Women and their Work

Women and Their Work is a nonprofit organization and arts space in Austin, TX. The space was founded in 1978 with the purpose of uplifting and supporting female artists in Texas. Women and Their Work provides education programming, has events, and helps women artists have solo shows. I was interested in Women and Their Work because it feels like such a unique gallery space and has a great legacy in Austin. 

Women and Their Work had a summer internship program listed that seemed really interesting to me and I thought it would teach me skills I wanted to learn, such as gallery installation, day-to-day, and what it’s like to run a nonprofit. I applied, was interviewed and then accepted for the Gallery Assistant intern position.

My consistent responsibility was being the first point of contact for people visiting the gallery. I would answer any questions about the gallery, talk to guests, and survey the demographics of visitors of the gallery. My other responsibilities would vary. I assisted with creating gallery guides, promotional material, gallery install and uninstall, research, spreadsheets, creating contact sheets, formatting documents and submissions, editing artists’ CVs, and creating transcripts to go along with the audio to provide more ways of access. I also worked on events such as gallery openings, and local arts events in Austin. 

I learned a lot during my summer at Women and Their Work. Prior to this experience, I didn’t know what the day-to-day of a nonprofit organization looked like. I was able to work on so many different projects and try on different hats because the environment was very collaborative and inviting.

My favorite experience I had was installing a solo show. It was really incredible getting to spend time with the artist and assist with bringing her vision for the space to life. I was able to assist with a mural she did on the walls of the gallery and it felt really special to be a part of the exhibit in that way. Speaking with her and other artists was really inspiring to me, as a painter who wants to be a working, exhibiting artist. This internship helped me see different paths in the arts I didn’t know were available to me and made me realize how much I value an arts community, especially the community I found at Women and Their Work.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

I found this internship from researching different museums that have graphic design internship opportunities. I applied through the official website and got interviewed and then notified I was accepted.

My direct supervisor was a graphic designer at the Met. In my department, I participated in the process and collaboration in between the graphics, exhibition, production and lighting designers. By working closely with my mentor, I observed the way he works from his technical skills and time management skills. I was also able to learn more about how to prioritize projects based on their importance. Having real deadlines and thinking about the next steps when the files were out of my hands made me work in a more organized manner. 

Additionally, It was really valuable for me to experience creating works that will be installed and printed in real space instead of just existing in digital form. Thinking about how things would look in actual scale, under the lighting of a space, with a crowd observing were things that I would never be able to find out before trying and experimenting.

During my time there, I collaborated with another person on a project to redesign the current small exhibition in the Korean department, called Jegi, in large exhibition. We had to work together from learning, researching, about the show, figuring out the concept of the show, and ways to use design to convey the curators message. We started the process by meeting the curator and talking to her about her initial ideas. From this meeting we split off to develop the exhibition and the graphics. Throughout the project we were always collaborating and bouncing opinions off each other about the progress. I was able to get critiques from multiple people and experience the actual process in preparing a show. At the end of the internship, we presented a deck of promotional graphics and exhibition plans to the whole department and also the curator which was such a valuable and proud moment.

Even outside of my department, this internship has allowed me to learn about the museum industry in general. The weekly education programs and hearing insights from various departments of the museum outside of design was informative and interesting at the same time. It made me realize that I like working in museums and that I genuinely care about exhibitions, the interaction of the institution - visitors, and education.

The Valerie J. Maynard Foundation

The Valerie J. Maynard Foundation is dedicated to sustaining, expanding, and preserving the legacy of Valerie J. Maynard, her art, and her ideals. I got started with this internship through an initial connection with a photographer at a show opening in New York in February. We later connected in May through Instagram where I eventually interviewed for a position. At The Valerie J. Maynard Foundation I worked alongside board and foundation members as well as other legacy interns.

Some of what my role and responsibilities included was cleaning, organizing, and archiving art materials, sculpture, tools, and photography within the home studio space. I also helped with creating an archival organization system to preserve archival artwork materials and worked on administration aspects like file naming and archiving. I attended group meetings to work with board and foundation members, and legacy specialists and interns to assist workflow and give updates. After a work session each day I would document tasks that were done for the foundation and record the locations of items. 

