Lauren Varga earned a BFA in Art History from the Massachusetts College of Art in 2001. In addition to art history courses, Ms. Varga enrolled in numerous printmaking, drawing and photography classes where she gained in understanding of materials and processes. She spent a semester in Florence, Italy during the fall of 2000 to pursue an interest in Renaissance and Baroque art. Her coursework included lectures on museology and conservation, and a studio class in paintings conservation. Her first conservation treatment included the cleaning of a 16th century oil painting depicting St. John the Baptist belonging to a local Florentine church. It was during this time that her interest and curiosity in conservation began. Following her time in Florence, Ms. Varga returned to Boston to finish her degree.
Shortly after graduating from Massachusetts College of Art in the spring of 2001, Ms. Varga joined the studio as a pre-program intern, during which time she gained an understanding of the principles of paper and photograph conservation and the foundations of conservation treatment. She conducted research on the Reference Collection of Photograph Paper, developing the protocol for cataloguing samples and assisting in the development of the catalog’s database application. She is a co-author of Optical Brightening Agents in Photographic Paper, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 44:1, 2005, which is based on a methodical assessment of this collection.
In 2004, Ms. Varga was accepted to the Art Conservation Program at Buffalo State College where she specialized in paper and photograph conservation. There she designed and produced a hand-held suction device for use in stain reduction treatments. This innovative device is in the prototype stage as Ms. Varga continues to research and develop its potential. As part of the graduate program curriculum, Ms. Varga spent a year as an intern in the paper laboratory in the Department of Prints & Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. There she focused the majority of the time on developing and executing a treatment for a large-scale multi-media drawing, an early work by the Belgian artist James Ensor.