Episode 063 Carol Mancusi-Ungaro

Show Notes

For this episode we are back in the conservation lab, visiting with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research at the Whitney Museum of American Art. If you were to visit the Whitney today and see the lab and the department that Carol leads, you might find it hard to believe that none of it existed back when she joined the Whitney. In 2001 Carol not only became the museum’s first director of conservation, but also its first staff conservator. In our chat we hear all about the incredible work that Carol has done over the past 20+ years at the Whitney, but the story goes much further back, prior to arriving at the Whitney, Carol spent a prior 20+ stint as the first conservator at the Menil Collection in Houston. Having originally trained and studied art that was centuries old, at the Menil Carol suddenly found herself dealing with modern and contemporary art and all the special and unique challenges that emerge when a conservator is faced with art where the paint has barley just dried. Carol found that talking directly to artists and their collaborators about the practical and technical aspects of their work was crucial in her work as a conservator — long before this was a common thing for conservators to do. This interview practice was eventually formalized and became the Artist Documentation Program, generating hours upon hours of footage of Carol and her former colleagues chatting with artists like Ann Hamilton, Ed Ruscha, Sarah Sze, Josh Kline, just to name a few. Today artist interviews have become a central part of conservation practice, so I was very excited to sit down with Carol, to interview the interviewer and hear what she has learned over decades as a leader the field of conservation.

Links from the conversation with Carol
> Artist Documentation Project: https://adp.menil.org/
> The Whitney Replication Committee: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/11/the-custodians-onward-and-upward-with-the-arts-ben-lerner

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Transcript

[00:00:00] B.: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. And today we are back in the conservation lab. 

[00:00:17] Carol: Hi, my name is Carol Mancusi-Ungaro and I am a conservator of modern and contemporary art. 

[00:00:23] B.: Carol is joining us from her office at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she serves as associate director for conservation and research. If you were to visit the Whitney today and see the lab and the department that Carol leads, you might find it hard to believe that none of it existed back when she joined the Whitney. In 2001, Carol not only became the museum's first director of conservation, but also its first ever staff conservator. In our chat, we hear all about the incredible work that Carol has done over the past 20 plus years at the Whitney. But the story goes much further back prior to arriving at the Whitney, Carol spent another long stint as the first conservator at a different museum, the Menil Collection in Houston. Having originally studied art that was centuries old, at the Menil Carol suddenly found herself dealing with modern and contemporary art and all of the special and unique challenges that emerge when a conservator is faced with art, where the paint has barely just dried. And I don't only mean that metaphorically. Carol found that talking to artists and their collaborators about the practical and technical aspects of their work was crucial in her work as a conservator. And this was long before this was a common thing for conservators to do. Her interview practice was eventually formalized and became the artist documentation program. And if you check out the link in the show notes, you'll find hours upon hours of footage of Carol and her former colleagues chatting with artists like Anne Hamilton, Ed Ruscha, Sarah Sze, Josh Klein, just to name a few. Today artists' interviews have become a central part of conservation practice. So I was very excited to sit down with Carol and interview the interviewer to hear what she has learned over decades as a leader in the field of conservation. Speaking of interviews, just a reminder that if you head on over to artandobsolescence.com, you can find our full episode archive, including transcripts. And if you click on the little donate button, you can make a tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts, every bit of listener support helps. And now without further delay. Let's dive in to this week's chat with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro. 

