This week we are introducing Yadin Larochette, who is taking on the new role of president to help lead Conserv as we grow and continue to support the heritage preservation community. Before joining our team, she worked for nearly 10 years at Tru Vue, Inc., initially as a consultant to help expand their market in Latin America and later as their Museum and Conservation Liaison for the Americas. She ran a successful private practice in textile conservation based out of Los Angeles, California for ten years prior to that, working with various institutions including the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Huntington Art Museum, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others. (Banner photo credit: Sharon Shore at Caring for Textiles, Los Angeles, California).
Conserv President Yadin Larochette
Yadin’s passion for heritage preservation is born out of two trajectories…
The first trajectory is from an ancestral perspective.
She comes from a long line of French tapestry weavers and painters which, along with extensive travel and exposure to different cultures, have influenced her core missions in life. She was taught to weave tapestries as a child, as soon as her little feet could reach the loom peddles. She sees the act of weaving itself as a way of preserving her personal heritage.
The second perspective is a global one. She was drawn to art conservation through a need to make things whole again in an ethical and responsible way: Textiles, specifically. Her focus on textiles stemmed from her family background, but she also saw (and still sees) textiles as a culture’s expression and language (the words “text” and “textile” share the same root after all). Her love of learning about other cultures and safeguarding their expression only seems natural.
Yadin takes the old saying “An Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure” to heart…
As she began working in the field of art conservation, she saw just how imperative it is to prevent works from falling apart in the first place. Heritage preservation has been at the heart of her professional life since her first exposure to conservation at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in the early 1990s while earning her undergraduate degree in Art History from the University of California at Berkeley.
Fortuitously, the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation began a pilot Preventive “subspecialty” (or “minor”) in her second year there, and she jumped at the chance to take part. Little did she know how influential that coursework would be.
A lot of time in her subsequent private practice involved educating collectors and institutions without conservators on staff on how to best care for their artifacts. So much of the detrimental, irreversible damage to cultural materials can be prevented with a solid understanding of display and storage environments. That graduate pilot program that started so long ago later became a full on (and very much needed!) major.
Yadin thrives on outreach and cultivating relationships towards better collections care…
Yadin’s recent years have been at Tru Vue, Inc., a manufacturer of glass and acrylic glazing specifically designed for fine art display. There, she often educated stakeholders on the importance of glazing to protect works from air borne pollutants and harmful ultra-violet light.
Outreach became a focus of her work, as she found that customers, from art collectors and advisors to framers, were eager to learn about best preventive practices and materials.
Yadin hasn’t been spending time at the loom as of late, but oh, how she does love weaving ideas into plans and people into connections! She thrives on building relationships around worthy endeavors and is beyond thrilled to be joining the fantastic and dedicated team at Conserv.
