Let's get it started! (Ha!)

Hello Hello! You all probably know me in some form or sense, but I’ll start this off by introducing myself anyways. My name is Megan Police and I’m 23 years old turning 24 in July. I have my BA in Art History and French from UNT and am currently in UNT’s Art Education Masters program that focuses on Museum Education. I’m the one with bright blue hair for anyone wondering.

My internship this summer is at the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art in Dallas, I’ll also be doing this Internship jointly with Christianna Reyes!! Whoop Whoop! We can proudly say that we are the MADI’s first Interns so this should be an interesting and exciting adventure for everyone involved.

Personally, I am a little apprehensive but mostly excited for this summer internship, just because I’m not sure how I expect this to go. I’ve previously spent a semester with the education department at the DMA but compared to that the MADI is much smaller both in staff and in physical building size. So it’ll be a completely different experience for me and I’m trying my best to go in with zero expectations and just take each day at the MADI as it comes. I think an important thing to note about this internship is that it is not just with education. Because it’s such a small staff we’ll be dipping our toes in lots of different aspects of an art museum, which I think is going to be a very unique and exciting experience.

We’ve completed our first three days at the MADI and the majority of our time so far has been spent gathering and formatting information to write both grants and grants requests, which are things I had never done before so I’m thankful for the experience. (Grants no longer seem so daunting to me now!) We also got to spend some time familiarizing ourselves with the collection that’s both currently on display and in their small storage spaces placed throughout the galleries. During this, we found a few art pieces that are in need of restoration so Christianna and I have both been put in charge of contacting restoration teams at museums in the surround Dallas area to try to lead a restoration project of some sort. Again this is something neither of us has dealt with before. (Wish us luck!)

One of the main things I want to push for and accomplish during my time here is re-formatting all of the wall labels at this museum so that any basic information currently missing can be fitted in and I would like to create a uniformity of font and size across all the labels. This along with helping Christianna to come up with and facilitate the program she wants to do, and to update their social media and improve upon their community outreach. 

We have a lot on our plates for this internship, but because we have each other and are working jointly on all of these projects I think it will be fun and go pretty darn smooth.

First week at the MADI!!

Hello Everyone! I’m Christianna Reyes, an Art Education Master’s student who is also getting the certificate in Museum Education. This week I have started my internship at the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art along with Megan Police, another Art Education Master’s student. For the last 2 years I have been both an intern and adjunct educator at the Dallas Museum of Art in the Center for Creative Connections, so being at the MADI will give me experience in a small scale museum. Because I am so used to being at the DMA, an intial challenge I could see is that I have to get used to this new space, but so far it has been very interesting and I've had no problem at all. Understanding how this museum is run and meeting all of the staff that make it possible is the first thing I would like to accomplish. 

I am also excited to be at the MADI because I will get to create and help facilitate a sensory program for the main gallery space. After meeting with the director of the MADI, I learned that school groups frequently visit, so I think this will be the target audience for my program. However, I would love to make it available to all museum visitors. I have previously worked with sensory programming at the DMA, but this will be my first time creating a program from scratch and getting to facilitate it myself. My overall goal for the summer is to successfully create a program that is beneficial to visitor experience. 

So far Megan and I have already done a lot over the last three days. We have helped finish up a grant proposal for an upcoming event at the MADI and in the process got to learn about the history of the museum as well as those who help run it. We also got to photograph some of the museum’s permanent collection for the grant which was pretty fun too!!

Our next day is Saturday where the staff will show us how tours are conducted. Then next week we learn more about the process of restoring one of the pieces in the museum’s collection!

It looks like we will be doing a little bit of everything at the MADI, so I am super excited to see what happens over the summer!

The Beginning:

Who We Are and Why We are Writing

We are unabashed lovers of museums and seek to better understand our place in them.

As part of a  Certificate in Art Museum Education at the University of North Texas, we are all required to participate in an internship at an art institution, which is the best way to figure out how and where we belong in such an institution.  An element of this internship is that we document our experiences in some way and, as a group (we are seven strong in number), we have decided to keep a blog. 

We will each write an initial post and a final post of the same theme; the first before we begin our internships and the last after we've completed them.  The first post that we each write will be about what we hope to get out of our internship experiences this summer and beyond.  What hopes and dreams, expectations and wishes lay ahead of us based on what we already know about internships, about ourselves, and about museums?  What do we suspect might surprise us, challenge us, and make us better in this experience?

Our final post will be about what we have learned through these internships, what personal experiences and meanings we have attached to what we have learned, and how we plan to apply what we have learned to our lives, personally and professionally.  We will write about what we wished we had known before we started our internships and what kind of advice we will give to students who come after us.  We will discuss what transformed us, what scared us, what we were proud of ourselves for.  

The in-between posts, of which there will be two from each of us, are going to be splatters of experience, on whatever topic from our internship that inspires us at the moment of writing.  We want this blog to be a sort of support group, to help us celebrate our accomplishments as interns, to turn to for questions, to use for advice and friendship, and we will do that through commenting on one another's posts. 

We have been told this will be a life-changing experience, in many ways, and that we will learn things about ourselves that we might not understand yet.  Here we go.