What I Learned at the Texas Fashion Collection

Generally, I like to attain practical knowledge of things. I believe we can only learn so much from studying without attaining hands-on experience. That is why I have loved my time at the Texas Fashion Collection. I have been able to get hands-on experience with objects and work in an environment that is exactly the type of collection I one day hope to start a career at. I consider myself lucky that this opportunity exists right down the street from me on campus. 

Practical skills are my main takeaway from this position. I have learned how to handle garments correctly, mount them for display, and catalog them in a library database. I now know that you should always lift garments from their strongest points and seams, usually the shoulders. I know that museum-grade mannequins are heavy and that I should wear comfortable shoes and pants on days I know it will be a physical job. And now I know how to make a padded hanger that is best to hang delicate objects on (sounds silly but I quite enjoyed making them.)

Working around the collection and my director has also widened my view and scope of how these objects can be studied. My research at the fashion collection has now progressed into my own personal research for my thesis, and it is a topic I enjoy. I don’t think I would have landed here without working these ideas and topics out at the collection with the garments. I cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed my time at the Texas Fashion Collection, and I look forward to continuing working there in the spring. 

Amon Carter Docent Training Final Update

Hi everyone! 

Wow, what a challenging task it is to articulate all the things I learned from my internship at the Amon Carter in their Docent Training Program. I have a few bullet points I'd like to share from my time there to sum up the most impactful parts of my experience there.

• For several months each week, I practiced my tour stops with my peers, which gave me the invaluable opportunity to practice using museum teaching strategies in the museum galleries instead of in theory or in the studio-based art classes I teach at UNT. During these practice sessions, I also saw other approaches which helped me gather more perspective as a participant of a tour. 
• It goes without saying that I learned so much about the Amon Carter's collection of objects, their educational programmatic offerings, and the values of the institution itself. I also understand how to integrate standard museum docent standards into building my own tour, so much so that I feel knowledgeable enough about docent standards that I could apply the practices/have a well- informed starting point at any museum institution I plan to volunteer with in the future.
• The intangible, informal learning opportunities at the Amon Carter were rich and plentiful! Building relationships with populations outside of academia was so rewarding. I learned not just about the Amon Carter's collection, but about how each area of their educational department collaborates to bring the local community into the museum, whether physically bringing them in, seeking them out, or ensuring they are represented more in the space. After learning about their library, I have recommended so many of my artist friends and students to get out there and utilize this amazing resource! 
• Balancing both the macro and micro when it comes to building a tour. By macro I mean the overall theme and ideas of the tour and by micro I mean the individual objects themselves and all of the various contextual information that supports the tour theme. I am very detail oriented by nature and often get caught up in the process or details of something, so it was a challenge to return to the macro. I began to see it as a gift though, not something confining or overwhelming, but more like something to return to find connections between pieces that seem so unrelated.
• Working behind the scenes, I got a sense of how the Amon Carter is working tirelessly behind the scenes to transform the way their collection is presented to visitors. Operations at a museum work SLOWLY, but they are trying to make things happen as quickly as they can! One example is they do not hang a group of works solely by its chronology, type of work, or artist. The work is displayed thematically and in such a way that viewers can make connections between work made hundreds of years ago and work being made today by contemporary artists. I believe this kind of thoughtful curation and design results in our ability to interpret and contribute to the future of art objects, too.
• The Amon Carter houses a large collection of works depicting Indigenous populations that is romanticized, discriminatory, historically incorrect, or told from the perspective of colonizers. In all education departments, this is addressed to inform the way educators and docents talk about those objects. Things like awareness of language, being sensitive to how a patron may identify, and the white washed lenses for which these works are often viewed through are all things we discussed in my docent training and educational sessions I attended. 

