CEO Michael Silver with the Getty Research Institute's Willem de Kooning conservation in progress

American Elements supports a wide range of museums, galleries, and cultural institutions by supplying the highest quality chemicals and advanced materials for conservation and curation. Our catalog of products includes laboratory grade chemicals for analysis technologies such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), spectroscopy, FTIR microspectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy, pigments and paints, pH balancers, absorbants, corrosion inhibitors, and other materials used in the production and conservation of artwork and historical artifacts. We also supply raw fine art materials to individual artists and studios such as metal or alloy parts, glass colorants, and others.

CEO Michael Silver is an active philanthropist in the arts and a trustee of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Sarara Initiative in Northern Kenya, and serves on the councils of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in Malibu. Mr. Silver has underwritten artists in residence at the UCLA Hammer Museum and made in-kind donations of artwork to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC and sponsors “Science as Art,” a competition during the Materials Research Society’s annual meeting spotlighting the ability of technical images to transcend their functional use to become aesthetic objects of art in their own right.