[00:02:39] Carol: I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and there was a very old and venerable museum there, the Montclair Art Museum. My first art lessons were there, and really the only thing I remember about them was at the end mixing all the colors and paints together with my hands and enjoying that immensely. So there must have been something about materiality and art that inspired me early on. I then went to study in Florence, Italy at one point, that's when I really got very turned on to Italian art and the whole aspect of Italian art. I was a student in Florence, and then after I left the flood occurred. The Arno, the river that runs through Florence. That these wonderful bridges go over, including the Ponte Vecchio, which is best known probably the Arno flooded in, I believe it was 1966. And the water rose in the city so high that there still are marks in the city. When you go to Florence, if you look carefully, you will see marks on buildings that are, at your eye level even. That's how much the water rose. The city was completely inundated and so all the art, as you can imagine in the churches, was damaged, seriously damaged, especially in the quarters where the water really rose high. There was a major international effort after the flood to remove and then restore these works of art that were damaged. Some of them were irreparably damaged and some of them, were able to be restored. it was really a major global exercise for all of us to raise money or to even go and assist. Helping to dry out objects and do whatever was necessary to do that. So it had a real impact on those of us who were interested in Italian art, certainly, but I think it had a broader impact on people who think of art as being totally indestructible at all times. And then something like this happens and you realize how very vulnerable it is. And so I, of course, I was moved by it deeply, and then I ended up going to graduate school at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. My interest in going there was Donatello. I was moved deeply by his art, and that's what interested me the most. However, while I was there the Metropolitan Art Museum, which was right across the street from the institute, was installing an exhibition called The Great Age of Fresco. They had taken the frescoes that had been damaged and others off of the walls of the churches in Florence after the flood. I began to audit the conservation courses, which were in the basement of the institute. And so even though I was enrolled as a PhD art history student, it was at that point that I became very interested in conservation and the materiality of it. After completing part of my studies my masters, I then married and went to Yale. And when I was at Yale, I trained in conservation as an apprentice to the conservator there. In those days, that was one way of becoming a conservator by apprentice apprenticeship. Now, there are schools of conservation where you go and they're postgraduate schools and they're very traditional in their training. But my training was put together by organic chemistry at Yale and I was the only person in the class who didn't wanna be a doctor and doing other things putting together an education for art conservation. The other thing that I've come recently to recognize is that the conservator who trained me at Yale was an artist primarily. He started as an artist and the way he thought about conservation and what we were doing must have been and was very much dictated by his wiring as an artist, artists are wired in a way that's different from us in, in a wonderful way. And so I think that had an impact on my thinking about what I do. It definitely did. So even though I wasn't working on modern and contemporary art at that point, of course I was working on medieval Italian painting there I became very much aware of an artist's perspective about a work of art, and that has continued throughout my career.

[00:07:00] B.: Speaking of which you would go on to become a conservator at the Menil Collection, which is very different than Medieval and Renaissance, frescos. What led to that? 

