Synopsis
Dwell Time is a term that measures the amount of time something takes to happen – immigrants waiting at a border, human eyes on a website, the minutes people wait in an airport, and, in art conservation, the time it takes for a chemical to react with a material.
Renowned art conservator Rosa Lowinger spent a difficult childhood in Miami among people whose losses in the Cuban revolution, and earlier by the decimation of family in the Holocaust, clouded all family life. After moving away to escape the “cloying exile’s nostalgia,” Lowinger discovered the unique field of art conservation, which led her to work in Tel Aviv, Philadelphia, Rome, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Charleston, Marfa, South Dakota, and Port-Au-Prince. Eventually returning to Havana for work, Lowinger suddenly finds herself embarking on a remarkable journey of family repair that begins, as it does in conservation, with an understanding of the origins of damage.
Inspired by and structured similarly to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, this first memoir by a working art conservator is organized by chapters based on the materials Lowinger handles in her thriving private practice – Marble, Limestone, Bronze, Ceramics, Concrete, Silver, Wood, Mosaic, Paint, Aluminum, Terrazzo, Steel, Glass and Plastics. Lowinger offers insider accounts of conservation that form the backbone of her immigrant family’s story of healing that beautifully juxtaposes repair of the material with repair of the personal. Through Lowinger’s relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx.
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Praise
“A masterful revelation about life and art imitating each other in maintenance and repair.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“DWELL TIME evokes a visceral, vibrant, complex materiality. From her mother’s aging body to the spectacular architecture of Cuba to the history of marble, concrete, and plastic, Lowinger brilliantly unlocks the stories that always reside in the material. DWELL TIME is as intellectually engaging as it is profoundly moving.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward, a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the Year
“Rosa Lowinger’s DWELL TIME is the story of a family, a mother-daughter relationship, but forged of what seems like new building materials entirely. An artist has many duties, among them to conserve the traditions and innovations of the past but also to “make it new.” This memoir does just that, and delivers on its final promise, that of repair.” —Gary Shteyngart, the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure and novels that include Super Sad True Love Story, Absurdistan, and Our Country Friends
“DWELL TIME is a multi-generational family memoir that reads like a panoramic, deeply moving roman-fleuve—taking the reader from Eastern Europe through Havana, Miami, Manhattan and Los Angeles, amid revolution, war, upheaval and exoduses. That it’s written by a revered conservator of art makes perfect sense, because Lowinger’s profession has given her a complex understanding of the past, of the contingencies of history, of the differences between surface and interior. One of art conservation’s creeds is: ‘You can’t repair what you don’t understand.’ This beautiful book is an act of understanding as a work of art.” —Randy Kennedy, New York Times arts writer and bestselling author of Presidio
“In DWELL TIME, art conservator Rosa Lowinger delves deep into a profound insight lying at the heart of her profession: when you understand how something got broken, you cannot help but soften to it. And when you soften to the damage done to an object of art, you soften to the damage others have done to you. Bit by bit, you begin to let go of the pain of the past, learning to live more fully in the present. Deeply personal and profoundly moving, DWELL TIME transcends the field of art conservation, applying its lessons to family and beyond.” —Barry Michels, bestselling author of The Tools and Coming Alive
Interview with Rosa
What made you decide to write a Memoir and share your story?
In 2009, when I had the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, I came across the memoir The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. As I read the way he structured a family story around the metaphor of chemistry, I realized that I had a similar book in me, about conservation. Initially, I thought of it entirely as a way of showing the world what the conservation field is all about, because there are no books out there AT ALL that display our work in a way that is true and makes sense. Our profession is rife with powerful metaphors about damage and repair, and I felt that telling that story would resonate with so many people. I thought about this book for years and years but put it on the back burner as I built a business, which is now the U.S.’s largest woman-owned materials conservation practice. Then, the pandemic happened. Suddenly I found myself with time to write and reflect. I began a novel, hired a writing coach to help me structure it, and out of the blue I mentioned this idea for a memoir. She said, “stop everything and write that book proposal.” As I began to unpack the conservation material, a story about my family burbled through the narrative. It centered around my troubled, volatile, and extremely abandonment-averse mother. I realized that our family’s loss of Cuba, a country that my grandparents had moved to in the 1920s traumatized my family irrevocably and made my parents difficult to live with. As I wrote, I began to see the healing metaphor within this subject matter as a way to understand my family history of double exile. Art Conservation teaches us that the basis of all repair is understanding the source of damage. My goal with this memoir was to use this knowledge I have to unravel and learn to understand the intergenerational trauma at the foundation of our family life.
