Joyce Hill Stoner, the Rosenberg Professor in Material Culture and professor of art conservation at the University of Delaware, has been honored for her dedication to students from historically black colleges and universities (HBCU).
The Alliance of HBCU Museums and Galleries presented a plaque to Stoner at its Dec. 7 annual diversity conference, hosted by the Winterthur/UD Program in Art Conservation. It was the alliance's first award of its kind.
Alliance leaders called Stoner "a model of equity and inclusion" and cited "her unselfishness, summer after summer" in working with students from HBCUs who come to Delaware for the Two-Week Introduction to Practical Conservation (TIP-C) program.
The summer program is designed to showcase the field of art conservation to promising students from groups that are underrepresented in the profession. Participants spend time in UD classrooms and the conservation labs at Winterthur Museum, where they learn conservation practices and use those techniques to work on projects.
Also at the diversity conference, former TIP-C student Matthew Fields, a fine arts major at the University of Arkansas, offered a tribute to Stoner via an audio recording.
“Your work toward diversity and inclusion was a
game changer for my educational environment and experience, and I know it was
for others as well,” Fields said. It was his participation in TIP-C in 2017
that gave him the background and connections to work as a conservation intern the
following summer at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, he said.
“Without inspirational mentors like Dr. Stoner,
I would not have been introduced to the world of museum studies,” Fields said.
Stoner is the Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman
Rosenberg Professor in Material Culture and director of the Preservation
Studies Doctoral Program at UD and a paintings conservator in the Winterthur/UD
Program in Art Conservation.
She has written more than 120 articles
or book chapters and co-edited a multi-author 890-page Routledge book, The
Conservation of Easel Paintings. She has carried out conservation treatments
for the Freer Gallery of Art, Colonial Williamsburg, the Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts, the Brandywine River Museum, the Wyeth family and various private
collectors.
Article by Ann Manser; photo by Evan Krape
Published Dec. 18, 2019
