Beginnings at the MBA

Hello everyone!

I've actually already started my internship at the Museum of Biblical Arts. My first day was May 8th, so I've been there a few weeks now. So far, I typically work Wednesday-Friday, but I have worked a weekend as well already. I think that will be my typical schedule, but things change all the time so I am well aware I may be called in or asked to come in on a day I otherwise had off. I am chill with that though. I've already been trained for the front desk and spend most of my time there so far. I am the first person people usually see when they come in, when I am scheduled at least. I have also gotten to help clean up a bit after an exhibit was taken down, that was fun. Everyone I work with has been super awesome so far, and I already love them to bits. I'm honestly super glad to be here.

I'm hoping to learn a lot while I am here too, though I think I'll be focused on front desk needs until Scott, the director, gets back from out of town, which should be relatively soon. The Museum of Biblical Arts is a small museum, so Scott has told me that everyone does a bit of everything there. He's told me before that he wants to have me learn how to lead tours, work at least one event, potentially help curate and put up an exhibit, and other stuff. We talked about this once when I got hired and its been a minute so I may have forgotten some of what he said... I've only actually seen and worked with him once so far, which I have been told is incredibly unusual, it's just impossible for him to come in to the museum while being overseas.

The museum itself is really nice, though I feel like I need to study up on religious artifacts... The museum has a whole section dedicated specifically to Jewish art, and I honestly do not know much about Jewish art and artifacts, so I should definitely take some time to look in to it, because I have already had guests come and ask me about a specific thing and it's quite awkward to have to admit you do not know. Overall, the guests are typically very nice though. I am not used to dealing with nice people when working a front desk so.. it is a very welcome change.

Oh, just a by the way, I believe entrance is currently free for UNT students because we currently have an exhibit of maps that are on loan from UNT.

Anywho...

Overall, I am happy to be here and excited to see what is to come!~

My time at the Texas Fashion Collection

Over the course of my time interning at the Texas Fashion Collection, I have started to grasp the way a historian might approach an art object as opposed to a designer/maker/artist. A main component in that realization is understanding that my method of creation as a historian is text. I have been stubborn up until this point in my career and hoped my messages would translate visually through the art chosen, to carry and express my ideas and theories… this is now longer the case. I am grateful for my time at the Texas Fashion Collection for giving me the ability to see how I research and stray away from the object due to my lack of ability to materialize the messages into written text. As a way to practice that, I was able to come up with a process which has helped me to patiently build my thought/concept/idea in a way which does not confuse my reader, but enriches them.

Apart from learning about my personal method of approaching research and learning from the physical object, I have realized that I do not want to make digitizing art collections the primary focus of my art career at this time. I had seriously considered it as a specialization because of my background in graphic design, the orientation I was planning on taking with my thesis project, and my initial beliefs of what digitizing a collection of artifacts would entail. While I am still attracted and find digitizing collections to be very important in a time where the primary interactions with objects people have is through their electronic device, I do not think I am prepared yet to be in a team with specialists because I don’t feel like I have specialized in what my responsibilities in the team are. Based on my experience at the TFC I feel like what I learned as a result of time there was, the importance of the right terminology used to describe and categorize objects, particularly when terms have different meanings and translations attached to them depending on the time they belong to. As a result of my time at the TFC, I have redirected my area of focus within the art museum society to studying and understanding the meanings of the terminologies used to describe and categorize cultural memory. Sometimes understood as the terms which create a “canon” of knowledge, these terms are significantly important to me as a result of my time with a team digitizing a collection because of the way “metadata” are assigned to the digital object as a way to be able to electronically search and retrieve any pertinent information surrounding the object. The role of metadata and digitized collections does not just affect art, but other cultural sectors of society such as linguistics and literature which I learned as part of a Digitizing workshop given I attended during my time at the TFC. A historian in a time of digitization makes sure the objects are digitized in a manner which is most truthful to the weathering of time on the physical object.

End of the Internship

The end of the internship has finally arrived. I am sad to have left events like the Spring Break Art Extravaganza and the Kimbell Family Festival behind because I loved getting to work with children during these events. It felt great to be in such an active role during these events throughout the internship and I wish there were more opportunities like that. The majority of my internship could be summarized with administrative assistant tasks; mailing docent planners, archiving files according to program type, printing materials for education staff members, and stuffing folders for different program participants. I understand the importance of these tasks - they're part of the unsexy reality of running education programs to coordinate with docents, have materials ready for programs, and make sure the audience has all the information they need about the museum's various programs. It felt more like the education staff were giving me the work that they didn't want to do themselves instead of giving me projects that would help me grow as a museum educator.

