Conservation plays an important role in museum and gallery collections. How the work is displayed, lighted, and stored determines how the object will stand up over time. An additional responsibility of conservators is to determine if an object needs restoration and how that restoration will proceed.

Retablos were not originally created as art objects, rather they were considered to be functional items. In everyday use, these pieces were touched or kissed by their owners and they were often hung above burning candles on a home altarpiece. Additionally, Mexican retablos were painted on the thinnest grade of tin plated iron, which eventually allowed rust and corrosion from the iron to emerge through the tin and affect the painted image. Due to this handling and to the materials used, all of the retablos in the Nwe Mexico State University collection have required some level of conservation and restoration. The conditions have ranged from very good to very unstable.

Before work on the retablos could commence, all of those involved had to agree on a philosophy of restoration. It was decided that the treatment and conservation of the retablos should be guided by a respect for their integrity as documents of culture as much as works of artistic value. In order to preserve these objects as cultural documents, the conservators wanted to improve the legibility of the images without removing evidence of their historic use. Therefore, a restrained approach to cleaning, inpainting, and refinishing was adopted. The primarily goal of this project was to stabilize deterioration and to prevent any further damage.

Hervey and Sally Stockman, and Karl Gustaffson of the Stockman Family Foundation have given a substantial donation to restore all 182 retablos from our collection to be displayed in the exhibiton "El Favor de los Santos: The New Mexico State Retablo Collection. The retablos were entrusted to the conservators Susanne Friend, Cynthia Lawerence, Silvia Marinas-Feliner, Patricia Morris, David Rasch, Luis Neri Zagal, and Richard White.