Awards and Prizes

At every IIC Congress, a distinguished member of the conservation profession is invited to give the Forbes Prize lecture. The prize is named after Edward Waldo Forbes (1873 – 1969) who was Director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University from 1909 to 1944 and the first Honorary Fellow of IIC in 1958. The Forbes Prize lecture was established in 1958 by IIC’s Council to acknowledge an individual’s success and conspicuous service to conservation and provides an opportunity to address the assembled Congress.

It is our pleasure to announce that IIC’s 2026 Forbes Prize lecture will be delivered by Thea B. van Oosten FIIC. Thea’s selection reflects her exceptional impact on the study and preservation of modern and contemporary materials, particularly plastics.

The Forbes Prize Lecture will be delivered on the morning of 8 September 2026. The lecture will reflect on pioneering research and its practical application in the conservation of complex modern materials, offering valuable insights for conservation professionals worldwide. This promises to be a defining moment of the Congress - an inspiring celebration of a career dedicated to bridging science and practice, and a powerful reminder of the vital role conservation plays in safeguarding our shared cultural future.

The Forbes Prize has been given for outstanding work in the field of conservation since 1960 and is named after Edward W Forbes, himself a significant conservator. IIC provides a prize of £1000 and invites the winner to give a lecture at its biennial Congress. You can read about previous winners here.

Thea B. van Oosten FIIC

Thea holds a master’s degree in analytical chemistry from the University of Amsterdam and further specialised in polymers through the National Dutch Graduate School of Polymer Science and Technology. Over a remarkable 36-year career as a senior conservation scientist at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE, formerly ICN) in Amsterdam, she became a driving force in advancing the conservation of plastic, modern and contemporary materials, receiving the Ridder in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau by the King in recognition of her work for Dutch modern art museums. Through her leadership, teaching, and dedication, she has significantly expanded the global understanding of plastics conservation, sharing her expertise and advanced knowledge at international workshops, inspiring professionals across the field.

Before retiring in 2011, Thea contributed to major international research collaborations and published many highly respected books and seminal texts, including Modern Art: Who Cares?, Plastics: Collecting and Conserving, POPART, and PUR Facts. In 2016, Thea was awarded a Guest Scholarship at the Getty Conservation Institute, served as the Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor in Conservation at New York University and received the ICOM-CC medal in 2017. Thea authored Physical Properties of Plastics: A Guide for Conservators, which received the AIC publication award in 2024 and remains highly active as an advisor and researcher of plastics in modern and contemporary art to several international research projects. She is also an associate researcher at the University of Amsterdam and a Fellow of IIC.

Every other year, IIC holds its Keck Awards, which celebrate the best in public outreach, sharing and widening understanding of the work of conservators. For 2026 the judges have selected ten impressive projects for our shortlist with a noticeable recurring theme of involving the public and community in the work of conservation - whether that's a child led museum conserving the everyday or transforming a specialist site into an open learning environment.

Once again we are asking the conservation community and the wider public to cast their votes. As we continue our journey through a vastly changed world, which of these projects speaks to you?

The winner of our £2,500 prize will be chosen 50% by public vote and 50% by our judging team. Two honourable mentions will also be selected by our judges

Voting closes Wednesday September 9 2026, 5.00pm BST/UK. The winner will be announced on the final day of the Congress/Closing Ceremony.

Click here. to cast your vote

Keck Award Nominees

Preserving Cultural Heritage through Inclusivity: Exhibition and Outreach Programme on Mounting and Conservation of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy

The Conservation Office and the Hong Kong Museum of Art built an exhibition and outreach programme around the 2,000-year-old craft of mounting Chinese painting and calligraphy, an item of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Museum displays, live demonstrations and hands-on workshops reached more than 576,000 visitors in Hong Kong, before travelling out to schools and underserved communities across the city.

Learn about the project

Motherland: The Restoration

After a lightning strike shattered the head of La Patria, the figure crowning the 48-metre Roundabout of the Disappeared in Guadalajara, conservators rebuilt the fragmented stone with carefully carved, compatible materials. The team also documented and preserved the photographs, banners and mosaics left at the monument by families of the disappeared, treating them as layers of recent memory rather than material to be removed.

