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Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair
What Kirkus describes as a "masterful revelation about life and art imitating each other in maintenance and repair" in a starred review, 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 “ How, I wondered, was it possible that no one in my family had ever told me that Havana, the place where we were from, was so closely aligned to my work? More importantly, how had I managed to reencounter this ornately decorated, sagging city at the precise moment when I was beginning to see a link between restoration of the material world and personal healing?”
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 “ How, I wondered, was it possible that no one in my family had ever told me that Havana, the place where we were from, was so closely aligned to my work? More importantly, how had I managed to reencounter this ornately decorated, sagging city at the precise moment when I was beginning to see a link between restoration of the material world and personal healing?”
360 pages, Hardcover
Published October 10, 2023
12 people are currently reading
229 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
May 25, 2024
I listened to this audiobook in fits and starts during lunch breaks and whatnot, so I spent a long time with the story despite its relatively short length. I appreciated how candid the author was, even when it didn't make her look like the hero--she made genuine mistakes in her personal and professional relationships, and it's easy to see the current of generational trauma running through her family. The weaving of memoir and art conservation information was organic and elegant, and I learned a lot. This is another personal look at the art world (along with Get the Picture) that will stick with me.
October 11, 2023
Inside a specialized world and how it can help us (Cuba, eastern/western US cities, Israel, Rome, Haiti, Trinidad; 1950s to present-day): “Love is a phenomenal adhesive,” says Rosa Lowinger in an interview about her groundbreaking memoir, Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair. The distinguished Conservator in the arts and architecture traces her personal and professional lives uniquely. Opening up to outsiders, as a first, her scientifically-based, highly specialized academic field, she then applies the materials, concepts, and philosophies of her discipline to her personal story, with important lessons for us.
Dwell time is a term that refers to allowing enough time for the chemical processes in conservation work to set. To bond. In turn, we’re asked what happens when not enough time and attention is given to our human bonds?
An impactful memoir that dazzles comparing what Lowinger learned over her forty-year career that also offers a special way to understand healthy and unhealthy relationships:
“There’s no magic here. It requires talented hands, but also belief and patience. That’s true of all repair, redemption, healing, restoration. It only works if you start with the notion that you have a chance of succeeding.”
Conservationists are careful not to jump to conclusions too quickly in determining the cause of damage and best method for fixing what’s broken. Similarly, we see how Lowinger’s palpably painful physical and emotional abusive upbringing is told with care, not condemnation. With an empathetic, tender eye, she examines the root cause of her mother’s uncontrollable rage beating her only child for hours, and her father’s anxieties, fears, “manipulations.” A man who’d “shrink under the weight of what could have been.”
The understanding the author displays in her challenging interdisciplinary field is also seen in her understanding of her parents’ and grandparents’ trauma as East European Jews fleeing 1920s Romania escaping sweeping antisemitism for tolerance, setting out for America but only making it as far as Havana, Cuba due to US legislative immigration quotas. Havana is Rosa Lowinger’s birthplace and where she lived until her parents were able to immigrate to Miami when Castro took over. One of the historical surprises is how welcomed Jews were in the pre-Castro days (20,000 Jews back then, today dwindled to around 1,000).
Lowinger’s escape from her toxic family environment is arresting, brilliantly compared to the toxicity of plastics. And yet, she’s also able to appreciate the good too. “There was also active kindness, humor, and generosity in my family,” she says. Over the years, she’s learned acceptance and forgiveness, but will never forget.
Conservation is a “transformative profession.” Lowinger’s early life was transformed by her future profession. By her scholarship, determination, creativity, independent-spirit, and a humanitarian’s passion to lift awareness, restore, and preserve art, history, culture, humanity around the world. Proof also comes from noteworthy achievements, building “one of the largest woman-owned art and architectural conservation firms” in the US and winning the century-old Rome Prize awarded by the American Academy of Rome in 2008.
Lowinger doesn’t dwell on the trauma inflicted on her. By page sixteen, she dives into her first prestigious conservation project for New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, restoring a rare Numidian marble fireplace mantel from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art collection from Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Manhattan mansion. Ambitious, she moves from one fascinating and different project to another while weaving the intimate into her story.
Lowinger does want us to know her non-professional diagnosis that her mother suffers from a personality disorder stemming from permanent psychic damage having spent ten formative years from ages four to fourteen abandoned by her own father to a Cuban orphanage. For all the damage she does to her lonely young daughter, she repeatedly tells her she did everything out of love.