[00:07:13] Carol: I took a job at the Getty when it was still in Malibu, but again, that was with very traditional art. Then I went to the Intermuseum Conservation Association in Oberlin, where I had more exposure to other conservators. And then I moving more into 19th century and 20th, early 20th century art. But going to the Menil was definitely a changing point in my life. I went there because I was following a husband around who was training in medicine, and he had a residency in Galveston. He was a burn surgeon. So that's what brought me down to Galveston, Texas, which is where I ended up meeting Dominique de Menil. She had a place at Rice, a exhibition space I remember the first painting she gave me was a Max Ernst painting to look at because she wasn't using conservators locally. Well, there weren't many conservators locally. But she was sending her art to New York to have it restored. So she showed me this painting or asked me what I would do. I told her and she said, she wasn't sure that's what should be done. I go well, that's what I think needs to be done. That's what I would do. So she said, all right, do it. And she was impressed enough to say, all right, I'd really like you to start working on my collection in Houston. So after my husband's residency was done, we moved to Houston. Again, we're still at Rice. The Menil collection as a museum isn't even discussed at this point. In that context I began to work with contemporary and modern art. She was very close to artists. She liked working with artists, she supported artists. And the collection was strong in early modernism, moving into contemporary. So that's really where I suppose I spread my wings. And of course the Rothko Chapel, which was a huge impact on my development. So that's really where and how I got to the Manil. Then the Menil became a museum and was applauded early on, very early on. So artists would come to the Menil to see their work because this had been a private collection that was basically in wraps for decades. They knew Dominique de Menil John de Menil had bought their work, but they never saw it again cuz it was put in storage. So when the Menil opened and so much of the art was on view and the artists heard how stunning it was, they started making trips to Houston. It was at that point that I began to have more exposure to artists, I would say. Dominique had asked that one of the main concerns she had was the Rothko Chapel. The paintings in the Rothko Chapel are primarily very dark, black, large monochromes, not all. But somber tones and the blacks had begun to develop a whitening on the surface. She had invited conservators and scientists from New York and elsewhere in the country to come to determine what was causing the problem. But no one could really put their finger on it. She was very concerned about it. She was particularly concerned because we'd be opening the museum and there was this whitening, these patterns that were showing up. So she asked me to get involved and I said, look, I don't know anything about Mark Rothko, his paintings. I don't know anything about his technique. I would have to go to New York and find someone who did. She said fine. I want you to do that. So I came to New York and I knew the name of one of his assistants for the chapel paintings which was Ray Kelly. But I didn't know how to reach him. And so in those days, we had telephone books and I called every single R. Kelly in the New York phone book, and I would start by introducing myself and saying I'm calling, did you ever work with Mark Rothko? And they'd go, who? What? Hang up Slam. You know, Everyone had no patience with this kind of stupid question until finally someone said, No one has asked me about Mark Rothko in years. Mark Rothko died in 1971, and this was 1985. I said, so you are Ray Kelly? And he said, yes. And it turned out he was from Amarillo, Texas. I asked him if he would be willing to come to Houston and paint out simulations of the paintings with me as he had painted with Rothko. He said, yes, Dominique was all over it. Loved the idea. And so it happened. Ray came to Houston, we painted out simulations so that I saw precisely how he made the paint, how he made the mixture, how it was applied from his perspective anyway, what he remembered of the technique. With that information in hand, it was time to do analysis to figure out what was causing the problem. Fortunately, it was a time in the eighties when the oil industry was in a slump, and the polymer chemists all around Houston were twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do. So I was able to make contact with the scientists, at the Shell Oil company, who were more than happy to do the analysis and to help us figure out what was the problem. I was spearheading this project, but there were other conservators, local conservators and others who were involved. This was certainly not solely my work. We figured it out. It was movement of the material and the mixture was an egg oil emulsion in the materials in the presence of high humidity of Houston. At the time I thought it was, ambient of Houston had caused it to blanche and were moving to the surface at that point. By the eighties now, there were actually discernible shapes that were appearing in the whitening, and so I thought, my goodness, what are these? Around the same time, the Mark Rothko Foundation decided to liquidate its holdings and gave to the Menil the drawings that Rothko had done in preparation for the chapel paintings and in the drawings. This was so extraordinary, In the drawings, I could actually see the rectangles that were appearing in the whitening on the paintings. So the patterning was part of his process. He started with a certain rectangle and they made it bigger and longer and so on. So I could actually see his whole process. that he worked out in the drawings on the paintings himself in this exu date. Quite extraordinary. Amazing. So we did all that. We documented it and then we figured out a way to remove it in a way, knowing full well it would come back. And so we did remove it. The paintings looked stunning, and the chapel was reopened when the Menil Collection opened in 1987. So that very much put me in the world of working with artists. No one had ever