A Year in the Life of a Conservation Intern

It’s late and the streets of Los Angeles are quiet, yet Michelle Tenggara is awake in her kitchen, stirring animal skin glue.

Although it sounds like a scene straight out of Harry Potter, Tenggara’s task actually comes from the 14th-century writings of Italian painter Cennino Cennini, who was known for writing a how-to book on late Medieval and early Renaissance painting.

As the inaugural Post-Baccalaureate Conservation Intern in Getty’s Paintings Conservation department, Tenggara is performing one of her homework assignments: making by hand her own gesso (a white paint layer), stirring it and preparing a wooden panel with the resulting glue. She knows that the trick is to mix the glue periodically so it doesn’t harden before applied. “It’s moments like these in my internship when I feel connected to artists in the past, just by learning more about their techniques or recreating them.”

The Getty-wide Post-Baccalaureate Conservation Internship program, launched in fall 2020, is the first nationwide effort to provide yearlong financial support and hands-on conservation experience to young professionals from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, preparing these individuals to apply to graduate school. Administered by the Getty Foundation, the program addresses a concern for museums across the United States: the lack of diversity in art conservation.

The Mellon Foundation’s Art Museum Staff Demographic Surveys of 2015 and 2018 reveal art conservation as one of the least diverse areas in the museum field. Administrators at the country’s graduate programs in conservation agree that a lack of cultural diversity is apparent in their training programs. Advanced degrees are essential to entering the conservation field, but the barriers to entry are substantial. Graduate programs often require prerequisite courses, and applicants must complete hundreds, if not thousands, of pre-program internship hours to be competitive. Yet paid internships are extremely scarce, leaving many without a way to support themselves while getting the experience needed to start a conservation career. The new internship program aims to chip away at this uneven playing field by funding the conservation training and coursework needed for graduate school, while providing a valuable mentor and peer network.

Originally the internships were designed as blended residencies that would start at the Getty Center and Getty Villa and then continue at Los Angeles partner institutions such as LACMA and the Autry Museum of the American West. When the pandemic hit, the program pivoted so that interns could stay in their current locations across the US, working remotely via Zoom with Getty and going on-site, when possible, at local museums to get conservation experience.

So how has the program influenced the lives of the three inaugural interns? We spoke with each of them to find out.

Looking under the surface of Irises

In addition to her adventures recreating 700-year-old techniques, Michelle Tenggara has taken part in an unprecedented technical study of Vincent van Gogh’s Irises at the Getty Museum. The painting is normally always on view in the galleries due to its popularity. But the pandemic and the museum’s closure have allowed Tenggara, alongside Getty conservators and scientists, to use non-invasive analytical techniques such as X-radiography, infrared reflectography, and a macro X-ray fluorescence scan of the artwork to learn more about Van Gogh’s materials and techniques, contributing to the existing research on the artist.

“It was incredible seeing Irises out of frame in the conservation studio for the first time,” says Tenggara. “My favorite moment was looking at it under the microscope and seeing multiple paint layers and solid colors streaking through. There are so many colors you don’t even know are present without magnification.”

Using the microscope, Tenggara and conservator Devi Ormond have found traces of what appears to be a red lake pigment mixed in with the blue paint. Unlike paint colors made by the grinding of minerals, lake pigments are composed of organic dyes, and their development greatly extended the type of colors available to painters and other artists. It is thought that the red lake in Irises may have faded over time, which suggests that the iris flowers were originally violet in color. Further analysis will confirm these findings.

Outside the lab, Tenggara has been reading the letters Van Gogh wrote to his brother, colleagues, and friends to get a sense of his experience at the mental health hospital at Saint-Rémy in May 1889, when he painted Irises. “Where was he in his mind, what materials did he have, and does he ever mention the painting?” Tenggara wondered. She eventually found six or seven letters that referenced the work. “It was exciting to get that first-hand account from Van Gogh himself and read about how working in the gardens helped him find peace.”

For Tenggara, the internship has solidified her long-term plans of pursuing a conservation career, and she’s currently deciding whether to pursue an MA in conservation or conservation science. “Working with both conservators and scientists has really helped me grow, and has given me a lot of practical experience. I know I want to pursue these fields in a museum context.”

Treating Indigenous objects and ancient relics

Although Post-Baccalaureate Intern Cheyenne Caraway couldn’t relocate to Los Angeles due to the pandemic, she’s been taking organic chemistry classes in New York and gaining hands-on conservation experience at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). There she has worked on a number of Indigenous objects being reinstalled as part of the museum’s Northwest Coast Hall project, an effort to reinterpret and conserve the hall and its artifacts from the Pacific Northwest.

“Representing diverse perspectives in conservation is incredibly important to me,” says Caraway. “As a Choctaw and Chickasaw, I have strong ties to my Native American background. I consider it an honor to protect collections that carry the stories of our ancestors.” One of her projects has been treating a Chilkat tunic (a rare example of ceremonial regalia hailing from Alaska and British Columbia) in the AMNH collection and helping build a mount on which the tunic will be displayed. “Seeing your efforts come full-circle, from research to treatment to mount to installation, is such a cool experience.”

Working long distance, Caraway has also joined the Getty Villa Antiquities Conservation department to carry out a technical study of a pair of gilded Coptic red leather shoes dating to around 420–60 CE in the Getty collection. To make the bicoastal training sessions beneficial for Caraway, Getty conservators have shared photos, photomicrographs, and X-rays of the shoes with her, and then set up meetings to get her perspective. “I was able to write a conservation report that touches on the history and origin of the shoes and assesses their condition based on the photos and discussion,” says Caraway. “Even though I’m not there physically, I still feel like I’m gaining so much by working closely with colleagues and looking at the shoes through a different lens.”