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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 9: The BKM summer interns gathered Tuesday morning in the boardroom for the ninth installation of our days of education programming. Even after nine weeks at the museum, we still have plenty to learn about the internal operations of such a large cultural institution. To help us puzzle together the various moving parts at work in the Museum and complement our understanding of museum management as a whole, we met with Megan Bill, Curatorial Assistant to the Arts of Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Islamic world. Megan, a former intern herself, framed the conversation by defining with more scrutiny the vocabulary we’ve been tossing around this summer. These terms—which include decolonization, provenance, and source community, have arisen as particularly relevant to our ongoing discussion of the responsive museum. Megan recounted the emotional experience of working with communities to uncover the histories of previously untraced objects. 

After our conversation with Megan, we migrated to the library. There we roamed amongst historic exhibition documents specifically pulled to contextualize our afternoon visit with Catherine Morris. The documents centered on the historical place of quilts and a 2013 exhibit in the Elizabeth A. Sackler for Feminist Art, Workt by Hand: Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts. 

At noon we settled in the sunlight of the courtyard for lunch. We compared plans for the remainder of our summers and shared disbelief at the impending conclusion of our summers at BKM. An unexpected gift from this summer has come in the form of a camaraderie and found kinship between the interns. Our friendship is certainly owed to our Tuesdays together and has made moving through Museum hallways and work spaces feel more comfortable and more ours. 

After lunch we reconvened in ‘Our house,’ the resource room of Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall in the Elizabeth A. Sackler for Feminist Art. Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator met us there for a discussion facilitated by Erika Lively, Internship Advisor, on the sociocultural role of quilts and the distinctions between feminist art and art produced by those who identify as female. 

We then moved to the auditorium, where we set up our stools on stage. There we met with Brooklyn-born artist and educator Iviva Olenick, whose beautiful work we saw in the museum’s archives during our second week. Ivivva grows her own indigo and uses its natural pigments to dye fabrics which she embroiders with words and images. It was an honor to handle her work and learn her process after feeling struck by its delicacy a month ago in the archives. We retreated into the auditorium’s seats as Iviva handed out needles and embroidery loops. After an introduction to elementary techniques, we had time to experiment with our own pieces. Embroidering, we learned, is uniquely meditative. A wave of serenity flooded into the space as we manifested our creativity. We’re a pretty artsy bunch of interns after all. 

We were released early, a rarity I personally capitalized on by going home and lying in bed. Exhaustion has set in from a very full summer, to be relieved all too soon next Friday. 

Posted by Ginger Adams

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Intern spotlight: William Satloff, Collections Department. 

I arrived at the Brooklyn Museum on a sunny morning in early June. Still healing from a brutal week of final exams, I had not yet prepared myself for the first day of my internship in the Museum’s Marketing and Communications Department. I was so unprepared that I felt no nerves at all– no butterflies, no sweaty palms. I hoped for a peek into the inner workings of a large arts institution and to engage in meaningful work. My internship experience fulfilled both these wishes, and gave me a gift I could have never anticipated. Through thoughtful and passionate conversations, my fellow interns have changed my relationship with museum spaces. The interns take on a variety of responsibilities in departments across the museum, bringing their commitment and drive to every corner of the building. William Satloff is an intern in the Collections Department. This is what he shared about his role: 

— Ginger Adams

I’m William Satloff, the Brooklyn Museum summer intern tasked with inventorying and conservation-grade repackaging boxes of commercial textiles. I work primarily with textiles related to L. & E. Stirn — cloth merchants that set up shop in NYC in the 1890s. Because most of the materials I handle are more than a hundred years old, they’re often dusty and sometimes completely disintegrated.

First I protect my nose, mouth and lungs with a particle respirator; then I cover my hands with latex exam gloves. (The gloves are also to protect the paper and textiles from the oils on my hands!) Then I’m ready to get to work. 

Each box has roughly 2,000-3,000 textile swatches and samples. To process all that, I’ve developed a routine to get through one box every four days. To lay it out for you… First I unpack the box — removing each item one-by-one, inspecting for any labels or tags, taking note of format and dimensions.

As I make my way through the box, I group the items in categorical stacks, considering what types of categories would be helpful to someone archiving the materials in the future. I subsequently write a brief description for each stack on a slip of paper that will stay with its respective materials through the packaging process. Next, I photograph examples from the most interesting categories (i.e. reflective sheers, metallic thread embroidery) to represent the box’s contents.

