April 17, 2013

Today I was able to follow Delilah around as she gave a tour in the gallery. Most tours are given on Friday's so I'm never able to catch them due to my other internship. This tour was a special situation because the class could only make it on this one Wednesday and it was also a very small group. Since it was a special education class, the tour consisted of half of the information it usually contains. It was interesting, however, to hear Delilah talk about the masks. It gave me hope that the Education department still gets to be involved in what the Curatorial department develops. One of my apprehensions about being part of the education department is that it feels so different from my initial reasoning for entering museum work. I wanted to become involved in museums because I love history and thought it would be so much fun to do research as a curator for the rest of my life. I had also read somewhere that curators get to travel to different locations to scope out objects and art works and that sounded so cool! After seeing all that the education department does, though, I definitely want to start here and make sure I'm directly and positively impacting people who are frequently overlooked in the education system. 

After the tour of the main gallery and annex, youth tours are directed towards the back of the museum for an activity that I helped prepare one of the first months I was interning. The students first made some simple screen prints onto card stock, then cut out some masks of their own and decorated them with paint and glitter. It was great activity and I'm glad I got to see how my hard work on those masks turned out!


HOURS WORKED: 10am-6pm (8 hrs.)