Presented by the Lunder Conservation Center and the Foundation for the American Institute for Conservation.

This two-day event, hosted by the Lunder Conservation Center, on November 19 and 20, 2015, will be an opportunity for exhibition designers, mount makers, registrars, collection managers, conservators, and scientists to explore the challenges of how materials are selected for use with art objects.

Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture
McEvoy Auditorium
800 G Street NW (8th and G Street)
Washington, D.C. 20001

The planning for appropriate collection care before, during, and after display is dependent on accessing reliable information about the materials we use. The production of fabrics, painted surfaces, mounts, foams, and board materials present many opportunities for the creative display of art objects. Understanding how these materials will react with artworks over time is a fundamentally challenging, but necessary, undertaking.

This conference will seek to convey practical considerations that facilitate and benefit collection care in museum exhibition workflows, and how they impact staff across departments. We hope to focus a large part of this conference on advances in the field of conservation science, in order to grant participants access to the available resources that address the challenging question of how the materials used in display and storage environments interact with the objects contained within. A particular focus of the conference will be the interpretation and sharing of analytical results from Oddy testing and alternatives to the Oddy test.

Call for Papers: New Deadline March 13, 2015

Original papers are invited for submission to focus on case studies and advances in:

Designing exhibitions and fabricating display furniture
Strategic approaches to collection care during the exhibition implementation process
Designing storage environments
Conservation work spaces
Aspects of material testing: including Oddy testing and alternatives to the Oddy test
Monitoring how materials change over time

Authors interested in presenting a paper should submit an extended abstract (400 – 600 words) by (February 13, 2015) to Christopher Wayner (waynercl@si.edu). Your work should be original and not previously published. Contributions of work-in-progress are also welcome. The abstracts will be reviewed by the conference committee and authors will be informed by May 2015.