Pre-, Post-, and Lunch Sessions

We hold these sessions before or after the main days of the annual meeting or during lunch on the main days. If you'd like to cover a topic that's longer than a presentation or present lectures that are not in workshop format, these sessions may be the right fit. We do not typically live-stream these sessions, but we may record them.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

The abstract submission deadline is today, September 15. If you are having technical trouble submitting your abstract, or if you cannot enter the system, please contact the email below and we will consider extension on a case by case basis. You may not hear back until Monday.

Abstracts will start to be assigned to reviewers on Monday and reviewer assignments will finish by 1 pm on Tuesday. Once an abstract is sent for review it cannot be edited during the review process. AIC will reach out to authors with incomplete abstracts and/or attempt to fix any straight-forward issues that are causing an abstract to remain in incomplete status on Monday morning.

Please contact rseyler@culturalheritage.org with questions.

  

Submit Session/Lunch  Instructions  Submit to Symposium

Pre/Post Sessions

• Pre-meeting sessions (May 20 and 21)
• Post-meeting sessions (May 25 and beyond)

You can propose content for a 1-hour session, 2 to 5-hour half-day session, or a full-day session before or after the main meeting. These are targeted sessions that cover a specific topic in a lecture or panel format. We make efforts to offer these at no additional cost to attendees, but we may need to charge a nominal fee beyond the base registration for these sessions.

Lunch Sessions (May 22, 23, 24)

You can propose content for a 1- or 2-hour lunch session during the main meeting days. These are targeted sessions that cover a specific topic in a lecture or panel format.

• Sessions that begin at noon will be ticketed to cover the cost of lunch. One-hour sessions that begin at 1 p.m. will not include lunch.
• Lunch will be 30-45 minutes and the session can start before lunch or after.
• Programing should not exceed 90 minutes.

If you want to propose a longer session or one that doesn't quite fit one of the existing types, email Ruth Seyler, Meetings Director, at rseyler@culturalheritage.org.

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Pre-Session Symposium

Towards Art In Transit 2.0: An AIC General Session Symposium (May 21, 2024)

When you ship collection items, you want them to arrive undamaged. How can we minimize the risk of unpleasant surprises during unpacking?

We are pleased to offer a full day pre-session Symposium centered on the practical concerns and sustainability of lending, packing, transporting, monitoring, and couriering museum collection items. The Symposium will be followed by a 90-minute Concurrent General Session summarizing the results of the Symposium. 

Symposium Description

Art in Transit (ed. Mecklenburg, 1991) is a classic conservation publication, but it was focused solely on paintings, and it has aged. The results of the recent international survey, Vibratory Impacts of Music and Transport (2022), indicate a noticeable variation in knowledge of vibration and shock issues and the practices for mitigating them across institutions. With increasing international focus on combating climate change, institutions also need to understand the carbon footprint of traveling collections, and how to address sustainability. 

We intend this session to be a starting point for updating practice at this important intersection of museum specialisms, and to expand the discussion to collection items beyond paintings. We invite papers on loan agreements, risk assessment for travel, estimating and reducing the environmental footprint of travel, designing and predicting the performance of crates, assessments of existing packing methods, descriptions of failure modes, new approaches to monitoring and couriering, and on-site recovery from shipping damage.

The symposium will be divided into four parts. Tentative subject areas for each part are given below, but these may be revised in light of the abstracts submitted.

• Risk assessment / loan parameters / shipping methods (Chair: Mark Ryan)
• Predicting and modeling vibration, shock, and environmental behavior (Chair: Vincent Laudato Beltran)
• Crate design and monitoring (Chair: JP Brown)
• Couriering / receiving / condition assessment / recovery (Chair: Dale Kronkright)

Please select the part you think your presentation best fits in or propose a new topic in the Comments box. We are listing presentation times of 15 or 30 minutes for individual presentations or 60-minute panels for pre-formed groups.

The Symposium will be held on Tuesday, May 21, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Presenters are expected to attend the Symposium and present in-person, but remote presentations may be considered if attendance is not possible. Note that the 90-minute Concurrent General Session on May 22 will draw upon select presenters and panelists from the May 21 Symposium to provide a summary of the discussion.

Program Chairs

• Vincent Laudato Beltran, Scientist, Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, CA. 
• JP Brown, Regenstein Senior Conservator, Field Museum, Chicago, IL. 
• Dale Kronkright, Head of Conservation and Preservation at Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM. 
• Mark Ryan, Assistant Director for Collections & Exhibitions, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St Louis, MO.