2027 Theme: Community of Trust

For this meeting, we will reflect on how trust is established, maintained, challenged, and renewed. Our gathering together at the Annual Meeting should be built on trust, and that current is what carries us towards new ways of examining our own practice and how our work shapes the way histories are interpreted and shared. It’s trust in one another’s expertise, the evidence that informs our decisions, the institutions we work within, the lived experiences of our colleagues, and the relationships we cultivate. It is also important to consider how conservators earn and maintain trust across disciplines and communities through collaboration, transparency, and accountability. Trust also motivates us to seek out what we may lack and acknowledge that care for our heritage is often carried out beyond our traditional professional boundaries. We will explore how trust influences conservation, strengthens our connections, and reinforces our collective dedication to uplifting one another.

Climate, Sustainability, and Equity

Building trust by examining and redefining the barriers and successes in balancing environmental responsibility and awareness, and in caring for and providing access to collections, buildings, and site-specific tangible and intangible heritage. This includes object treatment, stewardship of historic structures and material fabric, indoor air quality, HVAC operations, exhibition strategies, energy and waste reduction, adaptive reuse, and the decolonization of museum and preservation standards. Examples that highlight creative and local solutions from institutions or geographies of limited resources are highly encouraged.

Intangible and Community-Based Heritage

Building trust by taking direction from community priorities, listening actively, embedding diverse forms of knowledge and stewardship in conservation, and emphasizing support for local groups that care for local heritage and archives. Examples that include working with archives, contemporary objects, artist archives, historic societies, land trusts, and regional and site-specific museums are especially encouraged.

Professional Life Cycle

Building trust by cultivating a field that values knowledge transfer, career resilience, mutual support, cultivating confidence as a practitioner, and training and educating future leaders and administrators. We invite discussions on professional development, leadership and managerial skills, institutional relationships, succession planning, progressive learning models, and intergenerational learning.

Ethics of Working Together

Building trust amid the negotiation of competing priorities, navigating uncertainty, elevating shared decision-making, building support networks across disciplines, and forming and managing multidisciplinary teams for large projects. Examples that highlight the balancing of client goals, professional responsibility, and conservation, as well as collaboration with artists, their descendants, and estates on treatment, preservation, and documentation, are encouraged.

Centering Work in Progress and New Technologies

Building trust through the sharing of active treatments, ongoing investigations, emerging tools and techniques, and critically assessing the quality and limitations of evidence-based work. This includes the importance of framing meaningful questions that guide the selection of an appropriate treatment method or scientific analysis. We welcome presentations that explore how new approaches complement, refine, or challenge established practices and connoisseurship, as well as discussions on the ethics of research and data collection.