Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair

Please join the Institute of Fine Arts in conversation with alumna Rosa Lowinger (’82), art and architectural conservator; Angel Ayón, architect and preservationist; and Pamela Hatchfield, Head of Objects Conservation Emerita at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as they discuss Rosa’s new book, Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair. Michele D. Marincola, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Conservation of the Conservation Center and Chair of the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, will introduce the speakers and serve as moderator for the discussion.

Inspired by and structured similarly to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, this first memoir by a working art conservator is organized by chapters based on the materials Lowinger handles in her thriving private practice – Marble, Limestone, Bronze, Ceramics, Concrete, Silver, Wood, Mosaic, Paint, Aluminum, Terrazzo, Steel, Glass and Plastics. Lowinger offers insider accounts of conservation that form the backbone of her immigrant family’s story of healing that beautifully juxtaposes repair of the material with repair of the personal. Through Lowinger’s relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx.

Dwell Time is an immigrant’s story seen through an entirely new lens, that which connects the material to the personal and helps us see what is possible when one opens one’s heart to another person’s wounds.