The conservator Rosa Lowinger and the author Dana Spiotta (2009 Fellows) will discuss Lowinger’s new memoir, Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (2023), offering insights into art conservation and juxtaposing repair of the material with repair of the personal.

In Dwell Time, Lowinger interweaves the materials and science of art conservation with the story of her Jewish Cuban family and their state of double exile: from Eastern Europe in the 1920s and then Cuba in early 1961. Inspired by and structured similarly to Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, Dwell Time offers insider accounts of conservation that form the backbone of a personal family story about exile and immigration.

This event, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public.

Lowinger is a Cuban-born American art conservator and the author of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (2005) and Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (2016). She is based in Los Angeles and Miami.

Spiotta is the author of five novels, most recently Wayward. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize, and the John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Spiotta teaches in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing Program.