I am most proud of my skills in connecting with folks by pushing myself out of my comfort shell. I was able to have new experience of being a part of the inaugural cohort of legacy interns. This experience has given me a clarity of what kind of artist I hope to be that is committed to building community and working collaboratively with others and leaving behind a legacy of great character, reverence, and using my voice to advocate for the well being of those subject to the margins. I have left this experience with a stronger confidence in wanting to pursue being an educator as Valerie was with how she was committed to sharing skills with her community to support the growth of the next generation of artists.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

For my internship, I worked at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. My main project centered around helping out with an Astro-Animation Exhibition, but throughout my ten weeks I also got to work as a graphics support artist. I had multiple mentors for the exhibition and for my graphics support work. This summer, I worked on researching and prototyping potential animation related activities for the exhibition as well as many other graphics projects, including photography assistance, photo processing, logo design, and creating an illustrated poster. 

I found out about this internship in my Astro-Animation class last semester taught by my mentors. They were already familiar with my work from other classes I had taken with them and so I applied for the position, went through a short interview process and got hired from there. One of the exhibition mentors is an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard and so I was given a desk in-person in the office of my graphics support mentors. Despite technically working for my supervisor for the exhibition, others were more than happy to act as additional mentors for me and teach me about the graphics support work they do and they provided me with a lot of opportunities to work on graphics projects on top of my work with my mentors.

One of my favorite things about this internship was the amount of outreach I was able to do and the connections I was able to make all over Goddard. With the help of my mentors, I was able to sit in on a lot of cool meetings with different scientists and groups. One such connection that really excited me was that I was able to meet and interview members of the Conceptual Imaging Lab, the animation team of Goddard. Watching the work of professionals in a field I want to pursue was so exciting and inspiring, but it also made me more confident in how achievable that kind of career path is. 

I’m really proud of how much I pushed myself to take every opportunity I could and put myself out there. I haven’t always been the most confident in my abilities as a professional artist, but networking this summer and meeting with really cool NASA scientists and artists helped me feel like I was really making the best out of my internship.

Hamiltonian Artists

Hamiltonian Artists' mission is to build a dynamic community of innovative artists and effective visual art leaders by providing professional development opportunities and advancing their entrepreneurial success. Through a two-year fellowship program they produce group shows and solo shows to help build a solid foundation for emerging artists. A professor from one of my courses works at Hamiltonian Artists and reached out to me at the end of the course if I would be interested in an internship.

During my internship I would report back to my supervisor with tasks I was assigned to and we would discuss program planning for the future. I was involved in a variety of projects like managing donor and board member Thank You letters and learning about the Bloomerang database. I also helped plan programs for kinetic members which is a sales and lending program on cultivating the next generation collectors. The mission of the program is to connect artists and collectors in such ways as conducting studio, managing collections, and creating a more approachable art collection environment. Finally, a big part of my jobs was installation and openings of exhibitions and the day-to-day gallery management.

My biggest takeaway from this experience is understanding how to present myself as an artist and how to represent the organization in the broader art world. I got to be in touch with a board of members, gallerists, artists, and people who are passionate about art in general! I overall understand better how the fine art industry runs and how to make art more accessible from a curatorial perspective. I now understand how non-profit galleries run and I am proud to have been involved in the DC art scene.

This internship experience has helped me to deepen my understanding in ways of supporting artists, especially emerging artists and made me more certain that the care for artists is what I want to carry on in my curatorial practice.

Creative Alliance

Creative Alliance is a non-profit arts organization with a location in Baltimore, Maryland. They host exhibitions, resident artist programs, workshops, live performances and community events. I found out about this internship opportunity through a MICA Career Fair. There I talked to the someone from Creative Alliance. After our short conversation, I sent my resume and cover letter to apply to the curatorial internship position. I had a second meeting with them and we decided to move forward with the internship. 

My supervisor oversaw the operations of exhibitions and its related programming, including managing the resident artist program. The resident artist program is a housing/residency program. Artists apply to the program, pay subsidized fees for housing and studios in the Creative Alliance building and receive professional support and exhibition opportunities in return. 

As a resident artist coordinator, I interviewed resident artists about their needs and used this information to create original programming that responds to their needs. I was in charge of proposing, scheduling and budgeting these programs. I was also tasked with organizing all the physical documents relating to past resident artists into a physical archive, providing exhibition installation support and compiling artists’ resource lists, among other office tasks.

I am the most proud of my professional interviewing skills when having conversations with resident artists, all of them I have never met before. These conversations were fruitful and provided a lot of insights into what the resident artists want out of their time at the residency. 

