AIC's 41st Annual Meeting

The artist materials collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a key component of the conservation department’s mission to engage and interact with contemporary artists and their creations.

More than solely a collection of 20th and 21st century materials, this collection contextualizes contemporary art practice and celebrates the conservation department’s ongoing, active relationship with artists.

Containing more than 300 objects, the ever-growing collection includes a diverse range of materials, examples of which include swatches of silk custom-dyed by Robert Rauschenberg to replace a deteriorated silk component on his combine work, photographs and documents from the Richard Avedon studio describing mounting and materials used for prints in the series, In the American West, DeFeo’s painting trowel, original materials used in the fabrication of Eva Hesse’s molded fiberglass sculptures, a vintage camera provided by Nam June Paik relating to a work in the collection nd mock-ups by Richard Tuttle to test mounting techniques in advance of his retrospective.

This presentation will describe the artist materials collection and how it supports collaborative activity with artists, which is at the very heart of contemporary art conservation. The collection is being envisioned as a dynamic and accessible resource in the SFMOMA’s building expansion, scheduled to open in 2016.