Thank you for reading and wishing you all the best as you continue on in your program or enter the work force! This is my last semester in the Graduate Art Museum Edu Cert program, I have loved getting to know so many of you this semester. Stay in touch, can't wait to see all the awesome work you all do in the future! I hope to see you at the AC when I am volunteering one day :)

Kay

Mary McFadden at the Texas Fashion Collection

At the beginning of my internship, I was informed that I would begin research for an exhibition that would one day be online on Google Arts & Culture. My director had a few ideas she wanted me to explore that were designer-driven exhibits. The designer I ultimately decided upon is Mary McFadden, a womenswear designer from New York that worked from the 1970s to the 1990s. Though I had never heard of her previously, I have since been wrapped up in her designs and the narrative that she constructed around her work and image. 

We have quite a few beautiful pieces from Mary McFadden in the collection. She created very simple, loosely constructed garments that were visually interesting by their textile treatment. McFadden considered herself a fine artist and would construct the canvas (textile) first before creating a design. She is infamous for her “Marii” pleats which were a synthetic version of Mariano Fortuny’s silk pleats that he popularized in the first half of the century. McFadden’s pleats were synthetic and heat set so that they would always keep their shape and be able to easily hang in a closet. 

What is most interesting to me about McFadden is her interest in cultural mining. Each of her collections is thematic based on a different period or culture. Some examples are “Mosaics of Pompeii and Herculaneum,” “American Indian,” and “Ottoman Sultans.” There is a lot to unpack here. Questions of legitimacy, cultural appropriation, influencer culture, and constructed narrative have formed from my research. I have decided to pursue this topic for my thesis research, which is good news because I had previously been floundering and unable to land on a specific idea. There is not much research done on Mary McFadden so I hope to bring something new and interesting to the table. 

Skirt ensemble by Mary McFadden (1970/1979)

 

Cocktail dress by Mary McFadden (1982) 

Favorite Tour Stop Development at the Amon Carter

Hi folks!

On November 11th, I gave the final version of my demonstration tour to my peers, supervisor, and a few museum visitors that joined the tour unexpectedly. I was filled with nerves for many reasons: my peers are a knowledgeable group who know much more about the collection than I do, my memory recall often fails me, and I wasn't sure if the level of participation and interpretation I integrated into my tour would be well received by my audience.

With any institution I am part of, it is really important to me to feel like I can be myself and as if what I bring to the table is valued. Regularly, my peers and supervisor reassured me that my approach to tour stop development was creative and innovative. The approaches I took were ones that I use in the classroom while teaching or when making work: I use thoughtful questioning and embodiment to help people relate to the work in ways that are meaningful to them. In another class I am taking, our focus this semester has been how to weave empathy into building museum programs. Naturally I found I was considering that content when building my tour stops as well. For this blog post, I will focus on one of my stops that I am particularly excited about and got encouraging responses to. Normally, stops are 5 minutes max, but for this one, I spend a bit more time with the work. As a reminder from my first blog post, the title and theme of my tour is Choices: Radicalism in the Everyday.

We enter the mezzanine and I lead the group to Ruth Asawa's suspended sculpture (fig 1 & 2). As a way to get grounded together and feel the strange presence of this sculpture, I invite them to find a single spot on the piece and focus there for up to one minute. What they find is that the sculpture gently, quietly, and slowly sways and turns as it gravitates above its platform. This quality of the work something that is difficult to notice when you aren't truly present with it for an extended amount of time. I invite the group to tell me what they notice about the work. As they tell me what they notice, I paraphrase back to the group to check for clarity. Next, I invite them to imitate the motions the artist used to create the work to give them an idea of how labor intensive these sculptures are. In one hand, pretend you have a dowel, and in the other, straight iron wire. Asawa would wrap, and wrap, and wrap the strands of iron wire around the dowel until she had enough loops to crochet the beginnings of a form like you are seeing here (fig 3). When people talk about her work, they use words like: ghostly, transparent, and gravity. What else comes to mind? The responses are so varied - some are: feminine, gestational, gravity, micro view of a rain drop breaking, macro view of the universe, seed pods, and soft but also hard. From here, I mention the following contextual information:

