Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2023
360 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
Dwell Time is an illuminating debut memoir by one of the few prominent Latinas in the field of art and architectural conservation; a moving portrait of a Cuban Jewish family's intergenerational trauma; and a story about repair and healing that will forever change how you see the objects and places we cherish and how we manage damage and loss.
Dwell Time is a term that measures the amount of time something takes to happen – immigrants waiting at a border, human eyes on a website, the minutes people wait in an airport, and, in art conservation, the time it takes for a chemical to react with a material.
Renowned art conservator Rosa Lowinger spent a difficult childhood in Miami among people whose losses in the Cuban revolution, and earlier by the decimation of family in the Holocaust, clouded all family life.
After moving away to escape the "cloying exile's nostalgia," Lowinger discovered the unique field of art conservation, which led her to work in Tel Aviv, Philadelphia, Rome, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Charleston, Marfa, South Dakota, and Port-Au-Prince. Eventually returning to Havana for work, Lowinger suddenly finds herself embarking on a remarkable journey of family repair that begins, as it does in conservation, with an understanding of the origins of damage.
Inspired by and structured similarly to Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, this first memoir by a working art conservator is organized by chapters based on the materials Lowinger handles in her thriving private practice – Marble, Limestone, Bronze, Ceramics, Concrete, Silver, Wood, Mosaic, Paint, Aluminum, Terrazzo, Steel, Glass and Plastics. Lowinger offers insider accounts of conservation that form the backbone of her immigrant family's story of healing that beautifully juxtaposes repair of the material with repair of the personal. Through Lowinger's relentless clear-eyed efforts to be the best practitioner possible while squarely facing her fraught personal and work relationships, she comes to terms with her identity as Cuban and Jewish, American and Latinx.
Dwell Time is an immigrant's story seen through an entirely new lens, that which connects the material to the personal and helps us see what is possible when one opens one's heart to another person's wounds.
"From the coasts of Cuba to Israel's Mediterranean shores, Lowinger...interweaves her life story with insights drawn from her career in art conservation and restoration...Willing to immerse herself in the complexities and contradictions that mark Cuba, her family, and herself, without rushing to erase them, the author leaves readers with respect for the hazy, ever-moving line between remedy and disease and between making something better and destroying it completely, in life as well as in art. A masterful revelation about life and art imitating each other in maintenance and repair." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Dwell Time evokes a visceral, vibrant, complex materiality. Lowinger brilliantly unlocks the stories that reside in the material. This book is as intellectually engaging as it is profoundly moving." —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward, a New York Times Critics' Top Book of the Year
"Rosa Lowinger's Dwell Time is the story of a family, a mother-daughter relationship, but forged of what seems like new building materials entirely. An artist has many duties, among them to conserve the traditions and innovations of the past but also to 'make it new.' This memoir does just that, and delivers on its final promise, that of repair." —Gary Shteyngart, the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure and novels that include Super Sad True Love Story, Absurdistan, and Our Country Friends
This information about Dwell Time was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American writer and art conservator. The author of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005) and Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (Wolfsonian Museum, 2016), she is the founder and current vice-president of RLA Conservation, LLC, one of the U.S.'s largest woman-owned art and architectural conservation firms. A Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and the American Academy in Rome, Rosa writes regularly for popular and academic media about conservation, historic preservation, the visual arts, and Cuba.
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