Taylor Healy Saves the Signs of These Times
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Taylor Healy repairing a modern granite sculpture from an Asian-American sculptor. She is using tin foil as a stamp so the fill material mimics the grain texture of the weathered stone. (Photo courtesy of Taylor Healy)
A temptation lurks to spark joy and incinerate everything associated with the past since anything identified with our lifetimes, from the patriotism of Rockwell to the commercialism of pop art to the resourcefulness (some might say gimmickry) of found object art, has a historical linkage with the events that led to these troubled times.
Time-based media is the broad category of modern art that ameliorates rash iconoclasm or overreaction to objects mistaken for boulders blocking all paths out of this terrifying present. The viewer stands still while the artwork moves. Taylor Healy, age 27, is a rising specialist in this field of experiential art that I for one never knew had a name.
Time-Based Media
Here’s the Guggenheim’s copy and paste definition of time-based media: “Contemporary artworks that include video, film, slide, audio, or computer technologies are referred to as time-based media works because they have duration as a dimension and unfold to the viewer over time.”
Speaking of the Guggenheim Museum, Taylor, a graduate student in her fourth and final year in the New York University Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center, happens to be working with the venerable institution on a project that adapts a scientific breakthrough in conservation of paintings to digital art.
“I’m working on source code analysis for a Guggenheim installation. Instead of looking at an object under a microscope, I am examining its elemental composition through text or code editors and writing software to examine elements of its behavior. It’s similar to analyzing paint layers in a cross section,” explains Taylor.
“While in a gallery,” she elaborates, “you are seeing only the surface of a painting; underneath is a strategic layering of canvas, pigments and binding media that rely on each material’s properties to produce the intended visual experience. For software-based artworks, you are depending on the properties and limitations of programming languages, graphic interfaces, proprietary platforms, and hardware.”
In Spring semester of 2019 at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York, Taylor worked on the repair of a granite and galvanized steel sculpture by the acclaimed sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who was half-Asian like Taylor. A tumble from a flatbed cart broke the sculpture, titled Untitled, into three pieces.
To conduct a minimally invasive repair, Taylor and NYU classmate Andy Wolf explored physical properties for stone and the appropriate conservation materials. “Traditionally, structural stone conservation involves drilling and inserting a dowel, but the materials chosen for this treatment were calculated to be strong enough to join the fragments.”
As for which works of art undergo painstaking treatments, Taylor lists the determining criteria: “We spend a great deal of our academic training in conservation theory which entails weighing different values, such as rarity, aesthetic, historical, use, research, educational, newness as well as age, sentimentality, monetary, and commemorative importance.”
Meeting up with a hornbill in Puerta Princesa at the Palawan Wildlife Rescue and Conservation Center (Photo courtesy of Taylor Healy)
Roots in the East Coast and Far East
Taylor’s mother, Lisa Ilaw Healy, immigrated from Manila in 1973 and her father, Michael Healy, comes from Irish-Italian stock in Brooklyn. She was born in New Jersey and grew up in Richmond, Virginia where she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. Taylor has two younger brothers.
Taylor might not have considered art conservation as a career had Twentieth Century abstract painter Cy Twombly not canceled a lecture at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia due to illness. (He passed away in 2011.) “Instead,” recalls Taylor, “a conservator gave a talk about her captivating treatments and travels, which stayed in my mind for years.”
Taylor’s facility in this complex work was developed through several years of study in art and conservation. After a BFA in Sculpture with extended media minors in Chemistry and Art History, Taylor devoted her first two years of graduate school to working in conservation labs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn Museum, and Smithsonian Institution.
“Conservators-in-training are expected to carry out rigorous treatments and produce significant research under heavy supervision. Because there are infinite materials and techniques, no single person can know everything. So, supervisors tend to depend on us to become the experts while they advise more so on the significance of the decisions we are making.” In other words, “You are pretty much recruited to work on material that you are most familiar with or will make yourself familiar with.”
While art conservation is an unlikely career choice among Fil-Ams, more broadly women represent the majority of conservators who attend one of the four degree-granting programs in the U.S. Anecdotally, Taylor estimates, “About 80 percent of conservators are women. Unfortunately, the demographics of white middle and upper class women affect our compensation, which is quite low considering our specialization and education. ‘There is no money in conservation’ is a common refrain among my peers.”
Healy’s family: top row: Lisa (Mom), Michael (Dad). bottom Row: Logan, Conner, Taylor (Photo courtesy of Taylor Healy)
Unlimited Potential, Limited Opportunities
In assessing her career prospects in the Age of Coronavirus, the limited number of trained alumni of only a handful of graduate programs and a surge in fast-track retirements and pension plan buyouts among museum staffs probably won’t offset the long-term frailty in the job market caused by an onslaught in closures of small museums. Small museums tend to be located in affordable cities and pay more than large institutions that often factor prestige into compensation packages.
When Taylor says only time will tell the total impact of the pandemic, she means the two years it typically takes for the conservation profession to release reports on compensation, education and demographics due to fluctuations in the availability of grant funds that sustain most museums.
Job concerns have by no means put a damper on the sound of the final campus bell. “I’m finished with college. I’m ready to move on,” Taylor sighs.
In late August 2020, Taylor moved to Washington, DC, to complete her dual master’s degrees in sciences and the arts through a yearlong residency at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. With little access to physical collections brought on by Covid-19, she appreciates a return to the site of a previous internship she completed under normal conditions. “If I had chosen an institution that I wasn’t familiar with, it would be very difficult and awkward to start working in a virtual environment.
“My residency allows me to solidify concepts I learned in school and develop hands-on skills. It’s one foot in the job world.”
One major tangible: The residency is paid so she can afford the DC apartment she shares with a roommate.
A Role Model for All Eras
On the surface, being an art conservator is a descent into misery that comes with as many job openings as beefeaters at a vegan commune in France, an income comparable to the guys who hold Stop signs at a road paving, more years at the university than an undeclared senior, and less name recognition than the unknown soldier. Society has set a high bar for new conservators that only the strong of spirit can clear.
Taylor is also aware of the rewards that await her on the other side of the bar.
“Society has set a high bar for new conservators that only the strong of spirit can clear. ”
As an art conservator, Taylor will witness the pleasure her work brings to inner-city families on free admission days at the museum. She might save video and sound footage of the civil rights movement, performances of dancers and choreographers whose lives were cut short by the AIDS epidemic, videos from advertising pitches for marketing campaigns that made Apple computers more famous than granny apples, wall murals of Black and Hispanic artists who put protest to paint, or the films of Asian actors whose ingenious fight scenes beg the question whether the stereotype they inspired is more paragon than millstone.
The abundance of knowledge and experiences she accumulates behind the galleries will pour out like honey from the rock on the day she is asked to fill in for a famous artist. Taylor’s impromptu lecture will inspire girls to do something great with their lives. While she is just getting started, she hasn’t forgotten her roots.
Taylor’s Western art and Italian language studies were the basis of several visits to the country of her paternal ancestors. Last winter, she made her first sojourn to her mother’s land, the Philippines. “It truly opened my eyes to the intersections of cultures—indigenous, Malay, Chinese and Spanish—present in different regions. I hope to continue exploring Filipino culture with my brothers and parents.”
Taylor Healy is ready to succeed on multiple fronts.
Anthony Maddela
Anthony Maddela is a Positively Filipino correspondent based in Los Angeles. Find him on Instagram at anthony_maddela
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