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Job Title: Assistant Paintings Conservator
Type of Company: I work for a large fine arts museum in Boston.
Education: BA, Art History, Truman State University •• MA, Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University •• MA, Art Conservation, Buffalo State College
Previous Experience: I worked as a Conservation Fellow at a small museum in Washington, DC, and before that, as part of my graduate degree training program, I completed a year-long internship at a large art museum in DC.
Job Tasks: My primary responsibility is to complete remedial and major treatments on paintings for exhibition and loan. These treatments include feeding an appropriate adhesive under bits of lifting, unstable paint, relaxing and flattening planar distortions in canvases, cleaning dirt and grime off paint surfaces, removing old, discolored varnish from paint surfaces, filling areas of lost paint, often with a spackle-type material, and retouching these losses with a reversible medium.
Another job responsibility is the examination of paintings to assess their condition before and after loan. A detailed condition report is written to document the condition of each painting. These reports help determine whether damage has occurred while a painting travels for an exhibition in another museum. Similarly, reports must be written for paintings on loan to the museum where I work when we borrow them for exhibitions here.
When valuable art objects travel, a courier often accompanies them. My work as a courier involves travel roughly two to three weeks out of each year. Such trips range from 4 to 10 days out of town, generally. This work means long hours spent at airports, including time spent in the cargo area to see crates being palettized, as well as time with an agent who helps facilitate the crates' movement from arrival at the airport to departure on the plane with the courier. Once at the destination, the courier must accompany the crate(s) to the destination, and then return to the borrowing institution later for unpacking and installation of the art work(s), checking the condition of the work(s) as well.
Best and Worst Parts of the Job: The opportunity to work with beautiful paintings each day is a wonderful experience. It is highly rewarding to be able to improve the appearance of a painting and then get to see the painting hung in a major museum. Traveling as a courier, while not the most glamorous way to travel, has given me the chance to see many parts of the world I would not have otherwise visited, such as parts of Japan.
The major downside of becoming a conservator is the lack of jobs, particularly in museums. Also, the pay is not high. Coming out of graduate school, one might expect to find a fellowship earning roughly $25,000 to $30,000, for a position of one to three years. After that, one is lucky to find a job earning around $40,000.
Job Tips: Course work required to get into one of the three conservation graduate programs in the US, at New York University, Buffalo State College, and University of Delaware, include a number of studio art courses, two semesters of General Chemistry, two semesters of Organic Chemistry, and some Art History. Getting some hands-on experience is also critical and required before applying to the graduate programs. It can be difficult to get one's foot in the door somewhere, so to start it is a good idea to visit some conservation studios in museums and in the private sphere.
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