Cultural Heritage Conservation Events

Savannah College of Art and Design Art History Symposium: New Museum, New Museology

Date: 3-5 April, 2008
Place: Savannah (GA), USA


The Savannah College of Art and Design will host its second biennial Art History Symposium April 3-5, 2008. The event will explore the latest trends in museum studies. Abstracts are welcomed in the following areas pertaining to the concept of the new museum: exhibition, education, technology, environment, conservation and cultural heritage.

During the three days of the symposium a series of concurrent sessions and events will be presented, including a Friday evening keynote lecture. SCAD will provide tours of Savannah and of area museums and galleries.



From the sessions:

Contemporary Artists 'Intervening,' Re-displaying Museological Collections
Session chair: Celina Jeffery, Ph.D.
cjeffery(at)scad.edu
There has been intense discussion about the ways in which curatorial practice may be thought of as a form of artistic practice, but how about the consideration of artists as museum curators? Peter Greenaway's "Some Organizing Principles" (1993) at The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Wales; Sonia Boyce's "Peep" (1995), an installation in response to the collection of ethnographic art at the Brighton Museum; and John Baldessari's recent contribution to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's "Ways of Seeing" initiative, which invites visual artists, authors and film makers to create installations from the collections, have all sought to re-consider the museum as a self-reflexive space, resulting in displays that subvert, democratize and stimulate a creative dialogue with the audience. This panel seeks to evaluate the ways in which artists have re-envisaged museum collections from a subjective perspective. What is the history of artists as museum curators? What alternative curatorial strategies have artists employed and what new cultural languages have been offered through these interventions?

Towards the Variable Art Museum: From Static Objects to Dynamic Systems
Session chair: Timothy Allen Jackson, Ph.D.
tajackso(at)scad.edu
As art practices widen into more complex integration of emerging technologies and/or hybrid forms, art museums face myriad challenges of exhibition, conservation and interpretation. This panel will focus on the issues introduced by such variable media and the implications for the development of more variable art and design museums. Founding member of the Variable Media Network, Jon Ippolito, wrote: "the variable media paradigm encourages artists to define their work independently from medium so that the work can be translated once its current medium is obsolete"
(http://variablemedia.net/).

World Art Museums and Archaeological Sites in Crises: Collections, Collecting, Ownership and Cultural Heritage
Session chair: Jane W. Rehl, Ph.D.
jrehl(at)scad.edu
This panel is meant primarily to continue the dialogue about past and present collecting practices by art museums worldwide. A secondary but not unrelated concern is archaeological sites in jeopardy. Most of the controversies now swirling around collecting practices of art museums can be related directly to the larger issues of ownership (who owns the past?) and cultural heritage or patrimony. The latter is particularly troublesome today in third world and war-torn regions in which the guardianship of cultural history (in particular the archaeological site) has proven difficult if not impossible to sustain. Of particular interest are papers that address Nazi-era looting (1933-45) and the return of objects that changed hands in Europe and were welcomed into European museums; U.S. museum collections and the Nazi-era Provenance Internet Portal (www.nepip.org), which is handling Nazi looting claims in the U.S.; the progress of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 in the return of both human and cultural remains; the market for illegally excavated, stolen and looted objects from, and the demand for their return to, countries such as Peru, Guatemala, Greece, Italy, Egypt, Turkey and China; or the status of the collections of the Baghdad National Museum and the looting of Iraqi archaeological sites.

Art Conservation: Technical and Art Historical Studies
Session chair: Lesa Mason, Ph.D.
lmason(at)scad.edu
Strides in the field of the technical examination of artwork in the museum conservation laboratory abound into the 21st century. Remarkable collaborative projects, including art historians, curators, conservators and scientists, occur in the conservation lab that inevitably change our perspective in art history and ask us to consider associations that were otherwise unthinkable. Scientific evidence advances and unveils powerful insight into what is known about provenance, workshop practice, dating, the materials and techniques of artists, and authenticity. This session calls for papers focusing on art historical insight into artists' materials and techniques based on the findings in the museum conservation lab, and for papers that address new advances in the technology of scientific examination used in the museum laboratory.