The Art Conservation Department at Buffalo State College opened in 1970 as the Cooperstown Graduate Program in the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, affiliated with the State University of New York College at Oneonta and with the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown. Since its founding, the department has offered a Master of Arts degree and Certificate of Advanced Study in Art Conservation following a three year program of study. In 1983, the program transferred to Buffalo State College, and relocated to the campus in 1987. The department today occupies a superb modern facility in Rockwell Hall, expressly designed to support conservation teaching and research.

The Rockwell Hall suite includes well-equipped workshops, studios, and laboratories for each conservation specialty, as well as for state-of-the-art instruction in technical examination and documentation and conservation science. Particularly noteworthy are the department’s radiographic facility and digital imaging lab, its analytical instrumentation, its collection of historic and modern tools, and its study collections of pigments and other historic materials used by artists and craftsmen. The department has its own library in Bacon Hall that is supplemented by Buffalo State College’s Butler Library.

The college's city campus is located directly across the street from the renowned Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It is a brief walk to the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, which displays historical collections in a 1901 Pan American Exposition building, and a short drive to the Buffalo Museum of Science, with its outstanding ethnographic, archaeological, and natural history collections. The Burchfield-Penney Art Center, which focuses on Charles Burchfield and contemporary regional artists, is in Rockwell Hall, directly above the Art Conservation Department. The many museums and other cultural attractions of western New York and southern Ontario, especially those of Rochester and Toronto, are within easy driving distance.