PREVENTIVE ConservatOR

 
Title of the position
Preventive Conservator (Associate or Senior level)

Department
Conservation Services
Reports to
Executive Director
Status
Permanent- Full time or Part time with benefits options available


The Balboa Art Conservation Center (BACC) in San Diego, CA is growing our team to support our intentional shift into a radically inclusive art conservation nonprofit organization. As an essential part of this vision, BACC is expanding its conservation services areas and strengthening our programs to ensure that our impact is relevant, accessible, and community centered. 

About the Position:
BACC is seeking an Associate or Senior level Preventive Conservator to join our team. This position will be an important addition to BACC, as it expands its service to fulfill a reinvisioned mission to serve a more diverse audience and make conservation more accessible and relevant to all communities. 

This is an exciting time for BACC, as it expands its service areas into Preventive Conservation for the first time in its 47 year history. Our inaugural Preventive Conservator will play a crucial role in establishing this area of practice and impact for BACC. For this reason, the ideal candidate is more than just a practicing preventive conservator, but rather a visionary preventive conservator, ready to visualize and strategize how the right combination of technical practice and commitment to inclusive conservation can shift the way regional conservation centers engage with communities and cultural heritage. This candidate must share in our commitment to anti-racism, decolonial approaches to collections care, inclusion, and access. 
The role is flexible and can be a hybrid of in-person and remote work. This individual plays a critical role in providing support and collections care to BACC’s diverse collecting audiences (collecting institutions, communities, and individuals). The preventive conservator should have a broad knowledge base of collections care that includes integrated pest management (IPM), environmental monitoring, collections storage and installation, disaster preparedness and emergency response, developing collections policies, and adapting to eco-friendly and sustainable solutions in a rapidly changing climate environment. This position will provide guidance to institutions and collections on how to implement those ideas and procedures, and help them through established survey programs (such as CAP), but also be able to tailor surveys to meet the needs of our audiences. The Preventive Conservator will work closely with our programs team to carry out grant funded capacity building workshops such as disaster preparedness and collections care training and community led collections care. 

Consistent with BACC’s efforts to create opportunities for leadership and management experience for practicing conservators and collections care professionals, BACC art conservators are encouraged to work with our administrative and development team to propose program areas that expand their own experience as project managers, program leads, and community engagement impact. 

About our Team:  
The BACC conservation team treats a broad range of objects from a wide variety of museums, historic societies, cultural collections and private clients. The team also provides services such as mounting and framing, technical analysis, condition surveys, workshops, consultation on environmental monitoring, storage, exhibition practices, preventive conservation, and grant writing support. Currently BACC labs service paper, paintings, and frames; in 2023, BACC is expanding its service areas to include dedicated staff for textiles, objects, and preventive conservation. Across departments, BACC’s conservators and staff are a collaborative, innovative, and supportive group who enjoy active involvement with operations at BACC and the greater art and cultural heritage community who we have the pleasure to work with daily. We are a small but mighty team of eight full time staff who mentor interns and fellows on a regular basis and work passionately to demystify art conservation in our regional community.  This position works collaboratively with all staff to nourish a positive and healthy workplace and will be critical in ensuring BACC’s commitment to diversity, inclusion, accessibility, and equity is practiced both externally with our communities, institutions, and clients as well as internally, with our staff, our field, and our process.