• Asawa held multiple intersecting identities as a Japanese American woman with immigrant parents. and it's likely she held other identities that we don't about. She faced many obstacles over her lifetime because of others' perception of her.
• In the hysteria following the outbreak of World War II in 1942, she was incarcerated at an internment camp. There she met Disney animators that encouraged her curiosity and interest in art.
• When she attempted to be hired as a student teacher in Milwaukee to complete her college degree, no one would hire her because of residual hostility and discrimination against Japanese Americans following WWII. Not being able to find work influenced her decision to attend an alternative art school in North Carolina where she developed her philosophies and approach to making work.
• It goes without saying that she, like many other non cisgender men, experienced sexism within the male-dominated modern art world.
• At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, she met and married her husband and when determining where they would start a family, they considered locations they believed would be most tolerant of an interracial couple.
• They ended up in San Fransisco and had 6 children. When you google "Ruth Asawa," you will see images of her working on one of these forms within a form and her children are working alongside her (fig. 4) For her, there was no separation between work, life, and art. It was all intertwined and she worked constantly.
• Despite all of the challenges I just laid out, she said: “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am." I relate her words to the theme of my tour (Choices: Radicalism in the Everyday). Despite hardship and adversity, she chose to seek out and/or make a community to be part of. 

As the culmination to this tour stop, I give the opportunity to reflect on this mysterious and mystifying piece by utilizing a loose version of Project Zero's "I used to think....now I think" critical thinking strategy. It prompts participants to reflect on the contextual information given about the artist. Does knowing more about the person who made the work result in a deeper connection with the work? Maybe even result in some level of empathy within them? This tour stop was really well received and I can't wait to see how the next group responds. Thank you for reading about this process, I welcome any feedback! 

Fig 1. Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), Untitled (S.453, Hanging Three-Lobed, Three-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), ca. 1957–59, iron wire. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas,
© The Estate of Ruth Asawa, Courtesy The Estate of Ruth Asawa and David Zwirner.

Fig 3. Imogen Cunningham Ruth Asawa Working on Her Wire Sculpture, Gelatin Silver Print, 1956, Amon Carter Website, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Purchased with funds from the Ruth Carter Stevenson Acquisition Endowment © Imogen Cunningham Trust

Fig 2. Installation view. Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), Untitled (S.453, Hanging Three-Lobed, Three-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), ca. 1957–59, iron wire. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas,
© The Estate of Ruth Asawa, Courtesy The Estate of Ruth Asawa and David Zwirner.

Fig 4. Imogen Cunningham Ruth Asawa at Work with Children, Gelatin Silver Print, 1957, MoMA Website. 
© 2021 Estate of Imogen Cunningham

Sources: 

Chase, M. (2020, April 7). Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa. Chronicle Books, San Fransisco, CA. 

Excerpts from Ruth Asawa of forms and growth, (2016, May 26). Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5eyKMEQizY

Internment, Ruth Asawa, (2020, July 31). Retrieved September 10, 2021, from https://ruthasawa.com/.

La Force, T. (2020, July 20). The Japanese-American Sculptor Who, Despite Persecution Made Her Mark, The New York Times Style Magazine, Retrieved October 17, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/t-magazine/ruth-asawa.html

Snyder, R. (Producer & Director). (1978). Ruth Asawa On Her Forms and Materials [Film]. USA: Master & Masterworks Productions, Inc. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.sfmoma.org/watch/ruth-asawa-on-her-forms-and-materials/

The I Used to Think... Now I Think... thinking routine was developed by Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Retrieved from http://www.pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/I%20Used%20to%20Think%20-%20Now%20I%20Think_1.pdf

Introduction to The Texas Fashion Collection

Hello! I’m Macy Shackelford and I have the amazing opportunity to complete my internship as a Graduate Assistant at the Texas Fashion Collection. I have met with the director, Annette Becker, before and been around the collection but never worked there. My focus of research is on historic costume and fashion, and I am still trying to navigate what that might look like in my professional career. One goal while working at the collection is attaining a full, rounded knowledge of how a fashion collection runs and operates. Though I have an idea, I’m excited to see it play out in front of me as well as learn. Another goal is that I will learn the practical aspects of working with objects: how to handle, mount, and catalog them.

