A Dire Request: The Effects of Public Outreach on the Professionalization of Conservation in the United States

Abstract

This dissertation examines public representations of modern scientific art conservation to determine their effect on the field’s professionalization efforts, on public understanding of conservation and museums, and how these effects impacted the development of conservation as a profession and a practice in the United States. The conservation field has long struggled to achieve professional status in American society. Since the mid-twentieth century, conservators have argued that the key to alleviating the ongoing challenges of a sparse job market, poor pay, inadequate support, and a lack of respect from art and museum colleagues, lay in a collective effort to engage in more, and better quality, public outreach. However, this mandate is seldom, if ever, contextualized through examination of how new outreach relates to almost a century of similar efforts. I examine three conservation-focused museum exhibits: Technical Exhibit at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum (1936), Take Care at the Brooklyn Museum (1954), and the Lunder Conservation Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery (2006-present). While most previous studies of the history of conservation focus on straightforward documentation, my research utilizes co-methodologies of professionalism studies and visual rhetorical analysis to examine conservation as a case study of professionalization and as an active agent in the development of the American public’s relationship to museums. In finding that conservation exhibits are not only ineffective in advancing the field’s professional goals but also actively harm communities by reinforcing the closed system of the modern heterotopic museum, I complicate the ethical grounding of concepts like professionalism and public outreach. Though my final case studies— representations of conservation on the internet— continue to replicate the ineffective visual rhetorical model I identify in museum exhibits, I argue that digital communication, especially social media, has dismantled many of the structures that contributed to the inadequacy of this model and presents an opportunity to build something new. I suggest the path forward that offers the best opportunity for achieving both adequate support for conservation and the field’s highest moral and emancipatory potential lies in abandoning public outreach altogether in favor of adopting a strategy of activism.