March Quarterly Newsletter

Sunday March 10, 2019, 1:30pm, at Friends Village, 1 Friends Drive, Woodstown, NJ 08098

Please join us for our March Quarterly Meeting with a presentation by Rachel K. Wetzel entitled, “Daguerreotypes and the Robert Cornelius Database Project”. Rachel K. Wetzel joined the staff at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in 2007 where she currently holds the position of Senior Photograph Conservator. Prior to coming to Philadelphia, she completed the Andrew W. Mellon funded, post-graduate Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation at the George Eastman Museum and the Image Permanence Institute in Rochester, New York (2007). She holds a Masters of Arts degree in Art Conservation from the State University of New York, Buffalo State College (2005) and a Bachelors of Art from the University of Pittsburgh (1997), where she majored in the History of Art & Architecture. Rachel is a 2016 recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Research and Development Grant to create a searchable, online catalog of the collective works of pioneering daguerreotypist Robert Cornelius. Rachel has been an educator of photograph conservation and preservation for the last 14 years and has taught courses, workshops and webinars across the United States. Her previous employers include the Library of Congress (Washington, DC) and the private conservation labs of Heugh-Edmondson Conservation (Kansas City, MO) and Paul Messier, LLC (Boston, MA).

Speaker Rachel Wetzel, Senior Photograph Conservator at the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts, has been cataloging and photographing all of the known works of Robert Cornelius through a Research and Development Grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She will be presenting the works of Robert Cornelius and explaining the profound impact his work had in the American photography scene and how Philadelphia played a major role in the development of early photography.