“How do damaged items become whole again? How much destruction is necessary in a cycle of true repair?
Damage connects Lowinger’s personal and professional lives. Chapters are organized by the damage to the materials of conservation: marble, concrete, ceramic, plastic, bronze, bone, pigment, silver, terrazzo, wood, steel, mosaic, paint, glass. Disasters and graffiti complete the chapters, screaming for repair.
“Conservation is a mix of art, science, and hand skills, but it is fundamentally the art of understanding damage.”
Lowinger can also be seen through the lens of healer. “Conservation is a healing art.” For us, the eloquent and compassionate prose loaded with poignancy captivates, teaches, and helps us see ways to better our lives.
Inspired by Primo Levi’s masterpiece memoir, The Periodic Table, Lowinger has swapped Levi’s literary structure organized by chemicals with the materials of art and architectural conservation.
Lowinger connects with Primo Levi. His Holocaust survival story is the stuff of “martyrs and saints,” as noted in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_qD.... Levi was a chemist from Italy. Drawn to his extraordinary story and powerful writing, her memoir opens with his belief: “Understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves.”
Lowinger’s tale brings a wealth of historical details to the narrative: Cuba’s revolutionary forces; America’s foreign policies; Los Angeles and Haiti earthquakes; black history riots in the poor Watts neighborhood of southern Los Angeles, also the site of her largest outdoor project, Watts Towers; environmental degradation of ancient Greek and Roman ruins along Israel’s coast. The list goes on and on.
Marble, the first chapter, introduces us to the conservator as “an expert cleaner of marble” like her mother. Marble, a polished stone associated with “wealth and elegance,” is strikingly out-of-sync with the Cuban orphanage that punished her unruly mother by having to clean food off of marble tabletops that wasn’t easy. Now 91, her mother is still feisty but more loving. Still, the indelible mark she left on someone she claimed to love left her daughter feeling: “Never being enough or always being too much.”
Cuba looms large – emotionally, architecturally, aesthetically, politically. Once a vibrant place of Cubist, Surrealist, and Fauvist art styles, its architecture had remained intact for half a century. Fast forward thirty years when the author first returns to Cuba, it has become “dense with very damaged concrete buildings” due to erosion from the salty environment. “There was so much contradiction here. So much wreckage mixed with so much beauty” is a statement about Cuba’s decaying structures as well as her troubled marriage at this stage of her life.
The Bronze chapter, like everything else, means more than the heavy metal’s use in the art world. Technology turned this corrosive material into important commercial uses, “reverting” back to something less “reactive.” Then hitting us with: “Don’t we all wish to revert to states of being that are calmer? To be less reactive to our surroundings and circumstances?”
In asking what’s “needed to be lost before we could be found?” Lowinger asks us to reflect on our unprecedented times.
Dwell time is a term that refers to allowing enough time for the chemical processes in conservation work to set. To bond. In turn, we’re asked what happens when not enough time and attention is given to our human bonds?
An impactful memoir that dazzles comparing what Lowinger learned over her forty-year career that also offers a special way to understand healthy and unhealthy relationships:
“There’s no magic here. It requires talented hands, but also belief and patience. That’s true of all repair, redemption, healing, restoration. It only works if you start with the notion that you have a chance of succeeding.”
Conservationists are careful not to jump to conclusions too quickly in determining the cause of damage and best method for fixing what’s broken. Similarly, we see how Lowinger’s palpably painful physical and emotional abusive upbringing is told with care, not condemnation. With an empathetic, tender eye, she examines the root cause of her mother’s uncontrollable rage beating her only child for hours, and her father’s anxieties, fears, “manipulations.” A man who’d “shrink under the weight of what could have been.”
The understanding the author displays in her challenging interdisciplinary field is also seen in her understanding of her parents’ and grandparents’ trauma as East European Jews fleeing 1920s Romania escaping sweeping antisemitism for tolerance, setting out for America but only making it as far as Havana, Cuba due to US legislative immigration quotas. Havana is Rosa Lowinger’s birthplace and where she lived until her parents were able to immigrate to Miami when Castro took over. One of the historical surprises is how welcomed Jews were in the pre-Castro days (20,000 Jews back then, today dwindled to around 1,000).
