This volume emerged as a result of sustained discussions between art, cultural, and architectural historians, as well as heritage scholars, curators, and conservators specialized in traditional and recent art and material culture. These conversations were spawned by two sessions—The explicit material: On the intersections of cultures of curation and conservation and Objekte erklären: Kulturen des Kuratierens und des Konservierens—organized consecutively in 2016 on the occasions of the 104th College Art Association Annual Conference and the Swiss Congress of Art History. The majority of authors in this volume participated in one or another of these events or in conversations that developed in their aftermath. Each of them contributed a strongly voiced piece of writing on his or her respective topic, which went through a thorough editorial review by the co-chairs of the conference sessions. The editors discussed the contents and structure of the volume, and all reviewed the papers, working across diverse geographic and temporal zones. To see this book through the editorial and publishing process was thus a combined effort of many dedicated individuals.
Hence I would like to thank Francesca Bewer of Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Katharina Ammann of the Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zurich for accepting my invitation to co-organize our respective sessions and subsequently build on those to create an edited volume. My sincere thanks go to the authors who patiently responded to our invitations, comments, and criticism and continued revising their work to produce the papers included here. We owe our thanks to Ann-Sophie Lehmann for her interest in realizing this project within Brill’s Studies in Art and Materiality series. I am grateful to my home institution, the History of Art Department of the University College London, for all the support provided over the past two years. The Getty Conservation Institute and Getty Research Institute afforded me a very fruitful research context in which to develop these ideas further during a 2016–2017 residency. The Swiss Institute for Art Research and the Harvard Art Museums were instrumental in supporting this enriching endeavour.