interviewed Rothko about technical things. There was absolutely no information about how he worked. So I began to think this is a real loss. We should be doing this. That was at the same time that Menil opened, the artist came to see their work. Dominique de Menil was very polite and would always meet them at the door, and then had always asked me to have delivered to a conservation studio any work that artist had made. The artist would arrive at the door and she'd walk 'em back to conservation, which incidentally was an absolutely stunning studio that Renzo Piano had designed. There was the art and there was the artist, and then there was dead silence. Dominique de Menil was not big on small talk. I started asking the questions that I was interested in. How did you make this, what were the materials like? How does it look to you now? And so on. And I was stunned at how interested the artists were in these questions and answer them. They were the kinds of questions the artist wanted to answer. It wasn't like, what's this about? Or, where does this sit in your career? Or anything like that. It was just, practical questions. And they went on and on about it. And I was overwhelmed because I thought, this is really great for me to know all this, but I need to share this with my colleagues. Other conservators need to know this. This is just extraordinary. Fortunately for the Menil the Mellon Foundation at that time, didn't look at museums outside of a certain region or a certain type of museum, decided to give money to the conservation department at the Menil. And part of that was to give money for these interviews, which the Mellon Foundation, this was Neil Rudenstine at that time was the head of the program that funded this project. He thought it was important enough to start it. And so that's how something called the Artist Documentation Program started. It was basically filming artists in an interview with me, about their work and the reason why we filmed them was not so much to have the camera on the artist, but to have the camera on the work of art so that it was clear what state the work of art was in at the time we were discussing it. Almost every artist I invited to do this agreed. Over time this became a body of work and now it's all online as an archive as in the artist documentation program. It's adp.menil.org. Sometimes it's something that's so peripheral that you're doing to what you think is your central work, which in my case is building a conservation department at a museum. The ADP ended up becoming the most important thing over time, that was what ended up being of such interest over time. When I'm talking to younger people, I always say, don't dismiss the side interest you have, because sometimes those will be the ones that will end up dominating your professional life. When you work with, in my case, medieval, you see the aging process, you know that you're not looking at something the way it looked when the artist finished it, you know that, you're looking at something much later, you have to factor in that element of time, when you're looking at contemporary art, you tend not to think about that. But as a conservator you do, because you know where it's going. You can predict what's gonna happen. it's very important to know from the artist what is the essence of the work physically. If they are able to say that, and they usually are in a very roundabout way. That's very important to know because that is in what in the future, the conservators are gonna have to hang their hat on when they're trying to figure out how to restore something. I conducted these interviews in a way that they were conversations and I let the artist do most of the speaking and let it go off. Because it was very clear to me that the questions of preservation in the future will be completely different from what I think is important now. And the example I bring to mind with that is Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling. That ceiling, the restoration of that ceiling was a project that took place in the mid 1980s. There was a major controversy over that because in the process of doing the tests of cleaning, the colors that were subdued and brownish that we grew to love were actually very bright colors underneath. The cleaning of that surface, which means removal of all the dirt and debris and wax and everything of the centuries, would reveal a very different Sistine ceiling from the one all of us knew. And that was very controversial, again, an international uproar over this, that the restores were ruining the Sistine ceiling by removing what was believed to be simple modeling and toning in that Michelangelo had done. At the time, Michelangelo's biographers Vasari and Condivi, and the people who wrote about him never once asked him about color. No. Whenever the colors were the bright colors, everyone was wearing them. They were in all the fabrics in the houses. That was just, grass. it was so normal, why would you ask about it? And that is what centuries later, a cleaning controversy hinged on. As it turned out, the darker coloration was removed and the Sistine colors were revealed that were extraordinary. Many people were invited to go up on the scaffolding, to see the cleaning close up. And fortunately, I was one of them. I remember being within six inches of the brushwork, and I was just blown away by the confidence of this artist. I was completely overwhelmed by it. What totally convinced me of the success of the cleaning was when I got down back down to the floor and then sat in these banquettes that are still there in the chapel sat down and looked up. Suddenly the whole image went into focus. and the perspective was perfect. And that's when I knew the cleaning was a supreme success. The point I'm making though is that the questions of your time are unlikely to be the questions of the future. So when I do these interviews with artists, I just let them speak in any way about the work that they want to in response to my questions, because I have no idea what's gonna be important in the future. so the best I can do is to catch a spirit of the artist or a way that he or she thinks, or the way they approach materials. That may give some insight to the conservators in the future.

