Awards
CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
The CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation was initiated in 1990 for an outstanding contributions by one or more persons who, individually or jointly, have enhanced understanding of art through the application of knowledge and experience in conservation, art history, and art.
2013 Winners
Gay Myers (left) and Lance Mayer
Lance Mayer and Gay Myers have carved a unique position within the field of art-historical preservation. Their fine book American Painters on Technique: The Colonial Period to 1860 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011) brings together two lifetimes’ worth of research, insight, and dedication, forming a testament to their authority in an engaging text that will have a profound impact on the way historians think, and on the way conservators make treatment decisions. Since the late 1970s, Mayer and Myers have worked as consultant conservators to the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in Connecticut and as independent advisers to numerous collectors and leading institutions. They have studied and treated many of the finest American paintings, such as Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33), and Rembrandt Peale’s George Washington (Patriae Pater) (1824). Mayer and Myers have also mentored budding conservators, and their résumés detail a stream of excellent publications and presentations ranging from books and scholarly articles to university courses, public lectures, and treatments.
Past Winners
Conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and, more recently, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum have all received the CAA/Heritage Preservation Award. Independent scholars and conservators, such as Andrea Kirsch and Rustin S. Levenson (both 2001) and John Thorpe (2006) have also been honored. Perhaps the most international of CAA awards, recipients from institutions abroad include Paolo Cherchi Usai of the National Screen and Sound Archive in Australia (2005) and Ernst van de Wetering at the University of Amsterdam (2003).
Read a list of all winners of the CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation from 1991 to the present.
Award Nominations
CAA has begun accepting nominations for the 2014 CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation.