Lowinger’s escape from her toxic family environment is arresting, brilliantly compared to the toxicity of plastics. And yet, she’s also able to appreciate the good too. “There was also active kindness, humor, and generosity in my family,” she says. Over the years, she’s learned acceptance and forgiveness, but will never forget.
Conservation is a “transformative profession.” Lowinger’s early life was transformed by her future profession. By her scholarship, determination, creativity, independent-spirit, and a humanitarian’s passion to lift awareness, restore, and preserve art, history, culture, humanity around the world. Proof also comes from noteworthy achievements, building “one of the largest woman-owned art and architectural conservation firms” in the US and winning the century-old Rome Prize awarded by the American Academy of Rome in 2008.
Lowinger doesn’t dwell on the trauma inflicted on her. By page sixteen, she dives into her first prestigious conservation project for New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, restoring a rare Numidian marble fireplace mantel from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art collection from Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Manhattan mansion. Ambitious, she moves from one fascinating and different project to another while weaving the intimate into her story.
Lowinger does want us to know her non-professional diagnosis that her mother suffers from a personality disorder stemming from permanent psychic damage having spent ten formative years from ages four to fourteen abandoned by her own father to a Cuban orphanage. For all the damage she does to her lonely young daughter, she repeatedly tells her she did everything out of love.
“How do damaged items become whole again? How much destruction is necessary in a cycle of true repair?
Damage connects Lowinger’s personal and professional lives. Chapters are organized by the damage to the materials of conservation: marble, concrete, ceramic, plastic, bronze, bone, pigment, silver, terrazzo, wood, steel, mosaic, paint, glass. Disasters and graffiti complete the chapters, screaming for repair.
“Conservation is a mix of art, science, and hand skills, but it is fundamentally the art of understanding damage.”
Lowinger can also be seen through the lens of healer. “Conservation is a healing art.” For us, the eloquent and compassionate prose loaded with poignancy captivates, teaches, and helps us see ways to better our lives.
Inspired by Primo Levi’s masterpiece memoir, The Periodic Table, Lowinger has swapped Levi’s literary structure organized by chemicals with the materials of art and architectural conservation.
Lowinger connects with Primo Levi. His Holocaust survival story is the stuff of “martyrs and saints,” as noted in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_qD.... Levi was a chemist from Italy. Drawn to his extraordinary story and powerful writing, her memoir opens with his belief: “Understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves.”
Lowinger’s tale brings a wealth of historical details to the narrative: Cuba’s revolutionary forces; America’s foreign policies; Los Angeles and Haiti earthquakes; black history riots in the poor Watts neighborhood of southern Los Angeles, also the site of her largest outdoor project, Watts Towers; environmental degradation of ancient Greek and Roman ruins along Israel’s coast. The list goes on and on.
Marble, the first chapter, introduces us to the conservator as “an expert cleaner of marble” like her mother. Marble, a polished stone associated with “wealth and elegance,” is strikingly out-of-sync with the Cuban orphanage that punished her unruly mother by having to clean food off of marble tabletops that wasn’t easy. Now 91, her mother is still feisty but more loving. Still, the indelible mark she left on someone she claimed to love left her daughter feeling: “Never being enough or always being too much.”
Cuba looms large – emotionally, architecturally, aesthetically, politically. Once a vibrant place of Cubist, Surrealist, and Fauvist art styles, its architecture had remained intact for half a century. Fast forward thirty years when the author first returns to Cuba, it has become “dense with very damaged concrete buildings” due to erosion from the salty environment. “There was so much contradiction here. So much wreckage mixed with so much beauty” is a statement about Cuba’s decaying structures as well as her troubled marriage at this stage of her life.
The Bronze chapter, like everything else, means more than the heavy metal’s use in the art world. Technology turned this corrosive material into important commercial uses, “reverting” back to something less “reactive.” Then hitting us with: “Don’t we all wish to revert to states of being that are calmer? To be less reactive to our surroundings and circumstances?”
In asking what’s “needed to be lost before we could be found?” Lowinger asks us to reflect on our unprecedented times.