[00:20:38] B.: Back to the Menil we'll get to the Whitney eventually, I promise. During your time there I gather that you had a conversation with Cy Twombly that sort of shifted your perspective in a big way, and I was hoping you could share that with us.

[00:20:53] Carol: Well, after the Menil opened in 87. In the early nineties the Menil decided to make an effort to build a separate gallery for Cy Twombly's art. The project was a joint partnership with the Dia Foundation, with the Menil collection and Cy himself, and Renzo Piano was chosen as the architect. And so a separate building was built across the street from the Menil and a lot of Cy's art that was in Italy needed to be brought to Houston. I was charged with going and getting the work and spending time with Cy and arranging for not making the arrangements, but checking the condition of everything before it came. And a lot of this work had never been seen. There were works that required treatment. I would go back and forth between Rome and Houston with the work. Naturally over time we treated Cy's work. So whenever Cy would come, I would ask him questions about it. Just as I did in, in our formal interviews. Which I had not done with him. So over time I began to get a sense of how he worked and how he perceived his work over time and how time was manifested in his work. And for him, time was a big part of his work. It was a revelation to me. Cy was notoriously pretty reclusive. But he would reveal himself with certain clues, I would say, or cues even over time that enabled me to get a sense of the way he felt about his work and a sense of the work. In 1997, the Twombly gallery opened and it was a huge success and it still is one of the most beautiful places I think. There was also a retrospective at MoMA at the same time, I worked on almost every painting that was from the Menil that was in that exhibition. At the same time as the opening at MoMA in New York, the Gagosian Gallery decided to install a major three part piece, an opus really, of Cy's that he had just completed. It was enormous. 14 feet high and. Cy had sent the three panels to Houston in the original shipment with the idea that someday I will get a chance to finish those, maybe if I can finish them in Houston someday. And then he decided to buy a house in Lexington, Virginia, which is where he was born and found a studio space. So he asked to have the three unfinished canvases shipped there, and we did. And there he finished the paintings. I went with Paul Winkler and William Steam from the Manil collection to take them down and roll them and bring them back. They'd never been stretched. They were huge canvases that were nailed to the wall. The paint was still tacky, which was just unbelievable how I was gonna get these back. But anyway he'd say well, you need to stretch them up, I'd like to keep as much of that yellow as you can, and so on. And so we talked about that. Came back to Houston, measured them, ordered stretchers and then had all the equipment shipped to New York where they were stretched at the Gagosian Gallery for the first time and viewed for the first time. Lenny was a conservator who worked with me on this project in New York. That's working pretty closely with an artist that's making work, finishing work, then talking to you about how he wants it installed. Where the corners would be, where you turn the edge. It was a big project. And then ultimately he decided to give that work to the Menil collection. And so it is now on the walls at the Menil collection. I spent a lot of time with Cy Wombley not so much physically with him, but thinking about the work. And then meeting with him intermittently to confirm ideas. I learned a lot. My ideas were shifting, and I would say he was learning more about what conservators can do or not. One time we were in Rome and I said something to Cy as I slipped into my interview mode. I said, have you ever had paintings that were really seriously damaged? And his response was, only by restorers. And I thought, oh gosh, , this is an interesting beginning to this relationship. And he meant it. He totally meant it. Anyway, and I can hear him saying it in his southern drawl and I thought, oh, did I hear that correctly? I did. That's what he said. And that really cemented what became a 20 year relationship that we had over his work. Cause then I left the Menil, I moved to New York but he kept calling me and we kept talking about the work he was making and his concerns for it and that went on until he died in 2011.

[00:25:47] B.: Speaking of the Whitney, it sounds like, you know, timing wise, similar to your arrival at the Menil. If we look at what you do today and what the Whitney conservation program is, it's very different, of course, from when you arrived. You know, you have a whole department now with a beautiful lab and offices. But I remember even when you and I first met, it was very, very different. Were you the first conservator to work at the Whitney? 

[00:26:17] Carol: Margaret Watherston was a conservator in private practice who worked on the Whitney's paintings for many years. But I was brought to the Whitney to start a department of conservation. Max Anderson was the director, and he invited me to come here, to actually start a department. They never had one. It was one of the last of the big museums in New York that didn't have a conservation department. At the same time, I was offered a job to start a center for the technical study of modern art at Harvard. And so I was in Houston thinking about these two jobs and thinking about what I wanted to do in the next step in my development as a conservator. And I realized that there was a problem. the Whitney had an absolutely great collection of art that would be amazing fodder for both conservation technique, also learning materiality, the development of the field. So many things. The Whitney's always on the cutting edge. It was all very exciting. But the Whitney didn't have any research resources. Harvard, on the other hand, had more research resources than one could imagine the best of the resources, but didn't have a large enough collection of modern contemporary art for me to teach from the object. So it seemed that the only way that the dreams of each of these directors who wanted to build these centers. The only way it was gonna work is if they were together and joined each other through me. I was in a partnership between these two institutions for 14 years. I flew back and forth between Boston and New York, and I worked every week at both of them in developing what they wanted for their institutions. So that's how the department at the Whitney became a department, and that's how the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at the Harvard Art Museums developed. 

[00:28:08] B.: I'm curious to learn more about the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art. If you could just share a bit more about its development.

