Artist Estefania Puerta, conservator Michelle Barger, and scholar Jules Pelta Feldman join BAMPFA Chief Curator Margot Norton for a multifaceted in-gallery discussion of the issues and opportunities presented by art made under conditions of impermanence, as highlighted in the museum’s current collection exhibition, To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection. The discussion will consider experimentation, performance, and momentary events, as well as works made using unconventional materials, including those that dissolve and decay.

Estefania Puerta’s work incorporates organic and inorganic materials to form a new poetics of transformation and translation. She is interested in what is gained and what is lost in the process of making, and the new worlds that can emerge from recontextualizing materials. Her practice is rooted in world making, shape-shifting, border crossing, and language failure. Her research in psychoanalysis and the history of hysteria, natural medicine and folklore, and personal histories of immigration and undocumentation has led to questions around what is considered “natural” and “alien” in her materially diverse work. Puerta’s 2023 mixed-media work Luz/Helena is included in To Exalt the Ephemeral.

Michelle Barger is the Head of Conservation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). She manages the conservation program for the museum’s exhibitions, directs the department’s fellowship program, and is responsible for the care of three-dimensional objects in the collection. Developing models for the care of contemporary art is of particular interest to her. She has researched the artist Eva Hesse—her latex and polyester works in particular—and, among other writings about Hesse’s work, coauthored, with Jill Sterrett, “Play and Interplay: Eva Hesse’s Artistic Methods” in Eva Hesse (2001), the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at SFMOMA (2002).

Jules Pelta Feldman is Assistant Researcher in UC Berkeley’s Department of the History of Art. Previously, they were a postdoctoral research fellow for the project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, hosted by the Institute for Materiality in Arts and Culture at Bern Academy of the Arts. They were director and curator of Room & Board, an artist’s residency and salon in Brooklyn, and they have worked at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Grey Art Museum. Pelta Feldman’s research interests include performance and ephemeral art; conservation history and theory; craft and materiality; archival theory and practice; museums, curation, and exhibition history; memory, monuments, and public art; and social justice in the art world.