Preserving Art Through Community Engagement as a Midwest Art Conservation Fellow: Olivia Thanadabout’18

Olivia, what have you been doing since graduating from Breck?

After Breck, I attended Wesleyan University and graduated in 2022. I moved back to Minneapolis last year to gain experience through internships and fellowships before applying to graduate school. While searching for my next step, I met a woman through a local organization who connected me with her friend at the Midwest Art Conservation Center. After an introduction, I met several people, toured their labs, and learned about their fellowship application. I applied and was selected, which is perfect!

What experiences have you had during your fellowship?

One of the reasons I chose the preventative conservation department I work in now, instead of focusing on one thing like painting or a specific object, is because I love community engagement and connecting with smaller local historical societies. I can share my knowledge and the Midwest Art Conservation Center’s resources as they work to preserve their treasured historical objects. I am working on a research project to study how Hmong artists, historians, curators, and others gather information on what they believe are the greatest threats to Hmong material culture and how to combat these issues. I hope to create technical leaflets based on this information and distribute them within the Hmong community.

Tell us about your artwork at the Minnesota Institute of Art (MIA).

The art piece displayed at MIA staff art show was a senior thesis project in college, and it is an homage to my grandma, blending the past and present reality of the Hmong experience in the art form of a Hmong story cloth. My grandmother connected me with Hmong culture when we talked in her suburban kitchen when I was younger. Her intentional storytelling, cooking, and gardening in her backyard with me bridged my reality of living in Minnesota to her experience of immigrating from Southeast Asia. My artwork uses watercolor on paper and woodblock printing and then blends it together digitally to be printed onto fabric. I hope that people take time to take in all the visual aspects of this piece, like my grandmother’s kitchen, me in her garden, my aunt and uncle’s photo on the wall, and the woman in the refugee camp in Thailand sewing and see how past and present experiences in Asia and the USA can be felt in my grandma’s suburban kitchen.

Do you have any teachers at Breck who inspire you and invest in you to get you to where you are now?

[Former Visual Arts Department Chair] Michal Sagar. She was a super important teacher to me. She created a safe space for everyone to be themselves. She would talk with you; she knew you, and that level of connection could be channeled into your art. My friends and I still talk about her. She was a special presence in my artistic career.