What is the definition of Dwell Time and why did you pick it as the title of your book?
In conservation, the term dwell time refers to the amount of contact time a chemical material needs to work. It is a measure of action on something you are trying to remove— soap on dirt, solvent on a stain, paint stripper on a varnish. The term dwell time also refers to the total time a person spends in an airport, or looking at a web page, or the time a family lingers at a border, waiting to get into a country, or the time you live in a city before moving on. I chose this title because it perfectly describes how I was trying to clean away the murkiness that made my family difficult to understand. Metaphorically, Dwell Time can also mean the amount of time you need to work on a problem. As I write in the book: We repair and make reparations by taking the risk of going past our own immediate emotions. Acting is its own salvation. You take the harsh decision or material, blend it into a gel, and watch the magic happen. The content of this book is like one of those solvent gels. That’s my hope, anyway.
What exactly is an art conservator and why did you pursue this career? How is it connected to your personal history?
Materials conservators (this term is more esoteric, but it’s used to include both art and architecture) repair, preserve, and perform preventive maintenance and basically enhance the longevity of all built heritage, which includes artworks, natural history collections, books, media, film, sculpture, paintings, murals, textiles, costumes, tapestries, archeological sites, and historic buildings and their materials. Our work blends art, science, and good hand skills. We are trained in the science of chemical deterioration and repair, and we work within specialties, like doctors. In public building restoration projects, for example, we are the ones who determine how stone or metals are treated, how terrazzo floors are repaired and salts leaching through tiles are addressed, yet we are often relegated to the sidelines and the architects get all the credit, even though they do not have the technical knowledge about materials that we have. In art, the curators, gallerists and fabricators get all the attention, yet it is only we (conservators) who know what to do when someone puts their elbow through a painting, or an outdoor sculpture starts to rust. I pursued this career because I fell into it. I was studying art and not very good at it. A professor recommended the field to me. I got into grad school by default and found that the field dovetailed with my sensibilities. It was all a bit subconscious I imagine. As a conservator, you are a servant to a work of art, never the protagonist. It’s got an odd humility to it, work done in the service of someone else’s aesthetic. I was raised to be beholden to others’ visions, my mother especially.
About the Author
Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American art conservator and founder of RLA Conservation of Art + Architecture, LLC. (www.rlaconservation.com), the U.S.’s largest woman-owned materials conservation practice. She is also a published author, most well-known for Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005), a book on Havana’s pre-Castro nightclub era currently optioned for television by Keshet International, the company responsible for Homeland, Our Boys, and The Baker and the Beauty. Other fictional works by Rosa include The Encanto File, a play produced off-Broadway by the Women’s Project and Productions and published in Rowing to America and Sixteen Other Short Plays, edited by Julia Miles (Smith & Kraus, 2002), and The Empress of the Waves, a short story published in the anthology Island in the Light/Isla en la Luz (Trapublishing, 2019).
Rosa’s academic and professional distinctions include the 2008-09 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, where she researched the history of vandalism, graffiti, and street art; and Fellow status in the American Institute for Conservation and the Association for Preservation Technology. She holds an M.A. in Art History and Conservation from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, lectures regularly at numerous universities around the country, and serves on the boards of the Amigos of the Cuban Heritage Collection at University of Miami, Florida Association of Museums, the Partnership for Sacred Places, and the Florida Association of Public Art Professionals.
Rosa co-curated the exhibits Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (Wolfsonian Museum, 2016) and Concrete Paradise: Miami Marine Stadium (Coral Gables Museum, 2013). She writes regularly for academic and popular media about conservation, the arts, and Cuba. Her 1999 cover story on Havana for Preservation spawned a career in cultural travel that has taken her to Cuba over 100 times since 1992. Rosa lives in Los Angeles and Miami.
