At the Denison Museum this summer student interns are working with objects researching and learning new skills.
July 14, 2016
Interns at the Denison Museum spend time with antiquities, art and objects that enhance their learning, deepen their connection to their fields of research, and are just really cool.
They learn how to handle and clean ceramics, printed materials, textiles, wooden and painted objects. And they learn how to research items and curate collections. It’s all about observing, thinking and asking critical questions.
Many museum interns go on to careers that are directly related to the knowledge and skills they learned at Denison.
As one student says: “Working in a museum is similar to utilizing a time machine because objects date back as early as the 15th century, and each object tells a story that you learn as you work with it.”
Adriana Kidon ‘19 is a sophomore PPE (Philosophy, Political Science, Economics) major from New Jersey. She also plans on possibly minoring in art history. Adriana chose to apply to be a collections intern at the Denison Museum because she has always loved art museums, especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. After her time spent cataloguing and rehousing objects at the museum this summer, she has discovered a new-found love for museum work and hopes potentially to pursue art law after college.
Ellie Thien ‘17 is a senior History major and Women and Gender Studies minor from Columbus, Ohio. She spent her summer as a collections intern at the Denison Museum working with artifacts, rehousing, and cataloging. Having worked mostly with print documents in her major, she was interested in working with historical artifacts and objects at the Museum to gain experience dealing with different types of sources. She hopes to use her experience at the museum to assist her in pursuing graduate work in Modern European history.
Gabriella Caldwell ‘19 is a Black Studies major. Alongside her internship with the Denison Museum as a Collections Intern she works with World Peaces in Granville, a fair-trade retail/wholesale business. She aspires to take the skills she has learned working at the museum and apply them to the works of art she handles at World Peaces. In the future she would like to be World Peaces’ buyer, traveling across the world and working one on one with artisans.
Highlights of her summer with the museum have been learning about outside sculpture care, while cleaning Alexander Liberman’s The Path, learning about rehousing, while moving the Museum’s collection of ceramics, and learning the ins and outs of museum data.
Kevin Julian ’18 is a junior Classical Studies major from Granville, Ohio. Over the summer, Kevin has interned at the Denison Museum with duties such as a cataloging, rehousing, and researching. He also worked as an office assistant the previous school year of 2015-2016. Kevin’s hobbies include watching movies, playing games, and hanging with friends. He wishes to use his experience at the museum and within his major to potentially pursue a career in Museum Studies.
Bianca Lee ‘17 is a senior History major and a Anth/Soc minor with aspirations of either becoming a counselor and/or work in the non-profit world. This summer’s internship has been an intense and exciting experience learning about curation, artifact research and writing on political cartoons, and framing and matting. This summer, she also interned at the United Way, creating a proposal that would help connect the organization to the neighborhoods they serve. My hobbies include reading heart-warming novels, working out, and watching and critiquing anime. She hopes to learn more about curating and art education at the museum over the course of the next year, as it would give her experience to further pursue her endeavors.
Lashonda Love ’18 is a Music Performance major from Columbus, Ohio. She currently works as the Monomoy Curatorial Intern for the Denison Museum and as an Usher for the Vail Series. Involved in multiple campus music ensembles and other Fine Arts courses, Lashonda hopes to start a non-profit arts organization or participate in an arts education program for students without the financial means to study music or other arts in depth. She enjoys writing, performing folk music and slam poetry, yoga, and video gaming. Through her work at the museum, she hopes to get more experience learning how art, in all it’s various forms, can communicate with other art and learn how to share this experience with others. She also just enjoys geeking out about getting to touch museum objects.