My duties working at the collection will mainly involve cataloging new objects using the University’s library interface as well as assisting in the photo studio with the documentation of said objects that have not been photographed before. Working in the photo studio is a very physical job. We have museum-grade mannequins that are not light. They are diverse though; white, brown, black, thin, and fuller-figured. Since Annette has become director of the collection, one of her goals has been to diversify the holdings as well as how they are presented. One new acquisition we recently photographed falls in line with this goal. It is a women’s silk suit made by Bethany Yellowtail, an indigenous fashion designer. It’s printed with images of repeating elk teeth. Traditionally, real elk teeth would be sewn onto the fabric, but she has updated the design with this digital imagery. I forgot to take a picture of our suit, but I found an example online that I’ve shown below. 

I have felt like a kid in a candy store working at the collection. Rows and rows of gowns, suits, boxes of shoes fill up the main collection warehouse. It has been so fulfilling to peruse the stacks and see something new every day I’m there. With over 18,000 objects it would be impossible to see everything while I’m here, but the idea is exciting. I feel very lucky to be able to get a close look at these objects and then assist the collection with digitizing them so that anyone can also see them. 

Suit by Bethany Yellowtail

Texas Fashion Collection

Texas Fashion Collection 

Meadows Museum - Final Fall Update (See You In Spring)

Hello everyone!

Here is my last update this fall on my time with the Meadows Museum (I’ll be back in the spring). When I was first hired, I came into the position hoping to gain a better understanding of how education departments operate, and I absolutely have. Through both the MMSC and tour scheduling, I have had exposure to what has to be considered in planning events, how to manage timelines, who to communicate with and how, how to interact with security when scheduling, and the list goes on. Even if I have not been directly operating within these areas, I have been exposed to them and have been able to make connections to other departments. I have interacted more with other departments than I have at other institutions, and I will likely be working with the museum’s collections manager Anne Lenhart to gain some experience in collections/registrar work.

I was very also interested in what opportunities being on a university campus would provide the Meadows Museum. Interestingly, there is not a particularly strong connection between the museum and SMU’s student body (limited to a couple of art history professors occasionally visiting with small classes), and a part of my projects has been working on developing a better relationship. Through the MMSC I am able to assist in developing new connections to SMU’s student body with the end goal of producing a product that will be associated with the Meadows Museum - specifically a podcast that deals with their unique collection and those that work for and with the institution. The project will discuss jobs that are not necessarily known by the public while also providing insight into people with fascinating careers who are not recognized outside of the museum community. For example, Alton Bowman is an extremely prolific furniture and frame conservator who is very well known amongst museum conservation in the Dallas area, but people outside those departments may not even know who he is.

I have definitely had to learn how to work within a collection with a specific focus, and this has been done primarily through the MMSC where I have had to choose how to examine or focus on an artwork, what guest speakers to bring in, and how to encourage students to engage with the material.

I’m looking forward to returning and sharing more about my experience in the spring! Happy holidays everyone~

Mid Fall Semester Update - Meadows Museum

Hello everyone!

Things at the Meadows Museum are trucking along! Since my first update, I have continued working with the Student Collective on our podcast project and we have progressed pretty well. The collective has spoken to four out of our five planned guests and I am in the process of scheduling our spring meeting dates. The guests we have spoken to so far are: Meadows Museum’s collections manager Anne Lenhart, Meadows Museum’s curator Amanda Dotseth, Texas Fashion Collection director Annette Becker, woodworker, and furniture/frame conservator Alton Bowman - and art conservator Claire Berry will speak in the spring. Interviews with these speakers will hopefully be scheduled soon! As we have learned more about Portrait of a Lady I have been thinking more about the narrative and goals of the podcast, and I am very excited to see what direction the collective wants to take the project in the spring. I am allowing the collective members to have control over narrative direction by picking a focus along with the number of episodes and the episode(s) length with the goal of them selecting specific audio clips to be put into the final product. It’s definitely a learning curve both in understanding my position within the education department while also figuring out how to produce a podcast. Just the technology and recording setup research alone has taken up more time than I expected!

