Paul Messier's Bio (continued)
to discuss the preservation challenges inherent in specific works of installation art funded through a grant from the Getty Grant Program. This project was documented in a special issue of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation (2001). Mr. Messier is the founder of the Electronic Media Specialty Group of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) and was appointed program chair for the AIC annual meeting in Philadelphia (2000). He chaired AIC’s Publications Committee from 2001 to 2004. He currently serves on AIC’s board as Director of Communications in addition to holding the position of Associate Editor for electronic media preservation for the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation.
In 1995, Mr. Messier established a conservation practice in Boston, Massachusetts, which provides conservation services for private and institutional clients throughout the world. The current and sustaining focus of his practice is the conservation treatment of photographic materials and works of art on paper. Over the course of the past several years, Mr. Messier has performed major conservation surveys for the Denver Art Museum, the Davis Art Museum at Wellesley College, the Martha's Vineyard Historical Society, the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, the Carnegie Museum, and the Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard University. He is currently directing a project to survey the photograph collections at The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, the New York Public Library and Yale University, all supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation..
Recent research projects include the assembly and cataloguing of a reference collection for 20th century photographic papers and the development of an authentication methodology for photographs attributed to Lewis Hine. This project resulted in a method applicable for dating 20th century photographic papers and has received extensive coverage including articles in ARTnews, The New York Times (x2), The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly and The Economist. Profiled in the March 2008 issue of ARTnews, the studio’s reference collection and work characterizing photographic prints were described -- “The advances will reduce fraud, influence the marketplace, and even revise art history."