The Show Must Go On: The International Touring Programme at the NPG during the COVID19 Pandemic
In recent years the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG) has embarked on an ambitious programme of international touring exhibitions. When the Covid-19 lockdown was announced in the UK in March 2020, one exhibition was in Dubai, another was partially installed at a UK venue, a third was part way through conservation preparation, and a fourth was under development. This talk will examine how the Conservation Department at the NPG dealt with the impact of the Covid-19 world pandemic on the international touring programme, focussing on two shows: Tudors to Windsors and Icons and Identities. The paper will cover:
- Conservation documentation and communication with venues when physical couriering is not permitted.
- Getting to grips with remote installations across continents and time zones, including condition checking via video link.
- The challenges of socially distancing at work when preparation of art works involves art handlers, frame and paintings conservators all working in one space.
Co-presented by Alexandra Gent ACR and Polly Saltmarsh ACR.
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Alexandra Gent ACR
Alex is a paintings conservator at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Prior to joining the NPG in 2018 she worked for the Wallace Collection, Tate, National Galleries of Scotland, English Heritage, as well as in private practice. At the Wallace Collection she co-curated the exhibition Joshua Reynolds, Experiments in Paint, and in 2019 she was awarded a doctorate from the Courtauld Institute of Art, for her thesis on Repetition and Replication in Joshua Reynolds’s Subject Pictures. Alex has been an accredited member of Icon since 2010 and is a mentor and CPD reader.
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Polly Saltmarsh ACR
Polly is an accredited paintings conservator working for the National Portrait Gallery, London alongside running her studio based in Cambridge. After graduating from the University of Glasgow with a History if Art MA she completed her diploma in conservation at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Polly has worked in the Netherlands at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Arnhem and the Institute of Cultural Heritage, Amsterdam. In 2008 Polly joined the Making Art in Britain team at the National Portrait Gallery, a ground-breaking research project examining the materials and techniques used in Tudor portraiture.
