Magazine

A new certificate program through the Ole Career Launcher provides St. Olaf students with an opportunity to learn industry best practices from experts in art and artifact conservation.

Kassidy Goodell ’28 has always had an interest in museums and archival work.

As a St. Olaf College sophomore, she’s already gained valuable experience as a student employee in the Flaten Art Museum, Rolvaag Memorial Library, and Halvorson Music Library on campus. But she was interested in learning more about what happens behind the scenes to preserve materials and prepare them for display.

So when applications opened for the college’s new Museum Conservation Certificate program, she leapt at the chance to participate.

The program, offered for the second time this January Term, provides students with a series of six hands-on workshops led by experts from the Midwest Art Conservation Center (MACC). Students learn industry best practices for handling artifacts, characterizing materials, preparing condition reports, and salvaging collections. The program concludes with a visit to the MACC facility housed within the Minneapolis Institute of Art and an opportunity to meet with professional conservators.

“Being able to actually go to the MACC and meet the conservators really helped to put the work into perspective,” Goodell says. “It’s one thing to learn about conservation in a classroom, but it’s a whole different thing to go and see the things that you learn about being done by real people in a real place.”

The Museum Conservation Certificate is part of the Ole Career Launcher, which is designed to help St. Olaf students pair what they learn in the classroom with applied skills that they can immediately use in situations they’ll encounter when they enter the workforce.

MACC Director of Prevention Conservation Nicole Grabow developed the Museum Conservation Certificate alongside Piper Center for Vocation and Career Associate Director Meghan Anderson, who leads the Ole Career Launcher. Grabow says there’s been a remarkable increase in demand for undergraduate training in art conservation in recent years — but she hasn’t seen another college develop a program that provides this level of resources and training.

“There are not a lot of opportunities for students to be able to take advantage of something like this,” she says.

MACC is one of the largest regional centers for art conservation in the country. Grabow joined MACC in 2006, coming from the Smithsonian Center for Materials Research and Education at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, she was a Mellon Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She holds a master’s degree from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation, specializing in objects conservation, and a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College. She is also a certified CAP Assessor and a fellow of the American Institute for Conservation.

“Artifacts and artworks don’t mean anything on their own. We give them meaning. And we need to be able to see them and to interact with them in order for that meaning to be shared, for it to grow, for it to be transmitted from person to person.”

— MACC Director of Prevention Conservation Nicole Grabow

Many of the MACC workshops that Grabow leads are for mid-career professionals. In developing the certificate program for St. Olaf, she wanted to ensure that students not only gained a solid introduction to the field of museum conservation, but also an understanding of the way the field’s skills are transferable to a wide range of potential career paths. Each of the program’s sessions begin with a lecture and discussion — but then they transition to an opportunity for students to practice what they’ve just learned.

“The very first session, the lecture was on the ethics of conservation, and then we went right into a hands-on session on art handling,” she says. “They get to practice with a whole room filled with study collection materials that we bring on site. And the materials I’ve chosen for them specifically teach how you handle this type of object.”

Each session builds on the last.

“In the next lecture, we use the same study collection materials, but they go a step further, and now they’re doing a condition assessment and writing a practice condition report,” she says. “But they’re still practicing their handling skills too, because it’s like, ‘Okay, pick an object up safely and carry it back to your space.'”

Jay Rief ’28 says participating in the Museum Conservation Certificate program has opened a new potential career path. “I absolutely loved learning about the work that conservators do, especially the histories and stories behind different pieces that they have worked on,” says Rief, who is majoring in art history and gender and sexuality studies. “Artifacts tell stories, and I think those stories are so important to preserve.”

Goodell, who is majoring in art history and Classics, agrees. “We better understand our own existence on this earth because of the vast history that’s behind us as a society. If we don’t conserve art and artifacts, we forget the lessons that those pieces of art and artifacts held,” she says. “By conserving these cultural items, we preserve the culture itself.”

Anderson says the interdisciplinary skillset required for conservation work — which typically requires coursework in a range of disciplines that include studio art, art history, and chemistry — is a perfect fit for students with a liberal arts education. She’s seen an increase in students interested in museum work in recent years, and this program is one way to help them explore the field. “Ole Career Launcher programs like the Museum Conservation Certificate give students an opportunity to connect the dots of their interests and see how it can lead to a certain career path,” Anderson says. “Those ‘ah-ha’ moments are what I love about this work.”

“Ole Career Launcher programs like the Museum Conservation Certificate give students an opportunity to connect the dots of their interests and see how it can lead to a certain career path. Those ‘ah-ha’ moments are what I love about this work.”

— Piper Center Associate Director Meghan Anderson

Julia Steidl ’26, a history major with a concentration in linguistics studies, learned about the Museum Conservation Certificate from a fellow Ole who participated in the program last year. “I have a background in archaeology, and so I’m very interested in working with artifacts and wanted to learn more about the conservation side of artifact work,” she says.

She particularly appreciated the session on materials identification, which included details such as how to distinguish real ivory from ivory replicas by identifying a distinct pattern called Schreger lines.

“This program has reinforced my interest in artifact work, and in learning from a variety of disciplines,” Steidl says. “I’m not sure if I’ll go on to be a conservator, but the things that I learned from this program will stick with me.”

That, Grabow says, is exactly the point.

“Artifacts and artworks don’t mean anything on their own. We give them meaning. And we need to be able to see them and to interact with them in order for that meaning to be shared, for it to grow, for it to be transmitted from person to person. Physical materials of cultural heritage are the way that meaning is transmitted through time. It’s how we learn about people who are long gone and what their lives might have been like. And it gives us a very real connection to our shared humanity,” she says. “Nothing lasts forever, but the more work that we can do to preserve things and to care for them mindfully, the more likely it is that they will be able to be there to speak to future generations.”