Then I type a categorical inventory, outlining what companies, fabric and paper formats, and types of textiles (i.e. stripes, plaids, sheers) are in the box. I print the inventory and photographs to include in the repackaged boxes. After that, I wrap each category up in archival materials so they can be stable in a box for 10-15 years, or more. This step includes measuring and cutting acid free board to support the paper-backed specimens, sealing loose textiles in polypropylene bags with twill ties, and more. Finally, I pack the materials back into their original box. Usually I need to find better housing and expand to a second box when repacking because the conservation materials increase the total volume of the contents. 

It’s a lot of steps, but it’s really fun. I get to handle the art as opposed to looking at it behind a glass case. Because of the work I’m doing, these historic textiles will get a life beyond collecting dust and falling apart in some storage area. I’m given the independence and responsibility to make decisions about how this set of the Museum’s objects will be received by future collectors, curators, and conservators. I was hoping my internship would give me an opportunity to see how a major museum really functions and to get practical, hands-on experience with a key part of museum operations — this summer’s experience met and exceeded those expectations.

Posted by William Satloff

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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, who has served as the museum’s Director of Exhibition Design 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 Ar 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.

Posted by Ginger Adams

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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 7: On Tuesday morning the BKM summer interns gathered in the reading room of Nobody Promised you Tomorrow. Reclining with morning-slump into our low chairs, we stretched into our morning with a conversation about the commodification of activism. We discussed the controversial sponsorships of last month’s pride march and the trend of corporations adopting and appropriating models of activism for their own capitalistic gain. We collectively recognized that growing up in the age of technology has desensitized us to what in the Stonewall era struck audiences as shocking acts of rebellion.

Two of the exhibition’s curators, Margo Cohen Ristorucci, who serves the Museum as Public Programs Coordinator, and Lindsay C. Harris, Teen Programs Manager, joined us in the reading room (which they named “our house”) to walk us through the show’s conception. Five individuals from three departments across the museum collaborated up to produce the show, which celebrates New York based LGBTQ+ artists born after the year 1969. The team’s democratic curatory vision is clear in its execution. The space wraps you up in a vibrant and comforting weighted blanket. After in-depth dives into the pieces that most called out to us, Erika (intern program co-coordinator) notified us we had spilled into our lunch time.

At lunch I slumped my deepest slump of the day into a rainbow net chair in the courtyard. Digging into our leftovers and take-out, we discussed our favorite exhibitions at the Museum and our plan to share our personal creations with one another in the auditorium, an effort spearheaded by Public Programs intern Inga.

After lunch we had time to work on our group presentations, the culminating projects of our summer at the Museum. The assignment is to craft and propose an update to the Museum’s Cane Acres Plantation House in light of our summer’s guiding question, “What does it mean to be a responsible museum?” We roamed the (possibly haunted) exhibition together and dreamed up some pretty radical ideas… stay tuned.

We then boarded an uptown train headed towards the Museum of the City of New York. Chaos took hold and we ended up arriving in three separate groups, allowing those of us in the first chunk to browse the air-conditioned store and chat about Euphoria. Reunited eventually, we wandered through the Museum’s Pride: Photographs of Stonewall and Beyond and The Voice of the Village: Fred W. McDarrah Photographs exhibitions. We finished the day reflecting on the approaches to social responsiveness available to different types of museums (fine arts, historical, natural history, etc.). 

End-of-day-slump creeped in and we ambled out of the Museum and into the uptown heat. Next week we’re sticking close to our air-conditioned home and switching gears to explore the museum’s antiquities and exhibition design. Check back for updates!

Posted by Ginger Adams

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Week 6!

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 6: The BKM summer interns filed into the boardroom Tuesday morning for another packed day of programming. As someone more wooed by prestige than I’d care to admit, convening in the boardroom tickled my fancy. Esther Woo, Exhibition Project Manager in the Curatorial and Exhibitions Department, met us there to give us a run-down on her role and responsibilities. Esther’s presentation complemented those of our previous speakers from across the Museum in consolidating a holistic understanding of how the Museum functions day to day. As Project Manager, Esther handles the logistics imperative to producing exhibitions on time and in budget.  

