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In practice, preventive conservators manage the risks that threaten the preservation of cultural heritage. From lighting and exhibition case design to fire prevention, they are responsible for a wide variety of tasks. They work closely with colleagues whose expertise ranges from engineering to museum education. This work is highly collaborative and requires conservators to think in terms of big systems, spanning a timeline far into the future. Marie Desrochers is only the third graduate student to major in Preventive Conservation in the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. During this three-year master's program, students spend their third years off-campus in internships at cultural heritage institutions all over the world. Currently an intern at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia, Marie will introduce the field of preventive conservation in this talk and share a bit about recent projects and her research interests.

 

Marie graduated from the University of Central Arkansas in 2016 with a BA in Art and minors in Chemistry and Interdisciplinary Studies. She began to pursue her interest in conservation with her undergraduate thesis, documenting the conservation of Arkansas’ nineteen federally commissioned Depression-era post office murals. Additionally, she did undergraduate chemistry research with archaeological chemist Dr. Karen Steelman, analyzing painted plaster fragments from Anasazi Kiva murals at Lowry Pueblo in Colorado. She went on to gain pre-program internship experience in multiple specialties at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Archives of American Art and National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2016, she was a Baltimore SCIART conservation science research fellow in a group that investigated the degradation of gilded silver objects. In 2017 she interned at Shumla Archaeological Research Center in rural southwestern Texas, a global leader in rock art research and preservation. Most recently, she worked in the Washington, DC area as a paper conservation contractor at the George Washington University Museum and as a frame technician at GoldenRhodes Gilding and Restoration. Currently Marie is a third-year graduate intern at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Later this year, she will graduate with her Master's of Science from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation.

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