Expanding preservation services & access nationwide
VISION & LEADERSHIP
APF believes that cultural heritage is not a luxury. It is public infrastructure, evidence of our past, and witness to our present. Our vision is a country in which tangible art and heritage objects, across geography, community, scale, and type, are actively preserved, accessed, and understood.
The infrastructure for collections conservation in the United States has historically served the largest and most well-resourced institutions, with outsized concentration on the coasts. Existing funding sources are increasingly constrained and fragmented.
While the philanthropic pool has stagnated, the need for conservation and preservation services continues to grow, particularly among small and mid-sized institutions, community-based collections, under-resourced archives and libraries, and collections outside major metropolitan centers. While many of these collections are not large or visible enough to attract major institutional funding, they hold profound cultural, historical, and community value.
Without intervention, significant portions of our nation’s cultural record are at risk of irreversible loss. Art Preservation Fund was founded to change that.
Resources are concentrated. Collections are not.
THE PROBLEM WE ARE SOLVING
WHAT WE ARE BUILDING
In the near term, APF intends to direct financial resources and conservation expertise to collections and communities that would otherwise go without support — stabilizing at-risk materials, building institutional capacity, and raising public awareness of what preservation makes possible.
Looking further ahead, success looks like a materially stronger national preservation ecosystem: a more robust network of regional conservation service providers; a new generation of donors and advocates who understand preservation as essential; and a demonstrably more equitable distribution of conservation resources across geography, institution type, and community.
Equally important, we aim to shift preservation from a local concern to a broadly understood civic value, making the work of conservators visible, compelling, and relevant to people who have never thought about it before.
A stronger, bolder preservation ecosystem
Founding Team
Art Preservation Fund was founded by two professionals whose careers sit at the intersection of conservation practice, philanthropic grantmaking, and institutional leadership. Together they bring the technical knowledge, strategic experience, professional networks, and passion to make this fund credible, effective, and durable from day one.
President & Co-Founder
Annabelle (“Bellie”) is an MBA candidate at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, focused on building financially sustainable models for the arts and creative sectors. Prior to her MBA, she led marketing and development at the Balboa Art Conservation Center, where she managed the organization’s fundraising and external communications.
At Wharton, Bellie has consulted on strategy and development for the University of Delaware Department of Art Conservation, The National Gallery of Art, Barnes Foundation, and ArtsFund.
Bellie is a textile conservator with an MS in Art Conservation from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. She holds BAs in Art Conservation and Anthropology from the University of Delaware. She trained in some of the world’s leading textile conservation labs, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Abegg Stiftung, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Bellie is a professional member of the American Institute for Conservation, and her active service on the organization’s Textile Specialty Group, Sustainability Committee, and Emerging Conservation Professionals Network reflects a deep commitment to strengthening the field from within. Bellie also serves on the Junior Board of World Monuments Fund and the Board of Textile Society of America.
Annabelle Camp
Co-Founder
Alison is the Director of The Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH) at Yale University and a strategy leader in systems for capacity and investment in ethical stewardship of global cultural heritage. Her focus at Yale is to advance best practices in collaboration for conservation, heritage science, technical imaging, cultural heritage AI, and international exchange.
Prior to Yale she led the largest US-based grant program focused on sustaining the fields of art history, curatorship, art conservation, and heritage science as a program officer at the Mellon Foundation.
Over her career, Alison has led domestic and international programs to resource new subfields of expertise, rapidly diversify pathways into museum and heritage careers, and redress the state of provenance, display, and preservation of Native American, Indigenous, and African cultural heritage in the US.
Alison holds a BA in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and an MSIS in Museum Information Systems from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science. She received the 2022 Forbes Medal from the American Institute for Conservation for distinguished contributions to the field, and is an elected fellow of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC). She is vice-chair of the board of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia and treasurer of the board for Voices in Contemporary Art. She is also a member of the Education Committee of the Guggenheim Museum in NY.
Alison Gilchrest
Support our vision.
We are raising a $250,000 demonstration fund in our first year, proving that a dedicated national fund for art preservation is not only needed, but possible. Early supporters make that case.