After running over time with questions, we hurried down from the boardroom to meet Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenblum Leonian Curator of Photography, at the entrance of Garry Winogrand: Color. Drew walked us through the exhibit, which I had not yet seen and which I plan on returning to for as long as I can later today. He spoke about Winogrand’s life, his artistic intentions and values, his focus on content-based interpretation. Drew then led us out of Winogrand’s curtained cave of a gallery and into Liz Johnston Artur: Dusha, another photography exhibit on view at the Museum. Liz Johnson Artur’s work juxtaposes Winogrand’s, inviting a comparison between the contemporary, female, Russian-Ghanaian artist’s approach to life photography and Winogrand’s.

After Drew’s walk-through we found refuge from the Museum’s aggressive air-conditioning at the picnic tables. We gobbled down a quick lunch and met back up in front of the museum to board a train (actually, three trains) uptown. Our first field trip of the summer was to the New York Historical Society on the Upper West Side. A representative from the institution’s education department greeted us and ushered us through Love and Resistance: Stonewall 50 at the New York Public Library. Unlike the Brooklyn Museum’s Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall, which we visited together during week 2 of our internship program, the NYHS exhibit presents an artifact-centered historical narrative of LGBTQ+ activism from the 1960s through today.

After our tour we wandered freely throughout the NYHS. We gathered by the entrance and crossed the street to settle on the southern-facing stairs of the Natural History Museum. Under the shade of trees and across from a from a fountain surrounded by pigeons and running toddlers with plastic dinosaurs in hand, we reflected on the exhibit and our day. Our discussion flowed to the Guggenheim’s Mapplethorp exhibit we were assigned to visit independently and summated in the question: Can an exhibit be comprehensively inclusive? How? Maybe in the following closing weeks of our summer we’ll begin to address the pool of questions that have arisen since week 1. Probably we’ll leave with more.

Posted by Ginger Adams

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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 4: Week 4! A collective amazement at the speed at which our summer is whizzing by and a lingering soreness from the adjustment to 9-5 life charged the energy of our reunion Tuesday morning. Gathered around a table in Studio 2, we shared scandalous accounts of writing mid-summer progress reports and highlights from our weekends (which included swimming in the ocean and eating ice cream). We opened the morning with a discussion about the role of museums in exposing invisible histories and creating accessible and inclusive spaces. Kikesa, an intern in the Office of the Chief Curator, identified the importance of presenting artists of color not in isolation but in conversation with their predecessors and historical context. Inga, Public Programs intern, spoke to the responsibility of museums as transmitters and writers of history. This group of interns doodles the best doodles.

We then moved independently through One: Titus Kaphar, privileged as ever by our gallery access on days close to the public. The exhibit pairs Titus Kaphar’s Shifting the Gaze with the museum’s collection show of European works on paper, a marriage that challenges its visitors’ perception of the masterful European prints and drawings. We then sat down with the exhibitions’ curators Eugenie Tsai and Lisa Small. Eugenie and Lisa offered us a peek into the processes involved in producing shows as well as valuable nuggets of life advice. We followed up the conversation with a quick exercise that tasked us with brainstorming and presenting an engaging program for the exhibit targeted at college students. Fabiola, intern in the Registrar’s Office, and I envisioned plexiglass canvases and expo marker positioned in front of the works on paper inviting students to physically shift the gaze with their own revisions.

Lunch conversation at the picnic tables included critiques of the Whitney Biennial and a good price for an aura reading. 

After lunch we reassembled into our groups to continue our assignment from last week. The activity asked us to explore a permanent gallery and devise an intervention for the space. Celia (Conservation), Eliza (Director’s Office) and I headed back up to Arts of Korea and lost ourselves in conversation about the delicacy of presenting artists’ personal and dear creations. 

We met back up with the larger group in the boardroom (fancy!) for a visit with Tracey Reese, Chair of the museum’s Collections Committee. Tracey walked us through the strategies involved in acquiring and deaccessioning art and how these strategies differ between museums according to their respective missions and contexts. Tracey also shared some poignant wisdom with us. She noted after our introductions (name, college, major, department) the discrepancies between many of our academic focuses and our departments. She advised us to treat work like romance—to work with people we admire and to leave when we aren’t. Gorgeous doodles happening everywhere. 

Before the day’s closing reflections, three groups led us through galleries to propose the interventions they had conceptualized. A crowd favorite was an AR app developed for the Luce Visible Storage Center that would allow guests to see objects in their context by pointing their camera at particular pieces. The app would also give visitors the chance to curate and share their own exhibits with pieces from the gallery. 

