with Elsa Sanguoard, Senior Conservator, USS Monitor Center, Newport News, VA, in conversation with Ainslie Harrison, Associate Objects Conservator, VMFA,moderated by Dr. Peter Schertz, Jack and Mary Ann Frable Curator of Ancient Art, VMFA
Join experts in the field of conservation for a discussion about the different techniques and strategies needed to stabilize objects for display. VMFA’s Ainslie Harrison, Associate Objects Conservator, VMFA, will be joined by Elsa Sangouard, Senior Conservator for the USS Monitor Center in Newport News, for a conversation highlighting their past and recent efforts to conserve key works of art and archaeology
Speaker Bios
After completing her MA in Archaeology at the University of Nantes, France, Elsa Sangouard pursued conservation studies with a specialization in archaeology and ethnography at the Heaa-Arc of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She completed her conservation degree with a post-graduate position in conservation at The Mariners Museum and Park’s USS Monitor project where she was subsequently employed from 2008 to 2012. She then worked as a conservator for the Swiss National Museum in Affoltern am Albis, Switzerland, where she had the chance to treat many freshly excavated artifacts dating anywhere from the Neolithic to the Middle age. Elsa rejoined the USS Monitor Center team in January 2016. Her expertise focuses on the conservation of waterlogged organic and composite (organic-metal) artifacts such as the gun carriages of the USS Monitor.
Ainslie Harrison is Associate Objects Conservator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts where she has worked since 2016. She received her MA in Art Conservation from Queen’s University, specializing in artifact conservation, and went on to hold fellowships at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Penn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She also worked as an objects conservator at the National Museum of American History and was archaeological conservator for sites in Panama and Turkey. Harrison held a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy in 2005, studying archaeological heritage management and participating in excavations through the Universitá di Venezia Ca’ Foscari.
Dr. Peter Justin Moon Schertz has served as curator of Ancient Art since October 2006 and the Jack and Mary Ann Frable Curator of Ancient Art since 2007. He received a Certificate of Museum Studies in 1997 and a PhD in classical art and archaeology in 2004 from the University of Southern California, where he wrote the dissertation Seer or Victim? The Figure of Marsyas in Roman Art, Religion, and Politics under the supervision of John Pollini. He received his BA in classical languages and literature from the University of Chicago in 1987. His specialty is Roman art, with a focus on the intersection of art and culture, particularly art and religion. His current projects include a study of the original polychromy of the Arch of Titus and an examination of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in its Roman context. He is particularly interested in how new technologies can help us understand and interpret ancient art.