Each week the Brooklyn Museum Summer Interns participate in full-day educational programs that explore the roles of museums through on-site visits and field trips to other institutions around the city. Look out for our weekly posts where we’ll share what we’re doing and learning in the program.
Week 8: The BKM interns gathered in the Glass Pavilion on our third to last Tuesday of the summer. The morning was cooler than any in recent memory, a change many interns celebrated in sweatpants and long-sleeves (also worn in observation of our day away from the office). We split from there to continue working our group presentations. We will share our completed projects, in which we will propose interventions for the Cane Acres Plantation house on the museum’s fourth floor, in two weeks.
We reconvened in the boardroom, whose walls, I’m sure, have never enclosed so many t-shirts. There we discussed the value of mentorship and the steps we, as young actors tip-toeing into the working world, can take to build constructive relationships with mentors we admire.
We then migrated to the Arts of Asia to meet Joan Cummins, the Lisa and Bernard Selz Senior Curator of Asian Art. Joan, a former BKM intern herself (!!), walked us through the spaces that will come to hold the Museum’s Indian, Chinese, and Japanese art collections, as well as the already open Arts of Korea. She spoke to the nuanced challenges of her role, which include curating antiquities for a modern audience and grappling with unresolved provenance. Also funding. Joan shared how her academic training in art history and her personal experience prepared her for her position, the likes of which today might require formal knowledge of museum studies and curatorial theory.
Per tradition, we ran overtime with questions. After concluding with Joan, we broke for lunch. I felt somewhat personally duped that I could not escape the viscous air-conditioning of the galleries in the courtyard. Food helped me, so did conversation with my fellow interns who never cease to amaze me with their intelligence and wit.
After lunch we gathered outside One: Titus Kaphar and Rembrandt to Picasso: Five Centuries of European Works on Paper to hear from Lance Singletary, Director of Exhibition Design, who has been at the Museum for 15 years. An interest in how interior design and architecture control individuals’ psychological experiences in covert ways has rented out space in my mind this summer, so I was particularly excited about this conversation. Lance guided us through the space, explaining the process of exhibition design and the various actors involved. He shed light on the selection of wall colors and the sequences in which pieces hang.
We followed up our chat with Lance by meeting three of the Museum’s art handlers– Filippo Gentile, Senior Art Handler/Supervisor Museum Maintainer, Aisha De Avila-Shin and Richard Fett, both Art Handlers and Assistant Museum Maintainers. Filippo identified working intimately with art as the ever-rewarding joy of his job. In Eric N. Mack’s Lemme walk across the room, he discussed helping living artists achieve their vision, and upstairs in Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion, he and Aisha divulged some industry secrets related to securing hats onto mannequin heads.
We then traveled to the auditorium (coldest location of the day) for a conversation with Keonna Hendrick, School Programs Manager and Michael Reback, Senior Museum Instructor/Teacher Services coordinator. We discussed the fundamental role of the Museums' Education and Public Programs departments in its function as a responsive body (invoking to our summer’s framing question: “What is the responsive museum?”). We shared our visions for the democratization of museum access, which to us seems to hinge on improved representation within those in power.
This conversation spilled into our closing reflection, which, characteristically, ran late. Before clocking out for the day, we traded poem, song, artist, and book recommendations. Homework for next week.
