Fine Art Conservator and Restorer
She grew up in a city at war, experiencing blasts from bombs and personality blasts from her mother’s war- stressed personality, both causing her family to flee to the U.S. Later as an art preserver and restorer, she came to believe that living in an unsettled world helped to prepare her for dealing with damaged artworks.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Rosa Lowinger (RL) was born in Havana, Cuba in the midst of the Cuban Communist revolution. Her grandparents were Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, who had fled persecution there to arrive in Cuba. After Fidel Castro took control of the Cuban government, the entire family fled again, to Miami, losing all their possessions, which they had to leave behind during their emergency exit.
A favorite saying of RL’s mother: “Man plans, and God laughs.”
CHILDHOOD
Growing up during a revolution, RL’s childhood was punctuated by bomb blasts, upheaval and the frequent rages of her mother, a great beauty who had been traumatized by her family’s poverty and instability.
RL’s mother expressed her specific hopes for the adult career of her daughter, RL, who concluded after many conversations with her mother, “I know for a fact she would so much rather me be an aesthetician than a conservator.”
(Editor’s note: An ‘aesthetician’ is a person who is knowledgeable about the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art. As of 2023, the reported average annual salary for such a career is $57,479., with the range from $30,586 to $86,870. The editor hopes to find an aesthetician to describe their reason(s) for choosing that career path, typical daily work, challenges, and satisfaction.)
WHY ART CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION SKILLS ARE NEEDED
In addition to normal ‘wear and tear’ including human accidents involving works of art, human nature (e.g., wars) and ‘mother’ nature (e.g., earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, wildfires) are frequent causes of significant damage to works of art.
RL has worked to conserve and restore art following wars, hurricanes, arson, wildfires, and other causes too numerous to recall, including the ‘softer assaults’ from salt air and bronze disease and the baked-in flaws in objects that sometimes take years to manifest.
“Damage isn’t even an aberration,” says RL. “It’s part of the natural course of things.”
Looking back on her childhood from her perspective as an adult, RL has said that when restoring art, “It helps to have the psyche of a fleeing exile, or someone whose parent can flash like a wildfire…. Entropy (lack of order or predictability) is always around the next corner.”
EDUCATION
RL graduated from Brandeis University in Massachusetts, with a Bachelor of Arts in fine arts and art history. Later, she earned a Master of Arts in art history and a certificate in art conservation from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
A DAY IN THE WORKING LIFE OF AN ART CONSERVATOR
In terms of disasters, RL prefers fires to earthquakes and any cause of damage other than hurricanes. “When you walk into a hurricane damage site, that water is not just water,” she says. “That water is full of dead snakes and animals and oil slicks. And things that catch on fire.”
On a typical working day in a warehouse while overseeing the restoration of an artist-made amusement park, which had sat is storage for several decades, RL inspected the objects, finding “schmutzy schmear marks all over various things” which was not surprising, but she didn’t find significant rust as she expected. Her client / employer wanted to put the objects on display again and preserve their history.
“You’ll see the signs of wear, a little bit of abrasion, where somebody might have scuffed it or kicked it. We didn’t remove that,” she said.
RL walked past a Ferris wheel. The gondolas, shaped like skulls, were painted with phrases like “Rid of You.” Hanging from the rafters was a gigantic banner of dancing figures with dogs’ heads, which RL had carefully de-grimed.
When RL first saw screen-printed panels, they were smirched with orange gunk. “I said, ‘Well, let me just try and see if I can clean it.’” She did.
One of the amusement park objects was a geodesic dome made of mirrors and plastic panels with fried eggs painted on them. RL hadn’t got around to cleaning the eggs yet. She ran her pinky – least greasy of the fingers – across the white part, which was beginning to crack and detach from the surface. “A lot of times you get clients that go, ’Oh, that can’t be saved,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Don’t say to me what can be saved. Ask me if something can be saved.’”
RL stopped at a caddy loaded with her cleaning supplies: makeup sponges, horse-washing soap, denatured alcohol, acetone, and a solvent gel, for the deepest stains.
RL wandered to the far side of the warehouse to inspect her fix on a painting of a cartoonish butterfly wearing red high-heeled pumps. “Securing a flake of paint,” she said, “required an elaborate process of applying flue to the back of the flake, letting it dry, and then re-melting it, before tacking it down. Cause if you just try to put an adhesive in, and push it to set, the memory of the flake coming up will pull it back out,” said RL. She took a step back. There was a small spot where the paint had come off entirely. That was fine. “In this project,” she said, “You don’t fill in the hole.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
RL is considered a leader in the field of conservation of built heritage, a subject which includes art, architecture, museum collections and public spaces.
In 1988, she founded Sculpture Conservation Studio in Los Angeles, serving as its chief conservator for ten years, when she sold the firm to concentrate more on writing. She supervised the conservation of a mural, “History of Transportation” in Inglewood, CA. She curated a 2013 exhibit on the stadium at the Coral Gables Museum, titled “Concrete Paradise: Miami Marine Stadium.”
In 2008, RL was awarded the Rome Prize in Conservation from the American Academy in Rome, to research the history of vandalism against art and public space.
In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, RL was among the conservators hired by the Smithsonian Institution and the Haiti Cultural Recovery Center to remove the three remaining murals of the collapsed Cathedral of Sainte Trinite in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
In addition to her respected skills as an art conservationist and restorer, RL is the author of “Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub” and various articles on Cuban culture, modern art, and architecture. She is considered an expert in Cuba cultural travel, specializing in trips that focus on 2950s nightlife, contemporary art, and architecture.
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This career story is based on multiple sources including an article written by Dana Goodyear, published by The New Yorker magazine on November 6, 2023, plus internet research.
