Which objects or events will define the art of our time? Who will decide what is to be preserved for posterity and how that will be done? If an artist chooses ephemeral materials, should the work be allowed to deteriorate?

These are among the questions posed in this stimulating volume, based on a conference on the preservation of contemporary art held at the Getty Center in March 1998. Professionals from a range of disciplines—artists, museum directors, curators, conservators, art historians, dealers, collectors, and scientists, as well as a philosopher and a lawyer—offer their individual perspectives on the artist’s original intent, the effect of the art market, ways to cope with rapidly evolving media technologies, and art as popular culture.

The thirty-four essays in this volume, illustrated with more than eighty color photographs, center on the following topics: “Is Contemporary Art Only for Contemporary Times?” “Present and Future Perceptions,” “The Challenge of Materials,” “The Art Ecosystem,” and “Who Is Responsible?” Museum professionals, dealers, collectors, conservators, artists, art historians, and all those engaged in the dialogue surrounding art and cultural heritage will find this timely volume of critical interest.

• Foreword, Barry Munitz
• Preface, Mildred Constantine
• Michel Delacroix’s Melting Plot, Julián Zugazagoitia
• Introduction, Miguel Angel Corzo
• Part 1: Is Contemporary Art Only for Contemporary Times?
  • Looking at the Future Looking at the Present as Past, Arthur C. Danto
  • “Look at My Picture!”, R. B. Kitaj
  • The Case against Amnesia, James Coddington
  • Andy Goldsworthy’s New Ruins, Thomas F. Reese
  • Immortalité Provisoire, Robert Storr
  • Present and Future: Caring for Contemporary Art at the Tate Gallery, Roy A. Perry
  • Strange Fruit, Ann Temkin
• Part 2: Present and Future Perceptions
  • Work as Process or Work as Product: A Conceptual Dilemma, Helen Escobedo
  • For Example––Examining Pollock, Jürgen Harten
  • Copyright Aspects of the Preservation of Nonpermanent Works of Modern Art, Thomas K. Dreier
  • From “‘91” to “42”: Questions of Conservation for Modern Materials, David Grattan and R. Scott Williams
  • Immortality/Immorality, Joyce J. Scott
• Part 3: The Challenge of Materials
  • Conserving Photography and Preserving the Vitality of Our Culture, Peter Galassi
  • Permanent Impermanence, Bill Viola
  • The Media Arts and the Museum: Reflections on a History, 1963-1973, John G. Hanhardt
  • Preserving Now, Cliff Einstein
  • Infinite Columns and Finite Solutions, David A. Scott, Vladimir Kucera, and Bo Rendahl
• Part 4: The Ecosystem
  • Projectiles, Tony Cragg
  • The Art Ecosystem: Art as It Exists within a Private Collection, Agnes Gund
  • The Archive of Techniques and Working Materials Used by Contemporary Artists, Erich Gantzert-Castrillo
  • The Survival of Contemporary Art: The Role of the Conservation Professional in This Delicate Ecosystem, Debra Hess Norris
  • Intentionality and Performance-Based Art, Paul Schimmel
  • Linen Longevity, Sheila Hicks
• Part 5: Who Is Responsible?
  • Hope Springs Eternal: One Artist’s Struggle for Immortality, Judy Chicago
  • Notes on the Preservation of American Murals, Francis V. O’Connor
  • Art Museum Criteria, Thomas M. Messer
  • Preserving Whose Mortality or Immortality?, Keith Morrison
  • A Dealer’s Responsibility, Donald Young
  • The Conservation of Contemporary Art: New Methods and Strategies?, Ysbrand Hummelen
  • A Life in Its Own Times, Laurel Reuter
• About the Authors
• Illustration Credits
• Index

Miguel Angel Corzo is chairman of CorzoMedia, an international media representative agency. He was previously a director of the Getty Conservation Institute and president of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Prior to his appointment in 1991, he was president and chief executive officer of the Friends of the Arts of Mexico Foundation and Founding Dean for Academic Affairs at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. Born in Mexico City and now a US citizen, Corzo graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles; did his doctoral work at the Technical University in Munich; and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. Author of five books, including the Codex of Human Settlements, Engineering Design, Art and Eternity, and Managerial Finance, he is also the editor of more than twenty other publications. He is a member of social and educational boards and the recipient of several national and foreign awards, including the prestigious medal of UNESCO for Patrons of the Arts, awarded in 1997, in recognition for his lifetime significant contribution to the conservation of the world’s cultural heritage, the promotion of the arts, and their international dissemination. In 1995, Corzo was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the US Cultural Property Advisory Committee.

