Museums

Our team has specializations in objects, paintings/painted surfaces, and works of art on paper that have come from holding conservation and conservation science positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Rijksmuseum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Winterthur Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum. We have contributed extensively to the field by organizing conferences, with our published research on pigment degradation and new imaging modalities, and through our contributions to IMLS grant projects, Bank of America Conservation Grant projects, and the Kress Foundation grant projects.

We work with our museum clients to answer questions about prior (and often undocumented) conservation treatments or coatings, about the current condition of a work, and any changes of condition. The latter can include any fading/color changes, the formation of corrosion products, and efflorescences/blooms.

We also participate in technical art history research, which has resulted in numerous publications in the art conservation, art historical, and scientific literature. We have done such research on blue period works by Pablo Picasso, several Fauvist works by Henri Matisse, Impressionist works by Paul Cezanne, and expressionist works by Amedeo Modigliani, Edvard Munch (including the c. 1910 version of The Scream, and several members of the Die Brücke school including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

SAFA’s museum clients have included the the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the MunchMuseet, the Barnes Foundation, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the National Park Service, and Arlington National Cemetery.  We also work with university art collections at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and St. Olaf College.