Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has been awarded the biennial Forbes Prize for conspicuous services to Conservation by the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, its highest honour. Carol Mancusi-Ungaro is the twenty-fourth recipient of the Prize.
Carol Mancusi-Ungaro held until last year a joint appointment as director of conservation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, USA and founding director of the Centre for the Technical Study of Modern Art at Harvard University Art Museums, also in the US. For nineteen years she served as Chief Conservator of the Menil Collection in Houston in Texas and founded the Artists’ Documentation Programme wherein she interviews artists about the technical nature of their art. In 2004 she received the American College Art Association/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation and in 2009 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, marking the Academy’s first recognition of art conservation.
A Fellow of IIC for many years, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro has written on the work of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, and Barnett Newman among others, and continues to engage in research documenting the materials and techniques of living artists, as well as other issues related to the conservation of modern art.
The Forbes Prize Lecture traces its roots to 1958, when a Forbes Prize Fund was set up at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, USA, in recognition of Edward W. Forbes’s services to conservation. The first Forbes Prize Lecture was given at the 1961 Rome Congress by Harold Plenderleith and a Forbes Prize Lecture has been given at each subsequent IIC Congress.
The IIC Congress will take place from 12th to the 16th September 2016, in Los Angeles.