My biggest takeaway is that clear, concise communication is crucial in professional working environments. I also learn how to tangibly respond to resident artist’s needs through proposed tangible programming such as studio visits, critique sessions, and professional development workshops. This internship provides me with strong organizational and interpersonal skills that I can apply to my career as an independent curator or working with non-profit organizations in the future. 

National Museum of Women in the Arts

I found out about this internship as I was scrolling through the website for my school work. The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) holds a strong place in my heart, but I never thought about interning there as it doesn’t have a connection to my major. It was a stroke of luck that I manage to secure it as I found it three days from the application deadline date. My amazing professors were extremely kind and helped me write a letter of recommendation (I found out later it was my letters of recommendation that pushed me ahead of everyone else). Otherwise, using the 3 days, I asked as many people as I could to read through all my materials, including Career Development and my Academic Advisor. 

NMWA in Washington, DC champions and supports women artists. It is the only museum in the world solely dedicated to women artists. They feature a variety of art forms, mostly focusing on contemporary art. The department I worked in was Digital Engagement, this applied to all social media platforms, website, photography, all online activity. My direct supervisor was the director of Digital Engagement. As NMWA is quite small, her role encompasses almost everything related to the department other than website coding. 

My list of responsibilities varied during my internship, depending on what the department needed help with. I drafted Instagram posts highlighting women artists/art pieces, wrote tweets for Fresh Talks and calendar events, researched and wrote about exhibitions for the website, edited and sorted old photographs to upload to a digital server, photographed weekly gallery talks and events, researched and read case studies for previous museum’s social media initiatives during closure, and made guides for future interns. 

I am most proud of the connections I made through exhibition openings and talking to curators about their work. I never thought I would experience a job like this, so I made sure to learn as much as I could doing many different things. 

My biggest take-away and clarification of my career goal is that I would rather not work a 9am-5pm job when I’m older. This experience was amazing, but only because I worked with a museum that championed women artists. It’s hard to imagine putting in this type of time for an organization/company that doesn’t have a good ethos. With working Monday to Friday and commuting from Baltimore, the time to make art was extremely condensed. I learned that social media is currently one of the largest factors of business success. The Digital Engagement department is linked to every single other department and social media brings in more people than any other platforms (e.g. advertisements, email, print) for the museum. 

Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Media

This summer, I interned for the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Media (PCA&M) an organization dedicated to the promotion of the arts. This non-profit hosts an exhibition space that showcases anywhere from one to three exhibitions at a time, in addition to a school that offers a wide array of classes to both children and adults. The school offers a variety of classes, including ceramics, metalworking, screen printing, photography, and more.

While researching internship opportunities in Pittsburgh, I came upon a posting for an Exhibitions Intern. I was unaware that the posting was from 2016, however, I was able to get in contact with the Gallery Programs Manager who was enthusiastic about my interest. After some correspondence and a phone interview, I was offered a position as an Exhibitions Intern. I was supervised by the Creative Director.

The focus of my internship was on preparing and assisting with the upcoming exhibition, which featured seven solo shows from regional artists. My responsibilities were broad, as my work overlapped three departments: Exhibitions, Marketing, and Education. 

I visited each artist’s studio where I assisted the Marketing Manager in shooting promotional materials. We photographed and interviewed each artist, and I helped set up and take down of filming equipment. I coordinated with the artists to schedule an artists’ talk and a workshop. Leading up to the show's opening, I assisted in the de-install of the prior show. I then assisted the artists during the installation of their shows. The opening reception concluded my time at the PCA&M, and it was a fitting end to see the seven weeks of hard work come together into a full exhibition.

The greatest takeaway from this experience were the connections I made with the staff at the PCA&M as well as the exhibiting artists. Through conversations about their work, I was offered an overwhelming amount of advice and some realities about working in the arts.

The best piece of advice I was given from multiple sources was to simply be open to opportunities, even the ones that I never previously envisioned. For many of the people I met with worked a variety of jobs in different fields which proved to be extremely rewarding. In regards to technical and professional skills, I left with a strong foundation in exhibition prep from patching walls to hanging art to lighting. I was also able to experience working in a professional environment, learning how to carry myself not only around my coworkers but also the exhibiting artists.

Overall, this internship has been a rewarding experience that allowed me to explore the various roles that are necessary to organizing and promoting exhibitions. My time at the PCA&M clarified for me that I am more interested in gallery operations, like promotion and exhibition preparation, rather than in curation. I much prefer the hands on nature of this work as opposed to more administrative duties.