Judy Chicago, artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual, has exhibited widely throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Asia. A pioneer of feminist art and art education, she is the author of Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975, 1993, and subsequently published in England, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan); The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1979); Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework (1980); The Birth Project (1985); Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1993); and Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist (1996). Chicago received her bachelor and master of arts degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Russell Sage College in Troy, New York.

James Coddington was chief conservator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was a Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and editor, with Maryan Ainsworth, of the summer 1995 issues of the Art Journal, a publication devoted to conservation and art history. He has researched and published such topics as low-pressure structural treatment of paintings, digital image processing, and the materials and techniques of Jackson Pollock’s paintings.

Mildred Constantine, who inspired and helped organize the Getty Conservation Institute’s 1998 conference “Mortality Immortality? The Legacy of 20th-century Art,” was an art historian and a curator with a special interest in contemporary art. She was curator at The Museum of Modern Art for twenty-four years. She curated more than thirty exhibitions and is the author and coauthor of Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (1973, 1986); Soviet Film Posters (1974); The Art Fabric: Mainstream (1981, 1986); Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life (1975, 1979, 1983, 1993); and Whole Cloth (1998). Constantine received her bachelor and master of arts degrees from New York University.

Tony Cragg is an artist whose work has been exhibited in group and solo shows throughout the world. In 1988, he was the British representative and recipient of the Turner Prize at the 43rd Venice Biennale. He has taught at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, and is a member of the Royal Academy of Art, London. He studied at Gloucestershire College of Art, Cheltenham; Wimbledon School of Art; and the Royal College of Art, London.

Arthur C. Danto was Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University. He had been art critic for The Nation magazine. The author of several books on philosophy, Danto was president of the American Philosophical Association and the recipient of two fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He won the George S. Polk Award for criticism (1985) and the Book Critics Circle Award for his collected essays, Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (1990).

Thomas K. Dreier is Professor of Law at the University of Karlsruhe/Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, where he is the Director of the Institute for Information Law, and Honorary Professor at the Law Faculty of the University of Freiburg. He was senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law in Munich, Germany until 1999. His areas of specialization are national and international copyright law and the law of new technologies and the visual arts. He holds a doctorate in law from the University of Munich and an M.C.J, from the New York University School of Law. He also studied law at the universities of Bonn and Geneva and art history at the University of Munich. He is a member of the New York Bar.

Cliff Einstein is a founding partner and former chairman and creative director of the award-winning Dailey & Associates advertising agency. He and his wife, Mandy Einstein, are internationally known supporters and collectors of contemporary painting and sculpture. He serves as a trustee of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; has worked at advertising agencies in Los Angeles and New York; and founded a new product development firm, Silverman/Einstein. Einstein received his bachelor of arts degree in English in 1961 from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Helen Escobedo was an artist specializing in the construction of ephemeral site-specific installations with recyclable materials. She exhibited her artwork in Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Europe. She was head of Fine Arts and director of Museum and Galleries at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City; director of the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; and a member of the team of six sculptors who designed and built Espacio escultórico at UNAM in 1979. In 1988, she was elected an associate member of the Academie Royale, Brussels, and in 1991 was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Escobedo studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London.

Peter Galassi was, through 2011, chief curator in the Department of Photography of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he was also associate curator and curator. He was twice a Fellow in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He is the author of Corot in Italy: Open-Air Paintings and the Classical Landscape Tradition (1991, winner of the Eric Mitchell Prize), Philip-Lorca diCorcia (1995), and Richard Benson: North South East West (2011). Among his publications accompanying exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art are Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (1981); Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work (1987); Pleasures and Terror of Domestic Comfort (1991); American Photography 1890–1965 from The Museum of Modern Art (1995); Roy De Carava: A Retrospective (1996); Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills (1997); Aleksandr Rodchenko (1998); Walker Evans & Company (2000); Andreas Gursky (2001); Friedlander (2005); Jeff Wall (2007); and Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century (2010). Galassi received his bachelor of arts degree from Harvard College and his Ph.D. in art history and archaeology from Columbia University.

