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Formal Biography

Clarke Bedford received a BA from Williams College in 1969 and an MA from the Cooperstown Graduate Programs in Art Conservation in 1980. Since that time he has been Conservator of Paintings and Mixed-Media Objects at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He has also co-created and taught a course on the History of Painting Materials and Techniques in the Art History Graduate Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has lectured widely on both art conservation as well as his own art, often referencing the relationship between the two. His exhibitions/performances have included commercial galleries in Washington DC and New York as well as public art spaces and college and university art venues. He presently lives in Hyattsville, MD.

Informal Biography

I was born two years after the end of WWII, during the Berlin air lift. My childhood was standard post-war suburban New Yorker cartoon fare - dad took the train into the big city during the week and battled pachysandra on the weekends, mom went quietly nuts and battled the bottle - and the kids biked everywhere, blissfully unsupervised until a ships bell rang, signaling dinner. The stinker was when we moved from greater New York City to Baltimore in 1960, simultaneously going back in time about a century. Unfortunately, the weird authenticity of Charm City was lost on adolescent me, trapped as I was in a world of plaid pants and snotty private schools, an era which ended with a BA from Williams College in 1969.
After a decade of total bewilderment, depression and odd jobs, I surfaced in graduate school in art conservation at the Cooperstown Graduate Program, which is part of the New York State University System. I was apparently lucky to get in since it was one of only three such schools in the US and consequently quite competitive. It was also an improvement over my “career” working for a delightfully funny German gay textile designer in New York (who I referred to as the “acetate man”) or my last gig as a museum guard. My training led to a job as painting conservator (now, paintings and mixed-media objects) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, where I have been ever since (I had always felt pity for my father for working for one of the largest companies in the world his whole life (then Esso, now Exxon) and here I was, surpassing him by being a lifetime Federal employee! What’s that ditty about the “apple and the tree”?).

My existence is now a roundtable of work, making art, feverishly collecting everything from valuable antiques (I am particularly fond of the Arts and Crafts Movement) to junk, personal relationships and responsibilities for two semi-grown children. I let the house go to hell. There is only so much time.