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Baltimore art conservator gives makeovers to Lincoln portraits
This article profiles a Baltimore art conservator tasked with giving "gentle makeovers" to two historically important portraits of **Abraham Lincoln** owned by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.[1] The project is situated within a larger institutional initiative to assess the condition of ... Full context
This article profiles a Baltimore art conservator tasked with giving "gentle makeovers" to two historically important portraits of **Abraham Lincoln** owned by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.[1] The project is situated within a larger institutional initiative to assess the condition of **110 presidential portraits** and restore those that show significant aging or damage.[1] Funding support from **Bank of America’s art conservation program** highlights how corporate philanthropy has become integral to large-scale conservation efforts.[1] The piece delves into conservation and restoration as both a technical and ethical practice: the conservator must clean, stabilize, and reintegrate damaged areas while preserving the artist’s original intent and the works’ historical authenticity.[1] The article describes the months-long procedure of surface cleaning, varnish removal, and retouching, explaining how conservators use scientific analysis to distinguish original paint from later overpainting or grime.[1] It also touches on **material ethics and repair**, since decisions about how much intervention is appropriate affect the perceived integrity of the portraits and their role in public memory.[1] Beyond technique, the story frames conservation as a form of **art-historical continuity and dialogue**: restoring these portraits allows contemporary viewers to see the images more closely as they appeared in the 19th century, promoting renewed engagement with Lincoln’s visual legacy.[1] The project underscores how conservation can shape museum narratives and national identity by determining which objects are preserved and how they are presented. While primarily focused on conservation, the article implicitly raises questions about **memory, trauma, and resilience** in visual culture—how images of major historical figures are maintained to sustain collective remembrance over generations.[1]
Palimpsest Makeover (for Lincoln and the Institution)
In Palimpsest Makeover (for Lincoln and the Institution) the formal language of portraiture is disassembled and set into a speculative conservation scaffold. Two vacant ovals read like portraits removed for treatment; around them a branching aluminum armature—evocative of both topography and circulatory systems—maps the actions conservators undertake: cleaning, stabilizing, reintegration. The piece uses metallic and iridescent patination to simulate varnish age, grime, and cleaned paint, while humidity-activated striations and stitched linen fragments mark the visible traces of intervention. The narrow gilt band—an industrialized donor motif—hints at the way funding names and frames preservation work without resolving its ethical questions.
This work is a meditation on restoration as both technical practice and cultural choreography. Drawing on my conservation training and recent field salvage work, I treat repair as an ongoing event rather than a return to stasis: the sculpture stages the decision-making moments conservators face when they determine how much to reveal, what to leave as scar, and how institutional narratives about figures like Abraham Lincoln are materially maintained. By foregrounding visible welds, conservation labels, and the donor strip, the piece interrogates the roles of conservation, corporate patronage, and public memory—asking viewers to consider how acts of repair participate in histories of trauma, resilience, and authority.
About the Artist
Jin Novak
Jin Novak (born 1984-11-02) is a sculptor and mixed-media conservator whose work bridges the material discipline of conservation with a formally rigorous studio practice. They use they/them pronouns. ...
View Full Profile →Critic Reviews
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Marco Delacroix
Cultural theorist and curator. Reads art through lenses of discourse, power, and social context.
Jin Novak stages conservation as choreography in Palimpsest Makeover (for Lincoln and the Institution), a work that reads as both technical scaffold and mise en scene of institutional decision making. The two vacant ovals operate like portraits that have been removed for treatment, their absence productive rather than merely missing. Around them a branching aluminum armature, at once topography and circulatory map, registers cleaning, stabilizing, reintegration. Metallic and iridescent patination conjure varnish age and cleaned paint, while humidity activated striations and stitched linen fragments make intervention legible. The visible welds, conservation labels, and that narrow gilt donor band stage repair as a site where material practice and patronage meet.
As a cultural critic and curator who reads objects through discourse and power, I find Novak's insistence on repair as event particularly generative. The work refuses a nostalgic fantasy of original wholeness, and instead exposes the contingent judgments embedded in conservation. The industrialized donor motif is a sharp formal and conceptual move, it materializes corporate sponsorship without resolving the ethical questions it raises, and it prompts necessary queries about whose histories are conserved and at what cost. There is also a humane clarity to the piece, a disability informed aesthetics in which scars and visible interventions are not hidden but held in view, producing a politics of material honesty.
Formally restrained and theoretically rigorous, the sculpture functions well within the lineage Novak cites, from modernist restraint to East Asian literati sensibility. My critical reservation is one of scope rather than craft, the invocation of Abraham Lincoln and the institution risks collapsing specific historical violences into a general allegory of repair, rather than engaging the particular publics that are affected by institutional memory work. That said, as a provocation it is a precise, tactile, and intellectually disciplined contribution to ongoing debates about conservation, authority, and public memory.
Conservation as performance Institutional critique Material honesty and visible repair Donor patronage motif Formal restraint and patination Processual temporalitySep 11, 2026