We have held the AIC Annual Meeting every year since 1973, and we have brought together the conservation field as the American Group of the International Institute for Conservation since 1958. Our meeting has changed over the years. In 2012, we held our first concurrent general session in track format. Our programming has expanded in the past 20 years to include regular sessions on preventive care, sustainability, imaging, and contemporary art. Our networks have grown alongside our specialty groups to offer a wide range of content for every conservation and preservation professional.
Our locations change regions each year. If you'd like to learn about our strategy for selecting locations, visit our Future Meetings page.
Changing Strategies in 2020
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we had to quickly pivot to virtual meetings, despite having never worked with video conferencing software. Our professional development staff had experience with hosting online education content, so we quickly devised a strategy to host our 2020 conference online over two summer months. That meeting brought us all together in a time of isolation and led to our second virtual meeting in 2021, our joint conference with SPNHC.
Since then, we connected with an excellent streaming provider and began hosting hybrid meetings in 2022, starting with our 50th anniversary meeting in Los Angeles. We are embarking on our fifth hybrid meeting in Montreal in 2026.