Colorado museum training next generation of conservators
March 10, 2025 | In the PressDeep in the Denver Art Museum's basement, two eyeballs look around through tiny tv screens attached to scavenged electronics.
They're the centerpiece of the late Alan Rath's "Looker II," and the most recent project for Kress Foundation Fellow Elisse Brautigam.
"Each of these pieces are made with software that was custom made by Alan himself," she said.
Brautigam specializes in the conservation of time-based media, works of art that unfold to a viewer over time.
With "Looker II," Brautigam wanted to preserve the images in Rath's custom software incase they ever needed to emulate it outside of the original work of art.
"It can be challenging for sure, but it also is really fun to look at and see how the artists kind of went through their thinking and what they thought would work and didn't work," she said.
Six floors up, Helena Santos uses a microscope to zoom in on individual threads of fabric on an imperial Chinese robe. Santos is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for textile conservation at the Denver Art Museum.
"It does seem to be in a really good condition. And it is, but if you look up close, you will see those areas I was talking about, the little gaps. You will see a lot of them," Santos said.
Sure enough, the more she zooms in, the more gaps appear.
But conservation isn't always about fixing something. Each time she finds a gap in the fabric, Santos has to decide if it needs to be closed.
"We should do the least intervention as possible, just enough to preserve and stabilize the object. So it's been a challenge to see and to understand and to decide whether or not to do an intervention in a certain place, or if I just should let it be," Santos said.
Santos, Brautigam and the rest of the art museum's conservation team work under the guidance and mentorship of Sarah Melching, the museum's Silber Director of Conservation and Technical Studies.
"I think that embodied in the objects in a museum or a library are a reflection of cultural humanity and our cultural heritage and the history of how we have lived our lives," Melching said. "I think it's really important to be able to pass that on to future generations."
Melching is as passionate about training the next generation of conservators as she is about the work itself.
"These are people who have already graduated and fulfilled their master's level in education. And a fellowship provides additional training and an opportunity to do a deep dive into research and technical study," she said.
She's proud to not only be preserving works of art for the next generation, but to be preparing the next generation of conservators, too.
"Without conservation, without collection managers and really having a good basis of training and understanding, I think collections will fall to the spoils of deterioration," Melching said.