October 5, 2023
I absolutely loved Dwell Time-one of the best memoirs I have read so far in 2023. The story of Rosa and her family that starts with her grandfather immigrating to Cuba and then her own family immigrating from Cuba to Miami. Her mother who had a terrible childhood lashes her anger out at Rosa in ways that were extremely upsetting to me as a reader. But I see how her anger was really her way of showing love to her daughter. Rosa becomes a art conservator and I must say I loved reading about how art is conserved and fixed. I learned so much about the many different techniques and items that are restored and the amount of love that goes into this type of work. Rosa’s fractured relationship with her mother is somewhat like her job of fixing broken pieces of art. She becomes immersed in her family history and is able to travel back to Cuba numerous times to help restore some beautiful pieces of artwork. The book spans from her grandparents to during the pandemic of 2020 when she started this book and gives a great insight of how life in Cuba was like before the regime of Fidel Castro and just how glamorous life was like for those living there in the 1940s-50s and how neighbors would spy on each other and the depths that families would go to seek freedom in another country.
February 12, 2024
The first two thirds of the book was excellent. The deeply thought out corollaries between materials repair and emotional restoration, the parallels and her selection of particular representative materials was careful and moving. The last part of the book was still interesting as far as being a memoir. But her lines drawn to work materials were not particularly convincing or strong. Her prose also seemed somewhat indulgent, both in negative and positive ways, laced with both bitter self-recriminations and glamorous but hollow paths chosen. Learning about Cuba was also an aspect of reading Dwell Time that was valuable.
April 26, 2024
"How do damaged items become whole again? How much destruction is necessary in a cycle of true repair?"
I finished this beautiful yet difficult book in all of two days during Pesach. It was of great interest to me as my own work is closely aligned with the art world, especially conservation and preservation, and I was drawn to Lowinger's careful study of the varied meanings embedded in artistic and architectural materials and how she views her own life and quest for repair through the lens of materiality.
What I had thought was a story about intergenerational trauma from the Holocaust was more about the trauma of Cuban history, and I learned a lot about this world (despite having been raised in Florida myself) through Lowinger's memoir. But moreover, it's a story of Lowinger's relationship with her parents, and their struggles with class, mobility, abuse, and life in a new country (another line that really resonated with me: "Poverty has a way of gouging out all sense of moderation"). And overall, I saw her journey as a how-to process of doing the messy work of seeing the deep complexities of people, and humanity, and holding multiple truths about love and pain at the same time.
Two small quibbles, 1) I had hoped that Lowinger would talk more about the Jewish concept of teshuvah, so central to the idea of repair that it clearly resonated throughout her book, yet was oddly not discussed. Teshuvah also means "return," which would have had a special resonance with Lowinger's ultimate return to Cuba as well. And 2), she includes a number of quotations from other writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Primo Levi, and Elizabeth Spelman, but their works are not included in the bibliography. I would have liked to know where to find these quotes.
Overall, a beautiful and vulnerable memoir and I'm so glad it exists in the world.
I finished this beautiful yet difficult book in all of two days during Pesach. It was of great interest to me as my own work is closely aligned with the art world, especially conservation and preservation, and I was drawn to Lowinger's careful study of the varied meanings embedded in artistic and architectural materials and how she views her own life and quest for repair through the lens of materiality.
What I had thought was a story about intergenerational trauma from the Holocaust was more about the trauma of Cuban history, and I learned a lot about this world (despite having been raised in Florida myself) through Lowinger's memoir. But moreover, it's a story of Lowinger's relationship with her parents, and their struggles with class, mobility, abuse, and life in a new country (another line that really resonated with me: "Poverty has a way of gouging out all sense of moderation"). And overall, I saw her journey as a how-to process of doing the messy work of seeing the deep complexities of people, and humanity, and holding multiple truths about love and pain at the same time.
Two small quibbles, 1) I had hoped that Lowinger would talk more about the Jewish concept of teshuvah, so central to the idea of repair that it clearly resonated throughout her book, yet was oddly not discussed. Teshuvah also means "return," which would have had a special resonance with Lowinger's ultimate return to Cuba as well. And 2), she includes a number of quotations from other writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Primo Levi, and Elizabeth Spelman, but their works are not included in the bibliography. I would have liked to know where to find these quotes.
Overall, a beautiful and vulnerable memoir and I'm so glad it exists in the world.
