The Emerging Professionals Committee of the Washington Conservation Guild is pleased to announce the 2021–2022 recipients of the Sidney S. Williston Memorial Fund.
The Fund provides pre-program interns, graduate interns, fellows, and early career conservators with a membership to the guild, as well as the opportunity to present their work at the interns and fellows meeting on March 3, 2022. The recipients for 2021–2022 are:
Fenna Engelke, Paper Conservation Intern, the Freer Gallery of Art & Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Mitch Gundrum, Conservator Technician, National Archives & Records Administration
Hae Min Park, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Painting Conservation, the Walters Art Museum
Lauren Phillips, Pre-Program Intern in Conservation, Baltimore Museum of Art
Fenna Engelke is a second-year trainee at the University of Amsterdam’s program for Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage specializing in the conservation of book and paper objects. The University of Amsterdam program is a two-year master’s followed by the two year traineeship. Beginning in late May, Fenna will be interning for four months at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery’s East Asian Painting Conservation Studio. Previously, Fenna has interned and volunteered at the Harry Ransom Center, the National Park Service, the Texas State Library and Archive, and the Rijksmuseum. For more information, please see her website: fennaengelke.com
Mitch Gundrum is a recent graduate from North Bennet Street School’s Bookbinding program and is currently working both as a full-time conservator technician at the National Archives in Washington DC and as a private practice bookbinder and restorator. His focus at NARA is on pre-digitization stabilization treatments for Civil War-era pension vouchers including surface-cleaning, humidification and flattening, tissue-mending, encapsulation, and mold remediation. His independent bookwork and research center around historical book structures, early American bindings, and German decorated papers.
Hae Min Park is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in painting conservation at the Walters Art Museum. One of her main projects focuses on the technical examination and treatment of a late sixteenth-century portrait by Lavinia Fontana. Her work will also include treatment of an early seventeenth-century Dutch panel painting, stabilization of an eighteenth-century Southeast Asian panel, and analysis of Ethiopian panels for an upcoming exhibition.
Lauren Phillips is from Pylesville, Maryland and received her Bachelors degree in Art History from Lawrence University. Lauren is currently working at the Baltimore Museum of Art as a conservation technician, and is finishing up an internship in furniture and frame conservation at The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, Massachusetts. Lauren has completed multiple seasons of outdoor sculpture treatments with the BMA, and is currently working on pre-program projects in frames and paintings at the BMA and pre-program projects in furniture at the MFA. Besides her passion for conservation, Lauren enjoys rock climbing and hanging out with her cat, Rigatoni.
