Keynote
2024 Keynote Address
Session 3, Thursday, April 11, 7:00PM
Register to immediately receive Zoom Link, ID, & Passcode.
Reminders will be sent one day, and one hour before the session.
Abstract for Ms. Wegener's Keynote
For more than 175 years the Smithsonian Institution has been dedicated to the preservation of America’s cultural heritage and cultural and scientific collaboration worldwide. This mission took on a new urgency after the 2010 Haiti earthquake when Corine Wegener teamed up with Smithsonian staff and other partners to deploy a cultural heritage disaster response team that evolved into the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI). Since then, Wegener and her team have deployed around the world helping with training, equipping, and rescue efforts for response to both natural and human-caused disasters. In this special keynote lecture, Wegener will describe her journey from art museum curator to defender of cultural heritage in places like Iraq, Syria, Nepal, and Ukraine and give an update on the Smithsonian’s partnership with the U.S. Army to train the next generation of Monuments Men and Women.
About Our Speaker
Corine Wegener is director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI), an outreach program dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage in crisis situations in the U.S. and abroad. SCRI’s work has included projects in Haiti, Mali, Nepal, Iraq, Syria, and most recently Ukraine. Wegener has more than 20 years of experience as an art historian, curator, and emergency responder for cultural heritage in crisis. On behalf of the Smithsonian, Wegener serves as co-chair of the U.S. Heritage Emergency National Task Force and on the Cultural Heritage Coordinating Committee at the U.S. Department of State.
Before coming to the Smithsonian, Wegener was associate curator in the department of Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where she worked from 1999 to 2012. Her research areas included American and European decorative arts, Judaica, arms and armor, and the historic 1913 Purcell-Cutts House. Wegener is author and co-author of several books and articles on American and European decorative arts.
In a concurrent 20-year U.S. Army Reserve career, Wegener served in many positions, including as a Civil Affairs Arts, Monuments, and Archives Officer in Baghdad, Iraq. As founding past president of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, Wegener helped lead the successful campaign for the 2009 U.S. ratification of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Her research interests now include the protection of cultural heritage in armed conflict, forensic documentation of cultural heritage damage, and improving integration of cultural heritage into international disaster risk management frameworks.
Wegener is an honorary professor at the University of Glasgow College of Arts and a board member of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield and the Hill Museum and Manuscripts Library. She holds a BGS degree in Political Science from the University of Nebraska Omaha and MA degrees in Political Science and Art History from the University of Kansas.
We are delighted and honored to have Corine Wegener as our keynote speaker for the 2024 SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History Symposium!
