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.
2012 Winner
Francesca G. Bewer, research curator in the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, is an exemplary technical art historian. An expert in the materials and techniques of European Renaissance and Baroque bronze sculpture, she trained as both an art historian, at University College London, and as a conservator, at Palazzo Spinelli in Florence. A highly valued teacher and lecturer, Bewer has published a steady stream of superb texts in conservation and art-historical journals, exhibition catalogues, and monographs. She also recently authored a book on the history of conservation, A Laboratory for Art: Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation in America, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
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 will be accepting nominations for the 2014 CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation in spring 2013.