December 20, 2023
Rosa Lowinger's Dwell Time is an engaging memoir that deftly does several things all at once: 1) tells a fascinating story about a Jewish Cuban family, 2) shares a history of a period that's overlooked or not well-known, 3) effectively communicates the techniques of art preservation and restoration, 4) reflects on the complicated family relationships and struggles of parenting, and 5) does all the above in easy-to-read prose. There's a momentum to Lowinger's writing that keeps you turning the pages--or listening, if you did the audiobook like I did. Even though I thought I knew more than a little about Cuba's history, I found myself continuing to learn more and more as I went. Each chapter is built around a different medium--marble, concrete, ceramic, mosaic, plastic, etc--all things that Lowinger handles and repairs professionally. As an art-lover, I had little insight into the profession of restoration and preservation and loved how Lowinger balanced that information as a metaphor for the rest of the story--one of repairing relationships and coping with intergenerational trauma. I'll also add, the audiobook is excellent. Not everyone is a gifted reader, even of their own writing, but Lowinger is a joy to listen to.
May 7, 2023
The Cuban child of refugee immigrants, Lowinger sets the scene for this extraordinary book by telling of her twice-exiled family’s American rebirth. Her family dynamics were extremely challenging to overcome. But her journey into the world of art conservation is the real story here, and her voice in telling it is supremely easy to listen to. At times hilarious, at times quixotic, the drama of her search for her own personal “restoration” is completely engrossing. The evolution of the field of conservation itself fuels the plot, with a cast of characters I found fascinating. Framed in Lowinger’s struggle for personal survival, self-realization, and regeneration, this is also a study in materials. I loved how the very subjects of art conservation would take center stage; from sensitive marble and ubiquitous concrete, to wood, steel and organic coatings. Lowinger’s descriptions of her work with artifacts and precious objects connected to the characters and provided a context for the trajectory of the tale. A wonderful mix of a personal journey and a window into a unique and fascinating world. Highly recommend!
October 24, 2023
Have you read a memoir recently?✨
I am always drawn towards memoirs, I used to only read them about famous people, wanting to know more about their lives. After reading The Glass Castle, I realized everyone has a unique story and some are so fascinating that put them down on paper.
Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair by Rosa Lowinger, instantly had my attention. I could tell by the title, this was a memoir I would want to read. Rosa is deeply honest about her life and her family’s history, she doesn’t try to paint herself as the heroine, but is truthful about her positive and negative sides. Rosa’s family escaped Hungary during the Holocaust and then immigrated to Miami, where Rosa grew up. These extremes caused a lot of generational pain, and this was passed down to Rosa. I loved reading about her healing, while restoring art, the two things tied together beautifully.
If you like memoirs, you’re not going to want to miss this one!
Thank you @otrpr for this gifted copy!
Dwell Time will be released on 10/10/23! You can find this now on our Amazon storefront!🧜🏼♀️🌺
I am always drawn towards memoirs, I used to only read them about famous people, wanting to know more about their lives. After reading The Glass Castle, I realized everyone has a unique story and some are so fascinating that put them down on paper.
Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair by Rosa Lowinger, instantly had my attention. I could tell by the title, this was a memoir I would want to read. Rosa is deeply honest about her life and her family’s history, she doesn’t try to paint herself as the heroine, but is truthful about her positive and negative sides. Rosa’s family escaped Hungary during the Holocaust and then immigrated to Miami, where Rosa grew up. These extremes caused a lot of generational pain, and this was passed down to Rosa. I loved reading about her healing, while restoring art, the two things tied together beautifully.
If you like memoirs, you’re not going to want to miss this one!
Thank you @otrpr for this gifted copy!
Dwell Time will be released on 10/10/23! You can find this now on our Amazon storefront!🧜🏼♀️🌺
October 6, 2024
This would have been a 5-star review if not for all the Spanish words that were misspelled. I found it rather shocking that maybe 20-30 typos got past all the edits and revisions.
Hopefully, new editions will be corrected.
This book is brilliant. I'm big on book structure. When I wrote my own self-help book, the structure was what I found most daunting. I was blown away by Lowinger's table of contents, and the first page. She masterfully combines her expertise as an art conservator with her family history. I recently stopped reading a highly acclaimed non-fiction book because there was no order and the chapters and content were willy-nilly. Lowinger excels in this area. Especially given the themes seem hard to combine. Her connecting art and life are not just similes. They are thought-starters and thought-provoking which is why I think it would be a great book club pick.
Hopefully, new editions will be corrected.