We ended the day back in the studio, sharing final thoughts and observations. Another day of insight into the Museum’s operations, another day of being blown away by my fellow-interns. We’ll be back in two weeks after a vacation for the holiday!

Posted by Ginger Adams.

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BKM Week #3 Blog

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My blog post from Week 3 of BKM internship!

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 3: The interns convened this week on Friday for the third iteration of our days of educational programming. Our weekly meetings have exposed bit by bit the enormous puzzle of museum management. Sharing our experiences in departments across the Museum, we’ve begun to piece together the various efforts that keep the Museum’s doors open. This week we set out to understand how the Museum functions in practice, framed as always by the essential questions of our summer: What does it mean to be a responsive museum? Should the Brooklyn Museum strive to be responsive?

We kicked off the day with a conversation about Juneteenth. We discussed how we would like to see museums honor the holiday, which commemorates the final announcement of emancipation that reached in Galveston, Texas in 1865. After learning that not a single museum in New York City posted content to acknowledge Juneteenth, we closed the discussion with a query we would return to later in the day: “Consider what you know about the state of museums. Imagine how you want to see the field in 5 years.”

The first guest speaker in our day’s powerful line-up was Erika Umali, Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the Office of the Chief Curator. Erika outlined for us the Museum’s numerous boards and committees and how they contribute to the organization’s operation. We asked plenty of questions about the processes of accessioning and deaccessioning art and about Erika’s path to the Brooklyn Museum. I was particularly struck by her concluding insight: that you can love things without wanting to do them all the time, or even at all. This spoke to me. Yelled at me. Last week I had scribbled related questions on my mind-map (““Do I have to be good at what I like?” and “Do I have to like what I’m good at?”). I might just be approaching resolution. 

After lunch, our peek into the Museum’s internal operations continued with a presentation by Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art (the only permanent space dedicated to feminist art in the world!). Carmen presented on responsive art, highlighting artists featured in EASCFA exhibits like Beverly Buchanann, Sue Coe and, my personal favorite, Wendy Red Star. 

Next up was a visit from Brooke Baldeschwiler, Senior Manager of Digital Communications, and Sarah Lukacher, Content Manager in the Marketing Department (woo!). Brooke and Sarah discussed the Museum’s messaging strategy and the challenges and rewards of working with social media. They highlighted the difficulty of managing digital communications and marketing for an arts institution while navigating content restrictions and approval processes. 

After a full day of lectures in our studio, we decompressed with cake. While Erika, our program’s co-coordinator, served up some red velvet Juneteenth cake, we brainstormed approaches to a hypothetical task: writing a piece about Juneteenth for the American Alliance of Museums. 

Fueled by an energizing discussion prompted by the exercise, we broke up into small groups and took off into the galleries. Our mission was to devise an “intervention” (however we chose to define the term) in one of the permanent collection galleries. Celia, an intern in the Conservation Department, and I headed to the Arts of Korea. Not having had time to explore the gallery before, I was blown away by the collection’s beautiful pottery and decorative arts. 

Next week we’ll continue to conceptualize our intervention and hear our fellow interns’ proposals. Stay tuned!

Posted by Ginger Adams

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Check out my Brooklyn Museum bio! 

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Hey y’all. Here’s a op-ed I wrote for the Middlebury Campus about the sociological implications of the Bachelor’s season 23 finale.

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Hola. Over the second semester of my senior year of high school I created a film inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book that taught me to love books. The film follows the transformations of three relationships during this liminal time. I independently conceptualized, shot ad edited the project over five moths. It’s also, of course, a love letter to Brooklyn. Watch it here!

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Howdy. This summer I’m interning in the Marketing & Communications department in the Brooklyn Museum (~~***exciting***~~). Each week I’ll be posting weekly updates from the program on the museum’s blog and reposting them here. Check out the first one!

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Hey!

I’m Ginger from Brooklyn and this is my blog. I’m a student of Sociology and Spanish at Middlebury College with a particular interest in applying sociological theory to pop culture. I have a creative drive that propels my commitment to production. This page is for my creations!

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A short Instagram video I made for BRIC, Brooklyn’s leading cultural programming organization, based on an interview I conducted with artist Aiko. 

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