Category: Undergraduate Students
Student Blog: Midwest Art Conservation Center
January 28, 2025 Written by CAS Staff
For my third-year internship, I have been working as the Objects Conservation Fellow at the Midwest Art Conservation Center (MACC) in Minneapolis. This regional lab has conservators in five specializations - paintings, objects, paper, preventive, and textiles - and acts as a conservation resource for many cultural institutions, public collections, and private clients throughout the Midwest and beyond. I am so excited to be at MACC for the year and learn how a regional lab functions in comparison to a museum conservation lab. In a regional lab you’ll often see more odd and severe condition issues because the projects coming through the lab not only come from controlled museum environments but also from people’s homes and public spaces. Though difficult at times, these kinds of challenging condition issues have helped me get more creative in my treatments and work more collaboratively with my supervisors.
My first few months at MACC were primarily dedicated to completing outdoor sculpture treatments. Though many conservators get outdoor sculpture experience in their pre-program career phase, I had somehow evaded this, so I was excited to learn how to wax, buff, fill, and inpaint on various types of outdoor sculpture. These outdoor sculpture projects also gave me the opportunity to travel to St. Louis, Des Moines, and throughout Minneapolis. Once the season began to change and the weather began to cool, we shifted our focus to projects in the lab. I have worked on a variety of projects including the treatment of a small jade hairpin, a loan exam for a Frank Lloyd Wright chair, and a large-scale mold remediation project.
I am currently working on the treatment of a small Attic lekythos. The owner hopes to have the object removed from the wooden base and have a replica foot attached so the vessel can stand on its own in a less conspicuous manner. I began treatment by removing the white putty with a Dremel. Once I was close to the surface of the object, I switched to using files, a scalpel, and other small picking tools to remove the remaining putty. With the vessel detached from the base and cleaned, I am now in the process of creating the replica foot. I am using images of other similar lekythoi and consulting with the owner to find a shape and color that is historically and aesthetically accurate.
I have learned so much at my third-year internship and look forward to continuing to grow as a conservator during the rest of my time at MACC!
-Kacey Green, Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation Class of 2025