Tour scheduling and associated communications continue as always, but we have had to work through quite a few hiccups. I’ve lost track of how many times the system has been restructured. We don’t have specific software designed for tour scheduling and so the workarounds we have had to organize are complex with a number of little steps, but I think we have reached a stronger system through the tried and true method of trial and error. Tour requests have been heavier than expected, and the museum will be opening docent-led tours to all in the spring, so we expect to see a large increase in requests. Luckily, the education department is happy to have a new hire who will be assisting with managing tours!

I’m coming up on my last day at the museum before winter break and I’m in a rush to make sure everything is organized enough for me to find my footing when I come back in the spring. I can’t wait to share everything I have learned with y’all!

Introduction by Kay Seedig - Docent Training at the Amon Carter of Museum of American Art

Warm greetings, everyone! My name is Kay (they/them/theirs) and I am so excited to learn about your internship experiences and share more about mine, too. 

Briefly, a bit more about me: I am an artist, teacher, and learner with a background in studio art (MFA, 2017) and an interest in teaching and programming in art museums. I work full time at UNT as a technician in the Foundations Program and I have been involved in the behind-the-scenes work at arts organizations like 500X Gallery in Dallas and the soon-to-be nonprofit Radical Intersectional Printmakers Guild. I find that collaborating on exhibitions, programming, teaching, and mentorship are incredibly enriching and things I aspire to do no matter my position!

My internship is a bit unconventional due to circumstances created by COVID-19, in addition to balancing my full time and part time positions, and taking courses. I am so grateful for this flexibility as I complete this certification!

For my internship, I applied to the nine-month Docent Training Program at the Amon Carter (the Carter) in Fort Worth. After interviewing and being accepted in January 2021, we started meeting as a class on Thursday, February 25th, 2021 and have met just about every Thursday each week since then. Additionally, we meet for education sessions with curators and other specialists to discuss the collection, operations, and Carter's values. Back in September, I was lucky enough to volunteer during the 60th Birthday Bash, too! I met so many champions of the Carter - from board members and trustees to emeritus docents. Interacting with the visitors was my favorite part though!

Initially, I was drawn to the Carter after seeing the collection in person a few times. There is more to the collection than what meets the eye and their dedication to education, programming, and working with contemporary artists really got my attention. My interest intensified after meeting curators Maggie Adler and Kristen Gaylord and hearing how they are working internally to challenge the traditional ways in which museums display collections. Their thoughtful approach to curation and exhibition design can be felt as you walk through each gallery at the Carter.

My cohort is comprised of 12-15 folks, majority of whom are retired, and a few of us still work full time. Each Thursday, we meet as a group to discuss what I like to call the "anatomy of a tour." That anatomy includes aspects such as, how to insightfully ask questions and deliver information; how to create a welcoming and inclusive environment; and how to balance historical contextual information with the visual qualities of an object. Our lead instructor, Nancy Strickland, also emphasizes the importance of integrating the values of the Carter into our tours. Similarly to teaching, a thoughtful tour can be quite complicated to craft!

