Museums and Art Conservation

Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Program Officer
Alison Gilchrest, Program Associate

Ashley W. Farrell, Program Assistant

News and Updates

• July 6-7, 2009: NSF-Mellon Workshop: Chemistry and Materials Research at the Interface between Science and Art
• Updated information on the Mellon Pilot Projects in Conservation Documentation now available

• The Final Report on the Mellon Conservation Documentation Survey is now available

Program Overview

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation program for art museums is designed to help excellent institutions build and sustain their capacity to undertake serious scholarship on their permanent collections; to preserve these collections; and to share the results of their work in appropriate ways with scholarly and other audiences. The art conservation program concentrates largely on advanced training for future generations of conservators, but it also undergirds fundamental work in developing fields such as photograph conservation and conservation science – areas of increasing importance to conservation as a whole. Both programs, therefore, are engaged in supporting basic research intended to enable curators, conservators, and other professionals to devote intensive study to the objects in their care, and to make their knowledge and professional expertise available to others in new as well as in more traditional ways.

Current Programs

For information on the Museum and Art Conservation program grant guidelines and a list of our current areas of particular focus, please visit the Foundation's website.