The Clark Conference: Conservation | Making | Art | History

The conservation, preservation, and restoration of material culture has historically been closely joined to artistic practice and the study of the history of art. Over the last century, art conservation, art making, and the discipline of art history have become increasingly specialized and separated from one another—until recently. Developments in all three areas encourage a reconsideration of the innumerable threads that connect them to each other and to larger questions of cultural and environmental theory, anthropology, and philosophyIn this conference we will consider many past and present processes of maintaining, handling, reframing, and repurposing works of the past. Our aim is to put those methods into dialogue with wider frames of practice and thinking. The contributors to this conference consider how conservation involves forms of artistic making, frames philosophical examinations of time, shapes inquiry into human and non-human agency, focuses ethical debates about memory and identity, and models forms of inhabitation and cohabitation. For more information, click here.

Speakers includeIna Archer (National Museum of African American History and Culture), Jennifer Bajorek (Hampshire College), Chương-Đài Võ (Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong), Sven Dupré (Utrecht University and University of Amsterdam), Noémie Étienne (University of Bern), Fatima Fall (Centre de Recherches et de Documentation du Sénégal (CRDS)), Annika Svendsen Finne (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Caroline Fowler (Clark Art Institute), Erma Hermens (University of Amsterdam), Yukio Lippit (Harvard University), Murad Khan Mumtaz (Williams College), Brian Michael Murphy (Bennington College), Alexander Nagel (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Alva Noë (University of California, Berkeley), Iwataro Oka (Oka Bokkodo Co., Ltd., Conservation Studio for National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties), Fernando Domínguez Rubio (University of California, San Diego), Kavita Singh (Jawaharlal University), Gabriela Siracusano (CONICET and Centro MATERIA-UNTREF, Argentina), Jacqueline Stewart (University of Chicago)

To register for the live virtual conference, click here. For more information, please visit clarkart.edu/rap/conference