I wish that I had more opportunities to do things like the vision access project. preparing the tactile graphics and sensory bags, as well as working with the focus group to gather evaluative data. It felt like that was the last real project that I got to work on during the internship and the majority of the work that they called "research" involved vague instructions to find where to purchase materials without giving me a list of approved vendors or gathering information on summer programs with no parameters like age ranges or types of camps (baseball, community centers, ...). I would have hoped that their definition of research would include possible lesson plans, art activities, finding literary sources, or anything along those lines.

One of the programs that I wish I got to work more with this semester would have been the UTA pre-service art educators. I first learned about this multi-visit program when I created the folders for them containing their group information and the overview of the program. Although I was unable to see any of the in-between stages for the program, as I had been assigned other work, I was dying to get an opportunity to see the UTA students demonstrating their program to middle school students. After preparing all the materials for the program, I was assigned to help out with the program and provide any assistance to the UTA students during their teaching demonstration.

While the majority of my help was making sure they had all the materials they needed, I loved the opportunity to watch other art educators in the museum setting. I watched two groups lead discussions about their chosen works of art in the galleries and how it would relate to the art activity planned in the studio. The groups struggled a little bit while leading their gallery discussions but the middle school students were so polite in working with them. It definitely seemed like some UTA students weren't very experienced working with kids as they struggled to direct the projects while some took to it like they'd been doing it for years already. Each group had very different art activities going on and I was able to document them for potential uses in the future.

Additionally, I was able to talk with their professor while the students were teaching to try and learn more about their program. Dr. Amanda Alexander was so friendly and let me grill her extensively about the art education department at UTA. While it seemed like there was a lot of overlap between the degrees at UTA and UNT, there seemed to be more of a focus on hands-on learning at UTA with an increase in service learning experiences and programs like the one at the Kimbell. I think it would be great to try and have a similar program for UNT pre-service art educators to practice before their student teaching, regardless of where the program is held at.

While I enjoyed the time spent at the Kimbell and getting to work with the other interns and the majority of the Education greeters, I felt very unwelcome at the Kimbell and held at an arm's length from the rest of the Education Department. I feel like I was seen more like an "intern" than as "part of the education staff"; that I wasn't part of the team but someone underneath them. I appreciated getting to learn the different roles of the education department and the programs that I was able to participate in, however, this internship has left me wanting more for my next position in the art education field.

What I learned at the Greater Denton Arts Council

When I began my internship in August of 2018,  I was a little apprehensive and envisioned that the internship would help me to improve my communication skills. In many ways, my time at the Greater Denton Arts Council did. I find myself considerably more comfortable lecturing or speaking to a large group of people. Although, I believe the most important lesson I took away from the experience is how to interact with children and handle situations where a student is upset or discouraged. In the first few weeks of the internship, I was rather standoffish and unsure of how I should speak to the kids. Slowly I became more comfortable and learned to sort embrace how my students saw the world. I really tried to follow their chain of thought or discuss any subject that they brought up. That included trying understand their viewpoints on the art we discussed in class and even introducing myself to a host of  stuff animals. Many of which got their own chair and pencils for class.

It really took several moths for me to learn how to handle it when one of the students started crying. Usually one student per class, would get really upset because they were not happy with what they made, they missed their parents, or they had a bad day at school. At first I did not really know how to deal with it. I was rather awkward and my supervisor would have to step in. Eventually I learned that taking the students mind off of it was a good way of getting them to calm down. Last week, I had a student that was really upset that he got paper mache paste on his face and hair during at an activity. The poor guy had tried to put the newspaper strip into the paste too forcefully and it ended up splashing back at him. When he realized that he was covered in paste, he started crying and hid under the water fountain. His father came around at this time and started trying to coax him out from under the fountain. I ended up telling him that paper mache paste is made of flour so if he sat in a warm place he would turn into a loaf of bread. I also told him that if I turned into to bread I would eat myself with jelly and started to pretend to eat my hand. He started laughing and actually came out. When all else fails be ridiculous and distract them.

I also found that it helps to have the students try to list the things that are going well when they get upset. For example, if they unhappy with their artwork I try to have them list what they like about it or I will list what I like about it. It took me a few months to start having them do that. There is one thing that I which I got to learn more about--classroom management. I really struggled with keeping the students on task and I hoping that with my next internship I could learn how to do it effectively.