Learn about the project

Opening Conservation to the Public: The Pombal Restoration Heritage Education Program

Between 2023 and 2025, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz at Fiocruz in Rio de Janeiro opened the restoration of the historic Pombal building to the public, reaching around 400 people through hybrid lectures, guided site visits and inclusive activities. Ninety-three participants were trained through conservation courses, while tours for visually impaired visitors and lectures supported in Brazilian Sign Language made the programme a replicable model for inclusive heritage education.

Learn about the project

The Ghent Altarpiece: Conservation, Research and Public Engagement

The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) in Brussels carried out a seventeen-year campaign on the Ghent Altarpiece, revealing that large areas of the van Eyck brothers’ work had been overpainted in the sixteenth century. Museum visitors watched the conservation happen in front of them, while online audiences were given high-resolution imaging and the full research documentation.

Learn about the project

Metro Línea 1 SAS: Conserving Bogotá’s Cultural Heritage Through Public Engagement, Digital Innovation and Urban Storytelling

The company building Bogotá’s first metro line has recovered, documented and conserved more than 20,000 archaeological objects uncovered along the 24-kilometre route. Its interdisciplinary team shares the findings through exhibitions, community dialogues and digital platforms including a 3D virtual collection, showing how major infrastructure work can also build heritage stewardship.

Learn about the project

La Restauración en Ruedas (“Conservation on the Road”)

Amigos del Arte Andino (AMARA) runs the only scientific conservation studio in the Peruvian Altiplano, serving Quechua and Aymara communities whose churches hold fragile colonial paintings and sculptures. Since 2023 its travelling programme has loaded a heritage-rescue 4x4 with microscopes, ultraviolet light and traditional materials and driven above 4,000 metres to teach communities to recognise risk, registering over fifty works and engaging more than 250 participants.

Learn about the project

R.O.A.D. Programme: Public Outreach and Engagement Statement

Reclaiming Our Atlantic Destiny is a national initiative in Barbados conserving, digitising and reopening access to archival records unseen for more than 30 years, spanning four centuries of Barbadian and Atlantic history. Its 16-member team operates the first conservation studio of its kind in the Anglophone Caribbean, and translates specialist methods into public language through Heritage Month events, lectures, webinars and documentary coverage.

Learn about the project

First Conservation Phase in the Chiribiquete World Heritage Site Buffer Zone, Serranía de La Lindosa

ICANH, Fundación Erigaie and ALIPH worked together on the rock art of Serranía de La Lindosa, one of the largest concentrations of pre-Hispanic rock art in the Americas, tackling biological colonisation, termite activity and salt crystallisation. Local communities helped shape the work through participatory workshops and knowledge exchange, and the project produced illustrated materials and a bilingual video series documenting the fieldwork and treatments.

Learn about the project

Gyenvudde (The Journey): A Children Led Family Museum

At an ancestral home in rural Uganda, children under fifteen became the conservators, researchers and curators of their own family history. Guided by their paternal aunt, they recorded oral histories, conserved more than fifty treasured objects using minimal intervention techniques and built bilingual displays — a free, open museum showing that heritage lives in homes, hands and memory rather than only in palaces and monuments.

Learn about the project

Making Conservation Visible: Public Engagement Through Heritage, Storytelling, and Community Action

Alberto Sánchez Sánchez has spent nine years documenting the conservation of a seventeenth-century house in Used, Spain, sharing research, techniques, ethical decisions and mistakes in both Spanish and English. In 2021 he co-founded Asociación Fuset por el Patrimonio Rural, which has run eighteen traditional building-skills workshops for more than 250 participants and generated over €120,000 of direct economic impact in a village of around 260 residents.

Learn about the project

We are once again holding our poster and student poster prizes at Congress.

This year, you can vote for your favourite poster during Congress alongside a judging panel from IIC’s Technical and Local Organizing Committee. The winner will receive £150 towards professional development, and free membership for a year.

Poster voting will close 30 September 2026, 5pm. The Poster results will be announced via social media.

To vote for your favourite poster, please ensure you are logged in. Then, visit the poster's page and click the "Vote for Best Poster" button. Don't forget to browse all the posters.