Amy R.'s Museum Internships

This summer I have had the amazing opportunity to intern at two museums, both in my hometown. At The Blanton Museum of Art on the University of Texas at Austin's campus, I worked with Martha Bradshaw, the Manager of Visitor and Volunteer Services, to coordinate and orientate volunteers at the museum and facilitating our installation art/art-making station, the WorkLab Satellites. Each day I am in the museum, I interact with visitors and volunteers, make friends with the Gallery Assistants (our security folks, many of whom are current or former UT students), and meet more and more of the staff through the logistics of day-to-day business in the gallery. I have really enjoyed getting to know some of the docents as well because they are just as passionate about the works in our permanent collections as they are about the works that are only on display for a short time. Additionally, I have spent time working with volunteer records in the Altru database/ records management system that the museum has in place.

My second internship is with Emily Cayton, Associate Educator for Teachers and Docents at The Contemporary Austin.  While The Blanton has a substantial permanent collection including paintings and prints going back to the Medieval period, Classical casts, and a significant component of Latin American contemporary art, The Contemporary's downtown location serves as a white box space, a blank page for each new exhibit to interact with uniquely. My primary responsibility has been doing research about upcoming works and preparing materials about them for the docents. For someone who is accustomed to researching in the stacks of a library or skimming through JSTOR search results, this has been an experience of becoming more aware of the variety of online art resources and how helpful (or otherwise) news articles about new and old exhibitions can be. A studio artist and passionate art educator, Emily has also fostered in me an interest in art education with print resources, allowing me to shadow her tours, and by getting to assist during part of the Summer Teacher Institute, a continuing education opportunity for local art teachers, which explored a variety of methods and lessons for teaching through an art museum. Through these internships I have learned about two different kinds of art, been a part of two different kinds of art museum, and learned to see the museum experience from the view of the educator and the visitor.

            As long as I am in the area, I’ll be able to stay a part of these institutions through volunteering and I intend to serve as a docent for the Do Ho Suh exhibition for which I researched. http://thecontemporaryaustin.org/exhibitions/do-ho-suh/

 

One of the WorkLab Satellites and a supply cart
Blanton Blog Post: http://blog.blantonmuseum.org/2014/06/worklab-satellites-an-interview-with-artist-leslie-mutchler.html 

Megan Anderson ('12) at Texas A&M

Megan works on her SCUBA skills.

Down at Texas A&M, I've spent almost a year climbing up the steep learning curve that the Nautical Archaeology Program (NAP) throws at its first-year students.  Having not taken time off between undergraduate and graduate studies, I am one of the young students in the department. However, with the solid preparation I received through the archaeology program at Evansville and my previous underwater excavation experience, I haven't felt unprepared for the challenge. So far I have learned how to draft ship lines and construction drawings (and in the course of doing so I learned that 68 hours without sleep is about the limit a person can go); how to prepare and give thirty-minute presentations on a weekly basis; and that a twenty-page paper is "a bit short." I've also spent quite a bit of time working at the Conservation Research Lab, helping to record barrel staves and other interesting bits recovered from shipwrecks. The NAP has a very strong emphasis on hands-on learning, and this semester I am enrolled in a scientific diving course in order to gain familiarity with all of the equipment and techniques used in underwater excavations and become a better diver in general. This summer I will be participating in the Burgaz Harbors Project in Turkey run by Dr. Elizabeth Greene in collaboration with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA). Information on this and other INA projects can be found at inadiscover.com.

SHUMLA Field Methods in Rock Art featured in Texas Highways magazine

The March 2012 issue of Texas Highways magazine features a story on the 2011 session of SHUMLA Field Methods in Rock Art.  Junior Katy Schmidt participated in the 2011 season and can be seen in the third photograph in this article. 

For information about the 2012 season, visit SHUMLA's website.

Student Katy Schmidt at the Lower Pecos Rock Art Recording Center and Preservation Project

I spent this past summer in Comstock, Texas participating in a field school through the Lower Pecos Rock Art Recording and Preservation Project sponsored by SHUMLA, a nonprofit archaeological education and research center. In the field school we learned reserch methods and how to properly record the rock art of the area. Some of the stages of the recording process are figure identification, initial figure counts, figure photographs, making forms for the figures, figure illustration, and putting all of the information about a figure into a data base. Each figure got its own set of forms in which we recorded all information about that figure. During the field school we recorded a site known as Panther Cave in Seminole Canyon. The site is endangered due to rising humidity resulting from the Amistad Reservoir and from mud-daubers nesting in the cave. During the field school we clocked in thousands of man hours and recorded hundreds of figures.

After the field school ended in June and the other students left I stayed on at SHUMLA as an intern until the beginning of August. For the internship I was responsible for figure illustrations, attribute checks on the figures, field checks of all of the attributes in the field, and entering data into the SHUMLA database for each figure recorded. During the internship I also had the chance to work on rock art from the site of Delicato. The figures at Delicato are badly damaged from dust deposits and very difficult to see at times. This is one of the reasons why it needed to be recorded. Luckily we managed to finish the recording process during the summer. All in all, my field school and internship experiences this past summer were very rewarding and enjoyable.

Student Marley Rardin at Courson Archaeological Research

In summer 2011 I participated in the Courson Archaeological Research (CAR) project in Perryton, TX, right outside Amarillo.  The Courson project includes multiple sites