Paper Conservation with Sylvia Albro

The Phillips Collection’s Living Room is a series of intimate conversations featuring artists, authors, curators, collectors, and museum professionals. These programs offer rare opportunities to engage in discussions that connect the museum’s collection with broader dialogues.

Drawing from her experience conserving works on paper, Sylvia Albro will share key insights and behind-the-scenes stories from her work in paper conservation at The Phillips Collection.

About Sylvia Albro

Sylvia R. Albro has been with The Phillips Collection for close to 20 years where she has been privileged to work as the paper conservator for a wide range of artworks, from Van Gogh’s exquisite drawing of the Moulin de la Galette to Howard Hodgkins’s monumental 10-panel suite of intaglio prints As Time Goes By. She has also worked as a Senior Conservator at the Library of Congress and earlier in her career at the Yale Center for British Art and the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco. Sylvia has contributed technical notes on works of art on paper to several of the Phillips’s publications. She has a strong interest in the history of paper made for artists and helped organize the Biennial Congress of the International Association of Paper Historians in Washington, DC, in 2021. In 2016 she published a book on handmade paper produced in Fabriano, Italy, and she has identified many works in the Phillips’s collection created using paper of that origin. She has a master of arts degree and certificate of advanced study in conservation from the Cooperstown (NY) Graduate Program in the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works.