Initially when I began the internship, my intentions were to develop a tour for visitors that 1. was impactful in such a short amount of time (1 hour spend with visitors) and 2. closely aligned with my teaching values.  I hope to work on and hone the following skills during my internship: 

• craft effective and engaging interpretation of artworks within the collection
• deliver historical content of art objects and find innovative ways for viewers to relate
• develop a tour that utilizes embodied and dialogic strategies
• integrate ways to connect with a diversity of museum visitors in my tour and interpersonal skills

Currently, I am finishing up my tour development and for the last month or so, all meetings have been spent presenting tour stops to each other and getting/giving critical feedback about what is working and what could be improved upon. The theme of my tour is "Choices: Radicalism in the Everyday." I am interested in using works where I can analyze significant and/or radical choices (made by the artist in life or in their aesthetic choices) that rejected prescribed traditionalism at the time in some way or another. I also want to encourage those on my tour to interpret the work without necessarily being right or wrong about the historical information. What questions can I ask that engage their individualized experiences? How can I encourage them to think more about the experience of seeing and making? How can I make this tour really fun and memorable!?

Lastly, finding overlaps between subtlety and the obvious (typically seen as direct opposites) are what I am drawn to. Yes, a still life painting can be radical! 

Below are a few of the artworks I have used to develop tour stops:

Stuart Davis, Egg Beater No. 2, Oil on Canvas, 1928

John Singer Sargent, Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, Oil on Canvas, 1888

Robert Laurent, Plant Form, Stained Fruitwood from Direct Carving, 1924-28

Charles White, Love Letter III, Color Lithograph, 1977

Martin Johnson Heade, Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay, Oil on Canvas, 1868

I'm very excited to present my tour in its entirety in November and begin touring each month at the Carter. Thank you for reading. I also can't wait to share more with y'all!

Introduction - Meadows Museum

 Hello everyone!

My name is Evan Blackwell (they/them/theirs) and I am the Meadows Museum graduate Onstead fellow. 

I just completed my fifth week working at the museum's education department under the director of education, Anne Kindseth. I have three main focuses for my time at the museum: 1. a short-term goal on producing a three to five-minute gallery talk for a college night event and assisting with the event itself, 2. managing all tour requests and scheduling for the museum entirety, and 3. managing the student collective. I have also been given the side task of recording a couple of audio guides for two portraits I spoke on in my short gallery talk.

My goal with this fellowship is to gain a better understanding of the administrative side of art museum education as well as practice my educating skills through developing curriculum and providing talks and tours. I only relatively recently added art museum education to my studies, and all of my experience has been digital/remote, so I intend to build my skills with the interpersonal aspect of this type of teaching, as well as develop my ability to work in a physical setting. Through the Meadows Museum’s more specific collection of Spanish art, I want to practice operating within the limitations presented by that specificity - e.g. how to build audience connections when there are not seemingly endless subjects and/or histories to use to connect to or pique interest? Along with this, the museum being part of a university allows for exploration of how to facilitate and build connections to not only students but also to other disciplines. How does one encourage diverse engagement with a specific collection? I am happy to say that these explorations have already started happening!

While the Meadows Museum Student Collective (MMSC) has existed for several years, Anne and I have transformed it in order to provide the students a way to gain direct paid experience with the museum. The collective will be producing a short podcast exploring a specific portrait by the end of the spring semester - the first podcast associated with the Meadows Museum! I am currently in the process of interviewing our applicants and securing guest speakers. Managing all of the tour requests for the museum takes up a good chunk of my workday, but I’m hoping to start developing individual meeting plans for the collective soon. Our fall college night event has already passed and was a great success, but the development for that (and future events) is for another post.

Our current exhibitions Canvas & Silk: Historic Fashion from Madrid’s Museo del Traje and Imagine & Identity: Mexican Fashion in the Modern Period opened on September 19th, 2021, and will be on show until January 9th, 2022. I hope you will come visit!

Introduction

 Hello!

    My name is Martha Samaniego Calderón and I am the CVAD Galleries Onstead Fellow for this school year (2021-2022).

    I am currently during my fifth week into the Fellowship where I have been working with Stefanie Dlugosz-Acton, the director of the CVAD Galleries, to make my learning objectives achievable. I really want to put theory into practice and experience what is involved in a museum within the University setting.  I want to learn about the process of the different projects planned and how to troubleshoot when unpredictable situations happen. Right now, we are working with our current exhibition Florielgium  with artist  Matthew Ritchie.  This exhibition is in constant evolution as it is a 4-part multilayered project that has been giving (and will continue to give) space for students from all majors, staff, faculty and community to interact.