Erich Gantzert-Castrillo was chief restorer at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and founder of the Archive of Techniques and Working Materials Used by Contemporary Artists, which now exists as an online platform, artemak.de, operated by the Dresden University of Fine Arts. The artemak website and the physical archive was donated to the University in 2019. Gantzert-Castrillo was also restorer and chief restorer at the Mittelrheinische Landesmuseum in Mainz, Germany, and has produced numerous lectures and publications on the specific problems of conservation and restoration of contemporary art, including “How Durable Is Video Art?—On the Gradual Disappearance of the Original” and “The Development of a Registration System in the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt,” and has lectured at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Dresden, the Staatliche Kunstakademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, and the University of Mainz, Germany.

David Grattan was previously the acting manager of Conservation Processes and Materials Research Division of the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa, Canada, a research group that dealt with research and development issues related to conservation problems of Canadian archives, libraries, museums, and archaeological collections, which he joined after its formation in 1977. He was also chairman of the International Council of Museums Committee for Conservation. His research interests included archaeological, paper, modern materials, ethnographic, and natural history areas of conservation. Grattan received his Ph.D. in polymer chemistry from the University of Keele, United Kingdom.

Agnes Gund is a renowned collector and lender of art and a benefactor to numerous museums, social and environmental organizations, political candidates, and women’s organizations. She is president emerita and was trustee and chair of the board of trustees of The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 in New York. Among her many affiliations, Gund has been a board member of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, the American Academy in Rome, the Institute for Advanced Study, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. She is founder and chair emerita of the Studio in a School Association, which places professional artists in public schools to educate children about art. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of the Arts presented by President Bill Clinton (1997); the Governor’s Award, New York State (1988); the Doris C. Freedman Award, New York City (1987); the Montblanc de la Culture Award (1997); and Crain’s Most Influential Business Women (1996). She received honorary doctorates of humane letters from Brown University, Case Western Reserve University, and Hamilton College and was awarded an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Kenyon College.

John G. Hanhardt was appointed consulting senior curator for Film and Media Arts and the Nam June Paik Art Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2006 and previously served as senior curator of Film and Media Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He was also curator and head of the Department of Film and Video at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; film coordinator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where he established the Film Department and Film Study Collection; and a member of The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Film. In addition to his museum work, Hanhardt has taught at Columbia University, Middlebury College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Williams College and has been a trustee of the MacDowell Colony. Currently, he has also served on the board of directors of Electronic Arts Intermix. His writings have been published extensively in journals, catalogues, and scholarly texts. He has written prolifically on the work of Korean American artist Nam June Paik and is the author of Video Culture: A Critical Investigation (1986). He is the recipient of a Peter Norton Family Foundation Curator’s Grant for outstanding curatorial work (1993). Hanhardt holds a master of arts degree from New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies.

Jürgen Harten was director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, where he was responsible for numerous exhibitions, including the monographic shows of Broodthaeirs, Richter, Kiefer, and Siqueiros/Pollock, and group shows, including the American-German BiNational, the Israeli-Soviet BiNational, and The Ax Has Blossomed. He was formerly curator at the Kunsthalle; head of the office of Documenta IV in Kassel, Germany; and—with a background in art history, cultural anthropology, and psychology—a freelance art critic.

Sheila Hicks has exhibited her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and Kyoto; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Musée des arts decoratifs, Paris; the Musée des arts decoratifs, Prague; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Museo de Bellas Artes, Chile; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is a recipient of a gold medal from the American Institute of Architects and the medal of fine art from the French Academy of Architecture and was decorated as Officier des Arts et Lettres by the French government. Hicks received her bachelor and master of fine arts degrees from the Yale University School of Art.

Ysbrand Hummelen has been senior research conservator at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) since 1992, and was founding director of the Foundation Kollektief Restauratie Atelier Amsterdam. Previously, he was head of the Department of Color and Material Research of the Jan van Eyck Post Graduate Academy in Maastricht. Hummelen lectures in the Art History Department at the University of Amsterdam on painting techniques, color, and conservation principles and is editor of kM (Artists’ Materials), the quarterly Dutch bulletin for artists and conservators. He has researched and published on artists’ methods and materials; the theory and ethics of conservation and restoration (ethnography, modern art, natural history); and conservation management. Hummelen was trained as a conservator and restorer of paintings at the Central Research Laboratory for Objects of Art and Science, Amsterdam; the Swiss Institute for Art Research, Zurich; and the Istituto Centrale del Restauro, Rome.

R. B. Kitaj was the founding member of the School of London, a group of painters that includes Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, and approximately thirty other artists. In addition to numerous solo exhibitions, retrospectives of his work have been shown at the Tate Gallery, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His 1994 retrospective traveled to the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia, Madrid; the Jewish Museum, Vienna; and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany. Kitaj studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York; the Academy of Fine Art, Vienna; the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford; and the Royal College of Art, London.

