ECPN
Expectations and Realities: A Preview of the 2024 Condition Report of Conservators
By Stephanie Guidera, Michaela Paulson, and Kaeley Ferguson for the Emerging Conservation Professional Network (ECPN)
In 2022 and 2023, ECPN leadership received an enormous amount of feedback about continuous problems affecting the experiences of emerging conservation professionals (ECPs). Spurred by this, a group of conservators who have served the Emerging Conservation Professionals Network (ECPN) of AIC over the last five years in varying capacities created a series of three surveys devised to capture, record, and share solid data regarding the current ECP experience.
The 2024 AIC Annual Meeting general session titled “Expectations and Realities: The State of Emerging Professionals in the Field” was the culmination of the work of more than 30 volunteers from a range of training backgrounds, current employment circumstances, and career levels, and was designed to address survey responses.
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PSG
Easels Exchange: Collaborative Problem-solving with Non-stakeholders
By Fiona Rutka for Paintings Specialty Group (PSG)
Collaboration is a perennial subject in conservation research (Ramsay-Jolicoeur and Wainwright 1990; Kapelouzou 2012). Recent years have seen a proliferation in conferences, symposiums, and publications dedicated to the topic (Coleman and Wight 2021; Rausch et al. 2022; Brain et al. 2024), and new research will be disseminated at the upcoming 53rd AIC Annual Meeting, themed “What’s Your Story? The Power of Collaborations and Connections.” Generally, the collaborations shared via these platforms are between different types of professionals cooperating on a project, such as conservators of different special-ties working across discipline or conservators working with conservation scientists, artists, or curators. Another area of praxis that has received more attention lately is the collaboration between conservation professionals and the members of communities from which heritage objects under examination or treatment originate (IARC 2019). In these instances, the collaboration discussed is between stakeholders.
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