This book is brilliant. I'm big on book structure. When I wrote my own self-help book, the structure was what I found most daunting. I was blown away by Lowinger's table of contents, and the first page. She masterfully combines her expertise as an art conservator with her family history. I recently stopped reading a highly acclaimed non-fiction book because there was no order and the chapters and content were willy-nilly. Lowinger excels in this area. Especially given the themes seem hard to combine. Her connecting art and life are not just similes. They are thought-starters and thought-provoking which is why I think it would be a great book club pick.
May 3, 2024
Rosa Lowinger is an art conservator who tells her family's story of exile from Hungary to Cuba and then Miami in chapters based on the materials she works with: Marble, Limestone, Bronze, Ceramics, Concrete, Silver, and more. While she's not a particularly likeable protagonist, she deals with generational trauma, exile and immigration, divorce, infertility, motherhood, small business ownership, the pandemic, natural disasters, and the challenges of caring for aging parents with raw emotion, honesty, and insight. Plus learning about her conservation work all over the world was absolutely fascinating. And, she's an excellent audiobook narrator as well - voicing her mother perfectly! As Kirkus remarked: "A masterful revelation about life and art imitating each other in maintenance and repair."
January 4, 2025
Fascinating history of Eastern European Jews who came tongue then to the United States. Equally interesting the techniques of preservation and restoration of art and architecture. On a trip to France, walking through a cathedral I looked at everything in terms of the restoration and preservation all the artifacts needed - the book really permeated my thinking in that regard.
Still, I didn’t care much for the author as a person - she is narcissistic and borderline - understandable considering her family background of exile and psychological pathology. (Boy her mother sounds like a doozy). Some of her personal stuff was annoying, some uninteresting.
But-given the insight re: life in Cuba especially the a Jewish community-and the author’s expertise on restoration etc happy to have read it.
Still, I didn’t care much for the author as a person - she is narcissistic and borderline - understandable considering her family background of exile and psychological pathology. (Boy her mother sounds like a doozy). Some of her personal stuff was annoying, some uninteresting.
But-given the insight re: life in Cuba especially the a Jewish community-and the author’s expertise on restoration etc happy to have read it.
June 3, 2023
This is a beautiful and loving memoir of a young child, herself an immigrant, bearing the brunt of her parents trauma, grief and lost dreams. The author is able to look back on her life, often times a life filled with her parents grief turned outward in bursts of anger, abuse and neglect towards her. Using the tools of her trade, the materials she works with and the ability to “restore” abused and neglected artifacts she weaves a narrative of destruction and repair, not unlike her life. As a psychotherapist clients often ask me how they can forget their trauma from childhood. I tell them that they cannot, the way to move forward is to grieve the past. Ms. Lowinger grieves her past as she reflects on her life in this unsparing memoir and in the end finds repair.
May 10, 2024
When I first started reading this memoir, I was intrigued by the fact that the author was Jewish and born in Cuba. Her grandfather only made it to Cuba in his attempt to get to the US from Europe. I loved the information she presented about Cuba. I loved how she wove information about art restoration into her family and personal history. She presented many insights into human nature and interpersonal relationships. I generally find memoirs to be slow reading, however I was interested in this one. 4.5
March 3, 2025
I wouldn't have picked up this book, but my grandmother-in-law gave it to me and I enjoyed it very much. The author is an art conservator and a surprisingly good writer, since it's not her main occupation. She ties together themes of decay, vandalism, and repair from her work and life. I learned interesting things about Cuban history and art conservation. I also enjoyed her candid documentation of her family history, immigration tales, family dynamics, childhood trauma, and aging parents. She pulls everything together very nicely, in a natural way.
November 7, 2023
This was such a compelling memoir shared through the lens of the author's expertise as a conservationist. I appreciated how tenderly and genuinely she shared the multigenerational story of her family's exile, immigration, challenges and fractured but unbreakable bonds. I loved hearing the details of how different materials are analyzed, repaired and fortified interwoven between stories of her upbringing, family relationships, and travels.
August 10, 2024
I really loved the concepts that are carried through in the story. How she relates her job as a conservator, saving sculpture, to the human bonds that need healing throughout her life. She was very brave in how honest she was, not always showing herself in the best light. I have special affinity for her work as a docent myself so it's hard for me to gauge how others might feel about it, whether it would be boring to them or not. I'll refer you to some other more complete reviews here that might make it easier for you to decide.