Vladimir Kucera was previously director of research at the Swedish Corrosion Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, where he specialized in the fields of atmospheric corrosion and protection of materials. He was also coordinator of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, International Co-operative Programme on Effects of Air Pollutants on Materials, including cultural heritage, and organizer of national and international congresses and workshops. Author of more than one hundred scientific and technical papers and reports, Kucera holds a Ph.D. in corrosion science from the Chemical Technical University of Prague, Czech Republic.

Thomas M. Messer was director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. He has held museum directorships at the Roswell Museum, New Mexico; the American Federation of Arts, Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. He was president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and the MacDowell Colony; a founding member of the executive committee of the American Arts Alliance; and senior cultural advisor of the Americas Society. He taught at Harvard University; Barnard College; Wesleyan University; Hochschule für angewandte Kunst, Vienna; and Goethe University, Frankfurt. Messer studied art history at the Sorbonne and received his master of arts degree from Harvard University.

Keith Morrison, artist, art educator, curator, and art critic, is professor of art at Temple University. He was previously dean for the College of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University. He has exhibited his paintings, drawings, and prints throughout the United States and abroad. His work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Academy; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey, Mexico. He has curated several exhibitions and contributed to numerous periodicals, books, and catalogues, including “The Global Village of African-American Art,” in African-American Postmodern, edited by David C. Driskell (1995). Morrison received his bachelor and master of fine arts degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Debra Hess Norris is the Unidel Henry Francis du Pont Chair of Art Conservation at the University of Delaware. She has consulted internationally on the care and preservation of photographic collections and has lectured and published widely on many issues in photographic preservation, including disaster response and recovery, conservation treatment practice and research needs, and assessments and surveys. She is past president of the American Institute for Conservation of Artistic and Historic Works and currently serves on the boards of Heritage Preservation, the Collection Care Training Program, the Preservation Management Institute, and the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. Norris received her masters of science degree in art conservation with a specialty in photographic conservation from the University of Delaware/Winterthur Program in Art Conservation.

Francis V. O’Connor was an independent historian of American art based in New York. His research and writing addressed New Deal art programs of the 1930s, large-scale paintings of artists such as Jackson Pollock, and the history of wall painting in the United States. O’Connor received his Ph.D. in the history of art from The John Hopkins University. His papers are held at the Archives of American Art.

Roy A. Perry was, until 2005, head of conservation at the Tate Gallery in London, which he joined as an assistant paintings restorer in 1968. He was educated in England at Lewes County Grammar School for Boys and Camberwell Art School.

Thomas F. Reese is executive director of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and professor of art history at Tulane University. He is former deputy director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where he organized many symposiums, public forums, and expositions that examine the interrelationships among institutions, artistic production, identity, and community. He was professor of art at the University of Texas at Austin; has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1976–77), American Council of Learned Societies (1973), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (1983–84); and is a corresponding member of the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. He is the author of The Architecture of Ventura Rodríguez (1976) and editor of Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler (1985). His scholarship and publications include studies of eighteenth-century Spanish art and politics; culture contact in sixteenth-century Mexico; devotional space in colonial Andean society; and contemporary art and architectural practice in Europe and America. Reese received his Ph.D. from Yale University.

Bo Rendahl is senior specialist at the Rise Research Institutes of Sweden, working in the fields of atmospheric corrosion and corrosion of motor vehicles. The author and coauthor of approximately fifty publications, he holds a bachelor of science degree in chemistry.

Laurel Reuter is director of the North Dakota Museum of Art, which she founded while a graduate student of literature at the University of North Dakota. In 1981, the museum became the official art gallery of the state. She has curated or organized more than one hundred exhibitions of contemporary art in all media.

Paul Schimmel was chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 1990 until 2012. He was previously curator and senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and chief curator and curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, California. A participant in a variety of international circulating exhibitions, he has lectured around the world. He is a member of the Association Internationale de Critiques d’Art (American Section), the Southern California Art Institute Gallery Committee, and the American Museum Association. Schimmel studied at Syracuse University and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

David A. Scott is professor emeritus in the Conservation Program of the Department of Art History at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was senior scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute and head of the GCI Museum Research Laboratory, as well as editor of Studies in Conservation. Scott is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a fellow of the International Institute for Conservation. He has lectured in conservation at the University College London, Institute of Archaeology. Scott received his bachelor of arts degree in archaeological conservation from the University of London Institute of Archaeology; his bachelor of science degree in chemistry from the University of Reading, United Kingdom; and his Ph.D. in ancient metallurgy from the University of London.

