AIC's 45th Annual Meeting

The Northwestern University/Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS) was founded with a generous grant of $2,5M from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as a collaborative endeavor in conservation science that pursues objects-based and objects-inspired scientific research to advance the role of science within art history, curatorial scholarship, archaeology, and conservation. By leveraging resources at the Art Institute (AIC) and materials-related departments at Northwestern University (NU) the center, the first of its kind, is developing, harvesting and adapting innovations in other fields to advance our capabilities of studying, preserving and treating art. Within the Northwestern campus, it is serving as a catalyst to inspire and direct new cutting edge research in academia focused on cultural heritage, with accomplishments in analytical science, modeling, visualization, data fusion and data processing as demonstrated by over 40 peer reviewed publications to date. The Center also brings scientific equipment and expertise to collections that have no such talent in house (most recently, for example, the Guggenheim museum in New York, the Georgia O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, and the Musèe National Picasso in Paris, France). This research and education initiative also provides enhanced training opportunities for participants through involvement in university-museum multidisciplinary programs, early career internships, postdoctoral fellowships and visiting scholars' opportunities. Now in its fourth year of operation, the center is internationally recognized as a model of interdisciplinary scientific research in the arts. Since its creation the Center has focused on a broad variety of projects on materials ranging from archaeological glass and paintings to modern bronzes and artworks pursuing objectives as diverse as collecting materials evidence for dating, advancing knowledge for technical art history, enhancing conservation and exhibitions and developing new technologies. To date, more than fifty proposals have been submitted from all around the world, demonstrating the great need of such a resource for museums that have the intellectual curiosity but not the scientific expertise in house. In this talk we will provide select examples of NU-ACCESS projects to illustrate the center's role as a sustainable model for integrating scientific investigation into the next generation museum practice.