    This week, I am in the process of designing a "pedagogical tool" that will be available at the gallery in next two weeks for the public to use as they interact with the 36 GAN-created paintings by Matthew Ritchie. I've been using most of my time researching his work and revising theory from last semester around Museum Education. I am really excited and nervous to try something like this because I have never done it. This year , we are all still working around COVID-19 and while this is challenging, I like to think that it is giving us an opportunity to be creative and keep cultivating modified/new  learning experiences.

Here are some examples of what I've been thinking so far:

    Finally, I also have been working on the translation of the text in the gallery from English to Spanish. One of my goals for this fellowship is to make the CVAD galleries accessible for Spanish speaking visitors since Texas is the State with most Spanish speakers in the country with 26% of its population being native Spanish speakers. This goes along with another personal goal during this fellowship which is to understand how can the CVAD galleries help to support Hispanic/Latinx/Latino/Latina students' success?

I hope you can come visit us at the gallery soon! There is a concert "Infinite Movement" with special guest, UNT alumni Shara Nova on October 9th at 7pm at the CVAD courtyard.

The CVAD Galleries and the Texas Fashion Collection

View of some of the garments inside the Texas Fashion Collection

Hello Everyone! I hope that you are all doing well this fine February (I can't believe January is already over!!). 

This spring I am so excited to continue on as the Onstead Fellow in Museum Education at the CVAD Galleries. This semester, I am incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to work with Annette Becker, director of the Texas Fashion Collection, on the exhibition Delight that will be in the CVAD Galleries this summer. 

For this exhibition, I will be writing a short essay for the publication that will accompany the show. In addition, I will work to create virtual programming and resources (including short videos) that can accompany the exhibition. I am very excited to be a part of this and to really get to see all that goes on behind the scenes when it comes to putting an exhibition together. 

Another fun thing that I did a couple of weeks ago-- I got to move around some art in the galleries. It was so cool to me to be able to put on a pair of gloves and actually be so close to a work of art. Even though it was a small thing, I thought it was super exciting! One of the best things about being a part of a smaller institution is that you really do get to do a little of everything.

As a whole, I am very glad that this semester I am able to complete all of my hours face-to-face at the galleries and the Texas Fashion Collection. It is great to see some new faces regularly and to work in a different space (I am definitely getting to that point where working from home is almost unbearable).

I hope that you all have a great start of 2021! 

 

New Year, New Team

 Hello friends, 

As the title reads, this is a new year and I am officially on a new team - the Community teaching team! Last year during my fellowship I was put on the Gallery teaching team, but I have moved over to the Community team this year so that I may have some opportunities to understand what community outreach entails and learn the ropes. ALSO, the Community team just hired a new educator and it is the wonderful and amazing Briana Long (shoutout to Briana if she is reading this!). Briana and I are both in the office on the same days which has been a lot of fun and we even tried our hand at art installation last week for a gallery downtown called Artes de la Rosa (we had no idea what we were doing and I totally made Briana be the one standing on the ladder, ladders just kind of scare me). So this year has already started off on a good note!

I am just starting to help plan one of the first programs of the year which are Carter in the Classroom, where we will pre-record videos with some art history background info and some art prompts for high school students. I'm excited to write lessons for older students because I can dive into the history a bit more which is a lot of fun for me! I am also planning on leading our DEAI discussion next month and I decided to dive into the topic of White Supremacy in Art Museums - woo, big stuff. I am really nervous about that, but I will let you guys know how it goes in a month! 

Writing my thesis, applying for jobs/internships, and TAing for 5 classes on top of this fellowship is a lot and I am pretty exhausted. Just really ready to graduate honestly! I hope everyone is doing well and I look forward to reading about everyone's experiences this semester. :)

Emma Ahmad