Joyce J. Scott is a visual and performance artist who has exhibited, performed, lectured, and taught nationally and internationally. Her jewelry and mixed-media sculpture of primarily glass and beadwork are represented in public and private international collections. She has contributed to numerous magazines, journals, and newspapers and is the recipient of numerous awards, including an artist’s fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1980), a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation award (1994), a Pace Roberts Fellowship (1994), The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award (1995), and the Anonymous Was a Woman award (1997). Scott received her bachelor of fine arts degree in education at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, and her master of fine arts degree in crafts at the Instituto Allende, San Miguel Allende, Mexico.

Robert Storr is an artist, art critic, and curator and emeritus faculty of the Yale School of Art. From 2005 to 2007 he was visual arts director of the Venice Biennale and from 1990 to 2002 he was curator and then senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. A frequent lecturer in the United States and abroad, Storr has taught painting, drawing, art history, and criticism at numerous colleges and art schools, including the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and was visiting professor at the Graduate School, City University of New York. He is affiliated with The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation; the MacDowell Colony; Yaddo; the International Association of Art Critics; The Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, Basel; and Project Zeitwenden Stiftlung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn. The author of numerous publications and essays, he was contributing editor of Art in America and Grand Street, wrote a column for Art Press (Paris), and was a regular contributor to publications including ArtForum, Village Voice, Parkett, and Arts Magazine. A past member of the Editorial Board of the College Art Association’s Art Journal, Storr coedited two issues of the magazine devoted to censorship in the arts.

Ann Temkin is the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she was previously curator. From 1990 to 2003, Temkin was the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she curated many exhibitions, including Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (1994). Temkin received her Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale University.

Bill Viola is a contemporary artist who uses video and electronic media to explore the phenomena of sense perception as a language of the body and avenue of self-knowledge. In addition to numerous group shows, his works have been exhibited in solo shows at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; The Museum of Modem Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Durham Cathedral, Durham, England; and Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salp.tri.re, Festival d’Automne. Paris. He represented the United States at the 46^th^ Venice Biennale. A twenty-five-year survey exhibition of his work has been organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and is currently traveling in the United States and Europe until the year 2000; a book of his work, Bill Viola, was published in conjunction with the exhibition (1998). He is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. He has received honorary doctorates in fine art from Syracuse University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and California College of Arts and Crafts.

R. Scott Williams is an adjunct professor of Conservation Science teaching in the Master of Art Conservation Program at Queen’s University in Ontario. In 2013, he retired as a Senior Conservation Scientist at the Canadian Conservation Institute, where his primary topics of investigation are the selection of safe polymer and plastic products for use in conservation applications; the degradation and conservation of museum objects composed of plastics and other synthetic materials; and the use of nondestructive, in situ, infrared spectroscopic analysis for on-site determination of the chemical composition of museum objects. He was an analytical chemist for Canadian Customs and Excise Laboratory. Williams received his bachelor of science degree in honors chemistry, specializing in spectroscopy and quantum chemistry, from the University of British Columbia.

Donald Young was owner and founder of the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago that operated from 1983 to 2012. There, he showed important artists from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Jannis Kounellis, and Sol Le Witt, as well as younger contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons and Charles Ray. He regularly showed large-scale work and installations and, in directing the first commercial gallery to successfully deal with video installations, became well known for his involvement with Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, and Gary Hill. He was also known for his commitment to outdoor projects by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Martin Puryear, and Ulrich Ruckriem and for his support of European artists, including Sophie Calle, Tony Cragg, Cristina Iglesias, Richard Long, Rosemarie Trockel, and Sam Taylor-Wood.

Julián Zugazagoitia has been director and CEO of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art since 2010. Previously, he served as director and CEO of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, New York. As a consultant for the Getty Conservation Institute, he facilitated and curated the GCI’s commission of Michel Delacroix’s Melting Plot, an ephemeral installation for the “Mortality Immortality?” conference at the Getty Center in March 1998. His exhibitions include Coming Up Roses; Valerio Adami: Itinerary of Vision; Mysteries of Presence; Mitoraj: The Muse’s Garden; and Passion for Life: The Revolution of Mexican Art in the 20th Century.