Textile Conservation Group

Textile conservators and other members of the art conservation
community may be interested to know that, as of late spring 2013,
the State of New York accepted the paperwork to dissolve The Textile
Conservation Group. We should all be grateful to Rebecca Rushfield,
the last Chairperson of record, for continuing to file
state-mandated paperwork during a decade of inactivity and for
managing the official dissolution. The archive will soon be
available to researchers as part of the Conservation Archives
collection at the Winterthur Museum.

The Textile Conservation Group was founded in New York City in 1978.
For 25 years, a steering committee produced 6-10 meetings each year
and corresponding reports that also distributed news of the
discipline. The Group also sponsored seminars and conferences,
including the first on health and safety issues for conservators
(1980), the first on the conservation problems of modern textiles
(1988) plus courses on dry cleaning, dyeing, microscopy and more.
Membership was international, about 400 at its peak.

The Textile Conservation Group, which preceded the AIC Textile
Specialty Group (and several other organizations) by several years,
was instrumental in the creation of an international community at a
time when textiles conservators were not always well integrated into
general art conservation institutions. As distinctions receded it
became more difficult for the Group to remain viable and it entered
a dormant period about 2001.

Sarah Lowengard
ex-Membership Secretary, ex-Member at Large


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 27:9
                  Distributed: Sunday, August 18, 2013
                        Message Id: cdl-27-9-001
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