January 16, 2024
A beautiful memoir of three generations of a family living in Cuba (and then in the US) interwoven with fascinating information about art conservation. These are two topics I know nothing about, yet found the captivating writing and the interesting story compelling. I was hooked from the beginning and loved listening to the whole book.
June 23, 2023
This book was remarkable and riveting. I loved the correlation of repair and healing in conservation and the author’s experiences. I felt it was an extremely brave and creative work. I couldn’t put it down. Highly recommend!
October 17, 2023
Dwell Time is a gorgeous and penetrating mosaic of brokenness and repair, exile and return. Rosa Lowinger tells her personal story with unflinching honesty and writes about her profession of art conservation in riveting detail. Highly original and highly recommended!
February 9, 2024
I really enjoyed this memoir and learning about conservation through the vast experiences of the author. As well as restoring buildings and art works, she seeks to repair her broken relationships with her parents.
March 3, 2024
It’s been a long time since a novel sucked me in to an another place and time like Dwell Time. The reflection, compassion, forgiveness of self and others was the repair we need in this time of division.
May 2, 2024
Not for everyone but a beautiful written memoir that uses details of art conservation and damage repair as metaphors to tell stories of the authors family relationships and their journey from Eastern Europe to Cuba to the US.
March 6, 2025
I was intrigued to read a book about Cuban Jewish immigrants as it’s a subject I didn’t know much about. The author weaves an analogy between her work as a conservationist with reflections about her family history. It was an interesting book, but some of her conclusions didn’t resonate with me.
March 16, 2025
The conservation parts of this were most interesting to me, along with the early family history parts, but it bent very memoir for much of the book. (Which is what it is, and that's fine, just not where most of my interest was)
April 23, 2023
Dwell Time is a great read! Rosa incorporates her career as an art conservator as she tells the story of her Cuban Jewish family’s history as exiles from Hungary during the Holocaust then later from Cuba during its revolution.
I’ve always been fascinated by Rosa’s very successful art conservation business. Juxtaposed to stories of family members rebuilding their lives (sometimes with grace and sometimes with, well, less than grace) is Rosa’s history of entering art conservation and building a well respected business with projects everywhere. I love the vignettes describing the process of restoring different mediums.
While the subject matter sounds intense, this is a very readable book. I highly recommend it.
I’ve always been fascinated by Rosa’s very successful art conservation business. Juxtaposed to stories of family members rebuilding their lives (sometimes with grace and sometimes with, well, less than grace) is Rosa’s history of entering art conservation and building a well respected business with projects everywhere. I love the vignettes describing the process of restoring different mediums.
While the subject matter sounds intense, this is a very readable book. I highly recommend it.
November 18, 2023
I was attracted to this book because of the art history/conservation aspect. What a surprise to find so many other layers. I learned a lot from this book.
Read
April 19, 2024fair
August 5, 2024
Part memoir, part art history. I loved how candid Lowinger was.
August 10, 2023
A Profound Exploration of Repair and Redemption - A Must-Read!
DWELL TIME by Rosa Lowinger is an exceptional memoir that deserves nothing less than a resounding five stars. Lowinger's artful storytelling skillfully intertwines her captivating personal narrative with the intricate world of art and architectural conservation. From the first page to the last, this book engages readers on multiple levels, delivering a profoundly moving experience that lingers long after the final sentence.
In this masterfully crafted memoir, Lowinger elegantly presents her unique perspective as one of the few prominent Latinas in the field of conservation. She takes us on an emotional journey through her own history, revealing the intergenerational trauma that her Cuban Jewish family endured due to the ravages of the Cuban revolution and the shadows of the Holocaust. These familial wounds cast a heavy cloud over her early years in Miami, creating a poignant backdrop against which her story unfolds.
What truly sets DWELL TIME apart is the way Lowinger seamlessly weaves together her personal journey with the world of art restoration. The metaphor she draws between the repair of physical objects and the healing of lives and relationships is nothing short of brilliant. The idea that "damage is a prelude to redemption," which she embraces with a quasi-Talmudic perspective, serves as a powerful guiding principle throughout her narrative.
Structured around the materials she handles in her conservation work, the memoir takes readers on a thought-provoking exploration of her experiences. From Marble to Silver, Concrete to Glass, each chapter delves into the intricacies of her craft while simultaneously delving into the layers of her own identity as a Cuban Jewish immigrant, an American, and a Latinx woman. This parallel structure, reminiscent of Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table," adds a rich layer of depth and resonance to the book.
