A Career Devoted to Preserving Great Works of Art

The gist of what I do: As a senior program officer at the Getty Foundation, I work with colleagues across Getty and with specialists in the field of art and cultural heritage preservation to identify a particular issue or challenge.

For example, the conservation of modern architecture—and then we speak with people out in the field to determine: “How much of an issue is this? What might the solutions be?” So I’m almost like a mediator; we listen to the field on the one hand and then on the other support the field with finding a solution. Our funding strategies could include grants to support training residencies, workshops, a symposium, and sometimes publications to help address that larger issue.

Early introduction to art: I grew up in Haarlem, in the Netherlands. I’m the fourth of six kids, so it was a lively family. My parents’ families went through the Second World War, and they lost basically everything they had. But my grandmother had retained a few paintings and antique furniture that were packed into a very small house. One painting was so big that it covered an entire wall: a 19th-century Dutch farm landscape. I was close to her, so I think maybe that’s where my interest in art comes from. And I have always been interested in making, which runs in the family with all my siblings. I attribute this to my tinkering father and to living in a country where it basically always rains so you simply had to find fun indoor activities. In my late teens I had a small lathe, so I made wooden bowls for family and friends, and then I began making some very simple furniture, with fine lines, precise and neat.

An eye for spaces and textures: I always liked interiors—historic interiors and modern interiors. I like how people create a space in the world around themselves. I always felt that I had a good eye for quality, for good proportions, for the use of materials. And my father had a very small textile manufacturing facility, a sort of small knitting factory. It had three large machines that made a type of fine wool that was used for clothing. I helped him out quite a bit. You kind of learn to feel the material. Even now, when I go clothing shopping, I always feel the fabric’s quality first. I think my eye and tactile ability formed a really good combination for becoming a conservator.

Discovering conservation: In high school I played bass guitar in a band. But we were lacking a lead guitarist. Through a friend of a friend, we found someone who was the son of the city organist, and he went to cabinetmaking school. That was the first time I thought, “Wow, you can actually make a living by making furniture?” And what intrigued me more was that he was actually restoring furniture. I thought: “People are interested in this? They pay money for this?” That opened a whole new world for me, and I became very interested in furniture restoration and conservation.

At that time, there was no furniture conservation program available in the Netherlands, so I cobbled my education together through internships at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and the Amsterdam Museum, and then spent 15 months at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Each time the collections grew better and the challenges in conservation became more complicated. I found my first official job in the Netherlands working at a palace that used to belong to the royal family and housed some of their former art collections.

Conservation 101: One of the main principles of conservation is that you have to respect the original work. Even if you don’t like some of it, it’s still the intent of the maker. So, to make it structurally sound, restore decorative elements, or unify the piece to make it presentable in a gallery, you seek to do the minimal amount of work to give a work of art the maximum benefit. “Minimal intervention” is a mantra in the field.

From New York to Taiwan to California: I moved to New York for a position as a furniture conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I also became involved with hosting and training interns, and I found that particularly fulfilling. My wife is an artist from Taiwan, and we thought about starting a family. But living in New York City basically off one salary, we were not quite sure how to do that. So then we thought, “Well, how about moving to Taiwan?” Tainan National University of the Arts launched a new conservation program, and they were looking for a professor in wood conservation. So, we made the leap. We left everything behind and lived there for four years while I was teaching. It was so wonderful on the one hand and great to work with students, but it was difficult to integrate, as my Chinese was extremely nascent.

In 2003 I participated in the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) Guest Scholars program. I spent three months at the GCI researching how the discipline of furniture conservation grew out of traditional cabinetmaking and carpentry for an article in a professional journal. During that time I heard about an open position at the Getty Foundation that intrigued me. I was a conservator and not a grant maker, but it turned out that my background was a good fit for the job. Like our director says, you don’t wake up one day and say, “I want to be a philanthropist” or “I want to work in grant making.” You grow into it for different reasons. For me the main reason was that it opened the door to supporting and helping the field of conservation more broadly.

A good day at the office: I find it satisfying to know that certain grants will help people grow or gain more or new skills. A relatively small amount of money can impact people’s lives in very positive ways. I also find it fascinating to learn about emerging conservation issues in art and architecture and to work with the field to address problems when there’s somehow a barrier to finding a solution. That’s where grant making can be really helpful: to make resources available for specialists who then push the field to that next level. I find this personally very rewarding. I also feel fortunate to be working with wonderful colleagues both within the Foundation as well as across Getty.

A tough day: In working with prospective grantees, I first evaluate whether a particular project falls within our initiative’s strategies and assess how much it potentially could contribute to reaching the goal that we stated in the program plan. I start out with the hope that everything nicely fits. Sometimes, however, you realize that a project may not be feasible, even if you wish it were. Maybe the more you talk with a prospective grantee, you feel that you’re not really connecting on the same ideas, and then you just have to be very tactful in declining. This is not always easy, especially when you see the potential is there, but it is just not coming together. Fortunately, the good days outweigh the tough days by a lot.

Most rewarding moment: In the first year of our Keeping It Modern initiative to conserve modern architecture, we were identifying projects that would set the tone for what the initiative was going to be. I learned about a very beautiful chapel in Taiwan called Luce Memorial Chapel, built in 1962–63. It was an early design concept of I. M. Pei, but then was further finished by a Taiwanese architect, C. K. Chen. I thought this might be a good fit. I called the number for the chapel, and Father Samuel answered. We talked about the idea of Keeping It Modern. I said: “We will have grant funds available. What are the preservation needs of the chapel?” And he said, “Is this a call from heaven?” The chapel eventually became the first piece of modern architecture added to Taiwan’s list of national historic monuments.

There was another equally rewarding moment at the conclusion of Keeping It Modern. Each year, we had been reaching out to communities in the field with a call for grant proposals, but I struggled to connect with the modern architecture legacy by Black architects. That is until last year, when we were able to give a large grant for Conserving Black Modernism, which is a program managed by the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, DC. Through this program, the National Trust has now awarded eight grants for preservation planning and emergency repairs for buildings with great architectural, cultural, and social significance. These grants are among the first to draw attention to the important, but often not mentioned, Black architects who were an integral part of the modern movement in America.

Favorite spot at the Getty Center: Architecture-wise, one of my favorite spots is the exterior of the Exhibition Pavilion, which looks like a cube on long slender posts. It overlooks the Central Garden, and it’s just very beautiful.

Woodworking at home: I have always kept an interest in woodworking and, over the years, have made things for my wife. She does contemporary Chinese ink painting. Years ago, there was an exhibition at LACMA from the National Museum of Korea. It had this fine wooden frame, with a few pins in there, meant to hang brushes. I thought, “That’s so beautiful.” So I sketched it in the gallery, and then I made two of the frames in my workshop for my wife’s studio. She loved it. Right now I have some antique woodworking tools I’m restoring and getting in good working order. I value objects that are already made. I always have, even before the sustainability debate came to the fore. If you can use an older chisel that’s already been made and is good quality, why would you have to buy something new? A good quality tool can last for generations.