2025 AIC & FAIC Award Recipients, American Institute for Conservation’s 53rd Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, MN, May 28th, 2025. Via @conservators on Instagram.
Each year, the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) – the leading membership association for current and aspiring conservators and allied professionals – recognizes outstanding and distinguished contributions to the field of cultural heritage conservation.
We are proud to share that VoCA’s Executive Director Lauren Shadford was the recipient of this year’s Allied Professional Special Recognition Award, which celebrates individuals from related fields whose work significantly advances the conservation profession. Lauren accepted this prestigious award on May 28, during a ceremony held at AIC’s Annual Meeting in Minneapolis.
Suzanne Davis, President of AIC’s Board, shared the following remarks when presenting Lauren with the Award:
“[Lauren’s] sponsors for this Award unanimously praised her visionary leadership, collaborative ethos, and profound contributions to contemporary art conservation. Since VoCA’s inception, Lauren has transformed the organization from a modest startup into a nationally-respected platform, fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue, education, and stewardship through her development of innovative programs like the Artist Interview Workshop, VoCA Talks, VoCA Journal, and Time-based Media Stewardship Workshops. She’s made artist-centered, conservation-informed practices more accessible and inclusive. Her ability to build sustainable partnerships with museums, foundations, academic institutions, and individual artists reflects a rare blend of strategic foresight and genuine passion. She has not only addressed key gaps in the conservation field, but also elevated underrepresented voices and advanced educational opportunities for emerging and early-career professionals. Her leadership style is consistently described as creative, generous, and deeply committed to collaborative preservation.”
This award is not only a testament to Lauren’s impactful leadership, but also to the importance of platforms like VoCA, which create the necessary spaces to develop collaborative and interdisciplinary work that is so essential to the specific challenges of contemporary art conservation. As Lauren pointed out during her acceptance speech:
“This is a wonderful honor. It is a real privilege to be the Executive Director of VoCA, because in this position, I have had the opportunity to work with exceptional conservators who have shaped my views, certainly in terms of preservation and conservation, but also in how to look at creative solutions for complicated problems. And this is really VoCA’s sweet spot, and it’s all thanks to the conservators in our network.
I didn’t fully understand it then, but in 2010, when I started in this position, I had the good fortune to be alongside VoCA’s four Founding Board Members, three of which were conservators. Glenn Wharton, Jay Krueger and Inge-Lise Eckmann Lane. I had no idea how profound the impact that these three exceptional human beings would have on my life, and I am incredibly grateful to each of them. Since then, in the last fifteen years, I’ve had the opportunity to continue working closely with some of the most generous and thoughtful contemporary conservators in the field. Our leadership team has included Jill Sterrett, Kate Lewis, Jennifer Hickey, Gwynne Ryan, Tom Learner, Kelly McHugh, Narayan Khandekar, Steven O’Banion, Kate Moomaw-Taylor, Joelle Wickens, Kendra Roth and Michelle Barger. And the reason I share all of these names with you is that the only reason I can be an allied professional is because each of these colleagues has opened up space in their own professional practice to teach me, to show me, to talk to me, to listen to my endless questions about conservation and preservation of contemporary art. They are all the advocates, and they are the ones who have given me the runway to do my job well.”
Lauren Shadford with VoCA’s Program Director Margaret Graham; conservator and Founding VoCA Board Member Glenn Wharton; conservator and VoCA Program Committee Member Gwynne Ryan; and cultural advisor and VoCA Emeritus Board Member Jill Sterrett, all posing in front of Jason Rhoades’ “Untitled (Chandelier)” at the Rubell Family Collection (now The Rubell Museum), Miami, FL, February 2015. Photo courtesy of Seth Browarnik/WorldRedEye.com.
This timely opportunity to celebrate and uplift our network comes at a particularly critical moment, when VoCA and so many other nonprofit organizations are facing severe funding cuts at a Federal level, and having so many valuable resources taken away;
“We know what this administration thinks, that arts and culture are expendable. We at VoCA deeply disagree. VoCA will not fold, we will adapt. Even if our programs have to shift, our mission will remain unchanged to directly support the people doing the crucial work of preserving and advancing contemporary art in this country. The optimism, if I can find any, is that there’s no better group of people than conservators to be aligned with, as we all work to pursue creative solutions to this current attack on our work.”
Thank you to the AIC for celebrating this work, and congratulations, Lauren, for such a well-deserved recognition!