Job Talk: Conservator, Etherington Conservation Services
Job Talk: Conservator, Etherington Conservation Services
NAME/AGE: Michael K. Lee, 47
TITLE/OCCUPATION: Director of Conservation / conservator
EMPLOYER: Etherington Conservation Services, a division of The HF Group
YEARS IN INDUSTRY: 25
SALARY RANGE: Starting at around $21,000 for a conservation technician to a high end of about $120,000 for a conservation administrator at a large museum. What does your job entail?
Etherington Conservation Services of The HF Group in Greensboro specializes in providing conservation treatment of books, documents, art on paper and photographs, from single items to large collections. The center has a wide range of clients, from individuals and collectors to institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court, museums and universities.
“I am responsible for 32 employees and for marketing and public relations. I respond to clients’ needs, both individuals and institutions. Also, I still conduct hands-on treatment. I usually handle the most complex work,” Lee says.
The HF Group’s conservation division “is fairly large for a conservation center,” according to Lee. By comparison, he said, the National Gallery of Art has a staff of only four paper conservators and one photo conservator.
The Greensboro center is a for-profit enterprise that’s privately owned and operated. There are several nonprofit conservation centers in the U.S. that receive grants and have endowments to help them carry on their work.
How did you become involved in this line of work?
“I’ve always had an interest in the arts,” says Lee, who grew up in Baltimore. “My mom used to take me to museums a lot. That’s where I learned to appreciate these materials. She also used to draw and paint.”
Lee’s father, a physician, encouraged him to become a medical doctor. In college, Lee enrolled in pre-med, then met a professor who was also a curator for a small museum. “He introduced me to a number of conservators and I was able to have internships and they provided me with guidelines.” With a background in the sciences and his appreciation for art, the field of conservation beckoned. Lee changed his major to art history. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history from Skidmore College in upstate New York. By then, he’d worked with two curators and two conservators specializing in printing and photographs. Lee applied to graduate school to gain formal training as a conservator. With few programs available and a limited number of students selected into those programs, getting into a school can be difficult.
Lee was one of only a few students accepted to the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works program in the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York College at Oneonta.
The three-year program at Cooperstown prepared him with two years of academics and a yearlong internship. That led to a Master of Arts degree with a certificate of advanced study in conservation.
Under a two-year Mellon fellowship, he interned at the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass., at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, and at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts.
What training or education is required?
“You can take two paths. The first is an extended apprenticeship. And the other is to apply to graduate school with the appropriate qualifications — those being either a background in library science, or the study of art or art history and a knowledge of basic and organic chemistry.”
What does it take to do your job successfully?
“A lot of patience. Projects can take from several months to several years. It also takes extreme attention to detail. You might be working on a map that’s 50 inches by 60 inches and you’re concentrating on an area that’s 1 square inch.
“You also need good, sturdy hands — like a surgeon’s. You need to know your material and understand what materials you need for your work and aging properties of the materials.
“You need to have good manual dexterity. And you cannot be colorblind. This is still very much hands-on work.”
What’s most challenging about your job?
“Some projects are extremely large and highly valuable and can be complicated to treat because of the extent of the damage. You never know without prior knowledge of their treatment what materials were used to glue things down with,” Lee says. “Anything a conservationist applies to an object must be reversible for future treatment.”
What is most rewarding?
“Observing the beauty of an object once it’s been fully conserved, knowing what bad condition it came in.”Lee notes that some objects he and his staff work on are one-of-a-kind. The conservation center completes about 500 to 1,000 projects in a given year, depending on their size and damage.
Any advice for someone interested?
“Prepare to spend a lot of time learning. Anticipate spending years in graduate school — if you can get in. You need to be sufficiently humble in order to properly conduct the treatment. The worst vice is to think you can treat something without the experience and a full knowledge of procedures. You have to be attentive. What you screw up is often irreplaceable. You need to be someone who is a good troubleshooter. You need to be a team player.
“A conservationist has an obligation to maintain the integrity of the artifact. It’s not the conservationist’s goal to make it look brand-new. The main objective is to stabilize the object for future generations and make it aesthetically acceptable for exhibition purposes. The object is a period piece and it should look like it.”
Have an idea for Job Talk? Contact Patrick Collins at 412-5934 or pcollins@news-record.com.
Michael K. Lee, Etherington Conservation Services
Michael Lee is director of conservation with the HF Group/Etherington Conservation Services. In the company's paper conservation laboratory he works on Audubon's Iceland Falcon, part of the Birds of America collection, Havell Edition from 1837. The collection is owned by Louisiana State University.
Nancy Sidelinger