[00:28:17] Carol: It was founded to be a marriage between art history and conservation technical studies. And in fact in my teaching at Harvard, I often taught with Eva Laua. And Eva la is art historian of course, but first an artist and I guess I have a equal pairing. So we co-taught and it was very much about materiality and idea the breaching of the two and how that changes over time. Our classes were packed students seemed very interested in it. Part of the center at the time that I was heading, it was also to collect damaged works of art or works of art that could tell us that we could study and analyze that could tell us more about the materials. And one of the great gifts that was given to the center was from the Barnett Newman Foundation. The Barnett Newman Foundation gave all of Barney's materials a lot of what was left in the estate with regard to materials, studio materials, brushes, paints, all that sort of stuff to Harvard, to the center. It was cataloged and the cataloging is going on now, and in it we found all kinds of interesting things. And there are two things that I think were so interesting, and there are, so also instances that are reflective of that idea of materiality and art. There were all these boxes that came that had Barney's stuff in it, and in one of them there was a painting that was folded, but it was it was a painting. It had been stretched at one time. There were tacking edges we were just stunned by this painting. Harvard didn't have a Barnett Newman painting, they were joyed to have this, overjoyed to have this, but I felt it was small, it was easel size. I felt that was wrong. The artist had discarded this painting for whatever reason, he had folded it up and put it in a box with other fragments that had been cut up. It couldn't be considered a finished work of art. So an argument ensued between the curator and me not an argument, a discussion I think is probably better. And it was decided that it would remain at the center for study as opposed to enter the permanent collection of the museum, which I definitely think was the right position to take. That position reflected a respect for the artist and the artist decisions with regard to the work. There was another painting that was there that was part of the gift from Annalee Newman. Annalee Newman was Barney's widow. She had told me before she died, that after Barney died, she thought it was really important to start cutting up the paintings that he hadn't finished. So they wouldn't make it to the market. She cut up this big painting, and then she said she had a dream that in the dream she was cutting up Barney. So she just couldn't bear, to live with that. She hired a conservator to sew it back up and restore the painting, line it, and do a huge conservation treatment on it to preserve it. And then it just, that painting just disappeared into posterity. Gone. Until one day I was asked by the Barnett Newman Foundation to come look at some paintings in storage that they had and sure enough, there was that painting. It was unbelievable. 

[00:31:41] B.: That's incredible. Has there ever been something, very insignificant, seeming on the surface, that wound up teaching you a lot about an artist?

[00:31:51] Carol: Yes. You're walking my mind down to all the Barnett Newman materials. I also wrote in the catalogue raisonne on Barnett Newman. This is bringing back that whole time in my life. Unfortunately, two of Barney's really big, important works of art were damaged at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, vandalized actually. And the second one was Cathedra, which was a large blue, extraordinarily beautiful painting. there was a question about whether the paint had been sprayed or not on there, and someone said you know, no one was using spray guns then. This doesn't make sense that it could have been. Lo and behold, in among Barney's stuff, there was something that was a mosquito sprayer like that had blue paint on it, So he had devised this thing to spray paint. I think we did tie it into Cathedra but I can't remember if we did that analysis or not. There weren't any commercial spray guns then available to artists anyway, but this artist had developed something to enable him to apply paint with a spray. So that was interesting for us.

[00:33:04] B.:  So Carol, you are the first chief conservator to grace the airwaves of the podcast

[00:33:11] Carol: Thank you, I'm honored.

[00:33:13] B.: Of course. So I'm curious if you could give our listeners an idea of, what a role like yours entails. In your role as a chief conservator, does your day-to-day differ from, a bench conservator, somebody who's spending time in the lab treating a painting I'm especially curious to hear, from, that day that you arrived at the Whitney and fast forwarding to today and what you've built it into what did some of that work look like?

[00:33:42] Carol: I was always interested in looking ahead, where conservation should go, what we should do. It was difficult to start a department in an institution that never had one. And it was not a new institution. Whitney's found in 1930, we're talking about 2001. So it was an institution that was used to not having a conservator. It was very difficult to build a department here. The responsibilities of conservation were divided among the other departments. Fortunately, again, the director had a real interest in this and so he was able to support it. He tells a very funny story of inviting me to breakfast at the Mark Hotel. This is Adam Weinberg. He's not sure that the Whitney can really afford to do conservation after all, so that was such a credit to him that he was willing to change his mind and support it. And yes, as chief conservator, it was always thinking about where this department could go, what it should do how it could develop. Yes. Treatment of course, was basic. We had to have good conservators to do treatments. That's a given. I wanted the best to do that. But then beyond, Treatment is one thing, but what about all these other things that come up? and I guess part of that is where the whole question of replication came up. One of the topics that became very interesting to me because it was so obvious was, what do we do with works of art that simply cannot in any way sustain time? So I was talking with Angelica Rudenstine of the Mellon Foundation, and she became really interested in organizing a conference that in fact was held at the Tate in 2007. And the topic was Inherent vice the replication and its implications in modern sculpture. So the idea was these works of art that were just falling apart, like Naum Gabo, just plastics that were just falling apart, what would we do and what is the implication for a replication? I came back to the Whitney and decided, because again, as a chief conservator I guess I had the authority and Donna De Salvo was the chief curator and she agreed that I would start a committee here at the Whitney that we would begin to discuss these issues of replication and would it be possible? Would we do it? Do we do it? How do we do it? And so on. And so in 2008 we started what was a replication committee. What, and it consisted of conservators, curators who were dealing with multiples, prints, photography, film, video, registrar, archivist, legal counsel. It's expanded now to have publications and other members of the group rights and reproductions who get involved in these questions. We all sit around and debate the necessity of the replica from all our different perspectives and what there should be. It became an incredibly interesting committee and it happened so long ago this was 14 years ago before people were thinking of easy replica, but it was clear that it was coming, because the ability was there. The committee still exists. But it's very private. We don't allow visitors because it's a very intense debate that goes on in these committees. It's an example, of where I feel as chief conservator, I need to push our thinking and conservation ahead to be ready and then keep going.

