BKM Intern Success Story: Kinaya Hassane
When did you intern at the Museum and what was your role? I interned at the Museum during the summer of 2019 in the American Art Department. For the duration of the internship, I supported Assistant Curator of American Art Margarita Karasoulas by completing various research projects. Some of these projects included researching previous exhibitions of American art at the Museum, which involved me going to the archives. Others involved me researching individual works and artists in the collection. I also assisted with day-to-day tasks like responding to public inquiries into the collection.
After you left your internship at the Brooklyn Museum you received a full time fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia, a non- profit research library concentrating on American society and culture from the 17th and 19th centuries. In what ways did your internship at the Brooklyn Museum prepare you for that internship? I was brought on as a curatorial fellow at the Library Company to assist the curators in the Prints and Photographs Department with researching and conceptualizing their upcoming exhibition, Imperfect History. I’ve found that the projects I did at the Brooklyn Museum were incredibly relevant to the work I’m doing now. The goal of Imperfect History is to critically examine the almost 300 year history of collecting graphic materials at the Library Company and how the institution's collecting practices resulted in the misrepresentation and exclusion of racial minorities, women, and other marginalized people. The internship at the Brooklyn Museum allowed me to think deeply about the relationship between institutions, their collecting histories, and minority groups. That experience has been very useful in my work at the Library Company, which is grappling with many of the same issues.
Where do you want to go from there? My ultimate goal is to pursue a PhD in art history, specializing in American art or art of the African Diaspora. I’d also like to continue down the curatorial path. I think there’s so much work curators and other museum professionals can do to adequately acknowledge the contributions Black people have made to the art historical canon (as artists, subjects, and patrons) and I want to continue to be a part of those efforts.
What was the most memorable moment of your internship? Some of my most memorable experiences included getting to go into storage to see all these wonderful works of art that are tucked away and rarely on view. Getting be in such close proximity to works by artists whom I admire so much reminded me of why I was drawn to art history in the first place.
What is one piece of art that you enjoyed visiting during your time at the museum and what about it inspires you? I really loved visiting Lois Mailou Jones’s Dans Un Cafe a Paris (Lee Whipper). I really admire the work for its aesthetic qualities, but I also love it because it’s among the few historic works by an African American woman in the Museum’s collection. It therefore plays an important role in contextualizing the centuries-long tradition of art making by African Americans, which often gets overlooked in contemporary conversations about Black art.
What advice can you give to someone interested in interning at the Brooklyn Museum? My biggest piece of advice would be to treat this internship (or any internship in the arts for that matter) as a learning opportunity. That might sound pretty obvious, but I think it’s easy to get really absorbed by your day-to-day assignments. Definitely stay on top of your projects, but don’t be afraid to use your time as an intern to branch out and talk to people to learn how they got to where they are now. As a first-generation student, those conversations have been critical in helping me think about my own career path.
Posted by Erika Lively