Lowinger's unwavering honesty shines through her introspective reflections on both her personal and professional relationships. Her dedication to becoming the best practitioner while confronting her own challenges is both inspiring and humbling. Through her eyes, readers gain a new perspective on the potential for healing and repair, both in the material world and within oneself.
As a reader, I was deeply moved by Lowinger's powerful journey from her exile's nostalgia in Miami to her diverse professional experiences across the globe. Her return to Havana, the city of her origins, marked the beginning of a remarkable path towards family repair and personal healing. This transformation, deeply rooted in her understanding of the origins of damage, mirrors the meticulous process of restoration she applies to art and architecture.
In conclusion, DWELL TIME is a tour de force that offers readers an extraordinary lens through which to view the convergence of material and personal repair. Rosa Lowinger's evocative storytelling, coupled with her profound insights, creates an unforgettable reading experience. This memoir will forever change the way you perceive the objects and places you cherish, as well as how you approach damage and loss in your own life. I wholeheartedly recommend DWELL TIME to anyone seeking a captivating narrative that explores the interconnectedness of art, identity, and healing.
DWELL TIME by Rosa Lowinger is an exceptional memoir that deserves nothing less than a resounding five stars. Lowinger's artful storytelling skillfully intertwines her captivating personal narrative with the intricate world of art and architectural conservation. From the first page to the last, this book engages readers on multiple levels, delivering a profoundly moving experience that lingers long after the final sentence.
In this masterfully crafted memoir, Lowinger elegantly presents her unique perspective as one of the few prominent Latinas in the field of conservation. She takes us on an emotional journey through her own history, revealing the intergenerational trauma that her Cuban Jewish family endured due to the ravages of the Cuban revolution and the shadows of the Holocaust. These familial wounds cast a heavy cloud over her early years in Miami, creating a poignant backdrop against which her story unfolds.
What truly sets DWELL TIME apart is the way Lowinger seamlessly weaves together her personal journey with the world of art restoration. The metaphor she draws between the repair of physical objects and the healing of lives and relationships is nothing short of brilliant. The idea that "damage is a prelude to redemption," which she embraces with a quasi-Talmudic perspective, serves as a powerful guiding principle throughout her narrative.
Structured around the materials she handles in her conservation work, the memoir takes readers on a thought-provoking exploration of her experiences. From Marble to Silver, Concrete to Glass, each chapter delves into the intricacies of her craft while simultaneously delving into the layers of her own identity as a Cuban Jewish immigrant, an American, and a Latinx woman. This parallel structure, reminiscent of Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table," adds a rich layer of depth and resonance to the book.
Lowinger's unwavering honesty shines through her introspective reflections on both her personal and professional relationships. Her dedication to becoming the best practitioner while confronting her own challenges is both inspiring and humbling. Through her eyes, readers gain a new perspective on the potential for healing and repair, both in the material world and within oneself.
As a reader, I was deeply moved by Lowinger's powerful journey from her exile's nostalgia in Miami to her diverse professional experiences across the globe. Her return to Havana, the city of her origins, marked the beginning of a remarkable path towards family repair and personal healing. This transformation, deeply rooted in her understanding of the origins of damage, mirrors the meticulous process of restoration she applies to art and architecture.
In conclusion, DWELL TIME is a tour de force that offers readers an extraordinary lens through which to view the convergence of material and personal repair. Rosa Lowinger's evocative storytelling, coupled with her profound insights, creates an unforgettable reading experience. This memoir will forever change the way you perceive the objects and places you cherish, as well as how you approach damage and loss in your own life. I wholeheartedly recommend DWELL TIME to anyone seeking a captivating narrative that explores the interconnectedness of art, identity, and healing.
February 11, 2024
Dwell Time is beautifully crafted and deeply moving. Lowinger, a leading art conservator, fearlessly explores the multigenerational trauma of her family’s Cuban-Jewish heritage through the soulful lens of her profession’s unique understanding of repair. “What a moving, transcendent idea,” she writes, explaining that a conservationist’s job is to repair an artwork but not “change it permanently” and to always be “beholden to the object.” When Lowinger applies this principle of restoration to the often difficult, sometimes abusive experiences of her childhood and family history, the poetry that runs throughout this original memoir shines. A profoundly engaging read I couldn’t put down. Dwell Time is as poetic a memoir as they come.
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