[00:37:18] B.: Wow. Caring for the collection at the Whitney over the years, is there anything that stands out as the biggest challenge overall? 

[00:37:28] Carol: Well, that's hard to say because the collection is so varied. I was expecting to find a collection that hadn't been treated much. Instead, it was the opposite. It was a collection that had been treated a lot by conservators who were chosen primarily by the curators mainly the registration department, I believe. A lot of our work was reworking things or bringing works of art back to a state that we thought seemed right. Once we moved downtown in this beautiful building we're in, we were faced with the reality of light and how much light is in the building and our need to protect the works of art as best we can given the parameters of the building. And that has been a challenge that we continue to work on. I think we've been fairly responsible with it, in dealing with it in different ways, but it's also very much on our mind. We're also working often in our exhibits with living artists, and artists want their work to look as best as possible, of course. And they're used to conditions where the lighting is just what they want. We are always trying to work the balance between what we think is the best parameter for the preservation of the work of art, the care of the work of art, the responsible for the care of the work of art, and what an owner or an artist particularly might want for just a short period of time. Whitney's always kind of on the edge of pushing this stuff having figure this out. I think that's very much what this collection has done, that maybe a more traditional collection would not have to deal with.

[00:39:14] B.: Carol, you've taken this on this incredible tour of your journey and your evolution as a conservator and as a leader. any exciting projects in the works we can expect to hear about in the near future?

[00:39:25] Carol: Yes. I recently came back from Rome where I lived for five months at the American Academy in Rome. it was an extraordinary experience to be a fellow there. My project was to work on a book that I'm writing about my professional relationship with Cy Twombly. When you write these applications, you use all these. big words and big thoughts and you don't really know if any of it's gonna really happen, but it sounds good. It turned out that everything I wrote about happened and it was extraordinary. I was interested in the sense of time that Cy developed and lived with in Rome and Italy in general. Of course, I'd been to Rome many times, but I'd never been there for six months and lived there. And every day seeing peeling paint or see civilizations built on top of one another, the sense of time was so important for me to imbibe, in Rome. I became very appreciative of the value of sensuality and beauty among the Italians, the Italian life, and what I saw. And I saw how Cy would've responded to that and how his art responds to that. I don't think I would've seen that had I not had the experience at Rome. My writing that had already begun Was much deeper and much broader from a European perspective than it would've been with just an American perspective if I hadn't had that experience. Of course it's personal and I tried to make it not personal, but when you're writing about a relationship, I guess it becomes somewhat. 

[00:41:03] B.: I think it's really special, the kind of career-long relationship that conservators can develop with artists. 

[00:41:09] Carol: Conservators an artist, we share interests as much as anything. It's the essence of what we talk about. I think conservation is the most wonderful profession in the world. I look at the decades I've been in this profession, and it's astonishing to me, really. But again, it was following interest that led me there. I was very fortunate.

[00:41:31] B.: And that's it for this episode. Thank you, dear listener for joining me for our visit with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro. If you enjoyed today's show, I would just love it if you shared it with a friend that really helps more people discover the show. And as always, you can find our full episode archive, including transcripts over at artandobsolescence.com Until next time, take care my friends. My name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.