POSITION:  Associate or Senior Preventive Conservator
  1. QUALIFICATIONS
    1. REQUIRED
      1. Ability to create, manage, and reconcile budgets, revenue projections, and workplans 
      2. Ability to create, implement, and manage project timelines, task management, and schedules
      3. Experience managing projects and prioritizing workflows
      4. Ability to work independently and apply critical thinking and creative problem solving
      5. Experience with source community collaboration in the care of collections and knowledge of diverse models of collections care and storage
      6. Knowledge of the principles and practices of preventive conservation and sustainable practices, and readiness to participate in workshop development and outreach
      7. Experience as a practicing conservation professional with demonstrated abilities in examination, identification, analysis, documentation, and implementation of best sustainable practices. 
      8. Master of arts or science degree or advanced certificate from a recognized art conservation program
      9. Ability to nourish a positive and healthy workplace 
      10. Proven commitment to anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion, access, and representation. (this can be in professional, personal, or community settings)
    2. PREFERRED
      1. Ability to manage the business and workflow of a conservation lab
      2. Ability to supervise associate and assistant conservators, fellows, and interns
      3. Ability to manage valuable tangible property (e.g. supplies, equipment, customers’ property, laboratory space, etc.).
      4. Ability to travel overnight for onsite work (as a regional lab, we work with collection caretakers throughout the western region and participate in conservation-related knowledge sharing throughout the country. On average, a conservator at BACC may travel 4 times a year, with an average stay of 2 nights depending on the area of specialty- a preventive conservator will likely have a higher demand for onsite projects) 
  2. PRIMARY DUTIES
    1. Conservation
      1. Adhere to conservation best practices (such as Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice of the American Institute for the Conservation of Artistic and Historic Works (AIC))
      2. Conduct surveys/exams/assessments/analysis for prevention, conservation, and education projects with minimal supervision
      3. Perform treatments and treatment-related functions, including photography or filming, survey assessments, treatment proposals (with cost estimates), treatment reports and other forms of analysis/documentation with minimal supervision
      4. Participate in collections management recommendations, collections maintenance, research into artists and materials, collection surveys and disaster remediation
      5. Conduct research on conservation topics, marketplace trends, and business practices when necessary to stay abreast of conservation field
      6. Develop concepts, materials and opportunities to teach, train or publish for the conservation community as needed
      7. Maintain accurate, retrievable and searchable records in databases and files (shared drives, Airtable, etc)
    2. Engagement
      1. Participate in the development of outreach and engagement initiatives 
      2. Participate in community led conservation as a learner and knowledge sharer
      3. Remain current in evolving conservation practices, conduct research in the field of culturally appropriate conservation and present those results in the form of public lectures and publications as needed
      4. Represent BACC in joint projects with collecting institutions, including but not limited to grant support, collections care assessments, environmental assessments, emergency preparedness, emergency response procedures, and large scale conservation projects
    3. Administrative/Supervisory
      1. Support the mission and goals of the entire organization
      2. Aim to achieve sustainability, excellence, impact and relevance for the whole organization
      3. Support BACC’s efforts to build a collaborative leadership model 
      4. Supervise and mentor other conservators, interns, fellows, and volunteers as necessary 
      5. Empower, encourage, and support staff and conservation teams
      6. Participate in teamwork
      7. Communicate directly with collection caretakers, customers, and partners and deliver high-quality customer support
      8. Support with performance reviews and staff professional development when appropriate
      9. Support with supervision and management of workflows, schedules, budgets, and quality of outputs for preventive conservation service area
      10. In collaboration with the Executive Director and the Conservation Services Manager, oversee analysis, collect and maintain statistics, reports, revenue plan, and other metrics to assess and improve functions and develop policies and procedures for Preventive Conservation Service Area process improvements 
      11. Act as an external ambassador and internal role model for the organization

Salary/Benefits:
$62,000 - 70,000 starting  (for full time) 

Benefits Include:
  • 15 days of vacation to start; increases to 20 days after one year of employment
  • 10 days of paid sick leave
  • 14 paid holidays (including a winter break)
  • Conservation/Professional Development-related membership reimbursement
  • Health benefits (medical, vision, dental)
  • TIAA-CREF retirement program. BACC will match up to 5% of employee’s contribution (eligible after one year of employment)
We seek to fill this position by August 1, 2023, but the date is negotiable. 

Application Process:
  1. A statement of interest 
  2. A current CV 
  3. A writing sample (such as a technical exam or research paper)
  4. A portfolio containing three (3) treatments or projects (can be submitted in digital or paper format)

The application review process will begin on July 1, 2023 and the position will remain open until filled. 

By email to Lgomezfranco@bacc.org with the subject line: “Preventive Conservator”
-OR-
By US Mail to: 
Leticia Gomez Franco, Executive Director
Balboa Art Conservation Center 
PO Box 3755 
San Diego, CA 92163

The Balboa Art Conservation Center provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to age, ancestry, color, disability (mental and physical), gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, political affiliation, race, religious creed, sex (includes pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, and any other status protected by local, state or federal law. 

Black, Indigenous, and People of Color applicants are highly encouraged to apply. We are eagerly looking for a new team member to join us on our journey to becoming the sustainable and relevant organization we seek to be. This position description describes some of the core competencies and qualities of a potential candidate. If you feel this position may be a great fit for you despite not fitting perfectly into the box we have visualized above, you are highly encouraged to reach out, ask questions, and apply. 

About BACC:
The Balboa Art Conservation Center was founded in the 1970s as part of a national movement to create regional conservation centers that would serve collecting institutions within a certain geography. The goal was to centralize conservation and preservation services, bringing relief to museums, historical centers, libraries, etc., fulfilling their conservation needs without having to replicate the administrative, equipment, staffing and resources needed to run an entire conservation lab at every single institution. There are fewer than a dozen of these regional conservation centers in the country and BACC is the only regional conservation center on the west coast. Our center is located in San Diego, California on the ancestral homelands of the Kumeyaay Nation and our geographic area includes California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Colorado and Alaska. We are currently an eight-member team, in a 4,000 square foot facility on the second floor of a historic building in beautiful Balboa Park. 


For more than 45 years, BACC has been fulfilling its mission as a conservation lab to provide conservation and preservation services for cultural institutions and private collectors for their works of art, cultural objects, and historic artifacts. In accordance with best practices such as the American Institute of Conservation’s Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice, its highly trained conservators offer a rigorous and scientific approach to the preservation, examination, and treatment of cultural heritage objects. BACC has various scientific and technological equipment to aid in the examination of works including Infrared Reflectography, X-radiography, and  X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (XRF).


As a nonprofit organization, BACC is also committed to benefiting the public good by supporting training and education opportunities and partnering with stewards of community cultural collections. BACC is expanding access to the field of conservation to historically underrepresented communities by expanding the existing knowledge base to include culturally conscious and responsive methods of conservation. In turn, BACC is committed to learning from and dialoguing with artists and caretakers of diverse cultural heritage and ancestral collections.