The Henry B. Plant Museum invites you to come experience Conservation Live on April 7th and 9th. Conservation and restoration are so often part of the behind-the-scenes work at museums across the country. This is a rare opportunity for visitors to see first-hand the work that highly trained professional conservators undertake to repair and preserve delicate works of art and historical artifacts. On Sunday, April 7th, at 2:30 pm, Rustin Levenson will give a lecture on how conservators and art historians look at the materials and techniques of paintings to make historical assessments. Levenson and her team will be working on a conservation project in the Museum on Tuesday, April 9th, in full view of Museum visitors.
High up on the Museum’s conservation priority list is an original large painted tapestry, currently on display in the Grand Hallway. Levenson will work to remove over 100 years of dust, dirt and debris from the painted fabric section and do some stabilization on the front of the tapestry. As with many conservation projects, this is the first phase. Visitors will have the opportunity on Sunday to learn more about the process and how conservators approach their work. Then, on Tuesday, visitors to the Museum will be able to see the work in progress.
Rustin Levenson graduated with a degree in Art History from Wellesley College and was trained in conservation at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. She worked on the conservation staff of the Canadian Conservation Institute, the National Gallery of Canada and the Metropolitan Museum of Art before opening ArtCare, with studios in Miami, Florida, Los Angeles, California and New York, New York. Her studio teams treat paintings from museums, private, and corporate collections. She is co-author of Seeing Through Paintings, Yale University Press, and chapters in The Expert versus the Object and The Conservation of Easel Paintings. In addition to her publications, Rustin lectures extensively to professional groups, at universities, and to public forums. She is a Fellow in both the American Institute for Conservation and the International Institute for Conservation. In 2015 she was honored with a Residency at the American Academy in Rome.
This program is made possible through the generous support of the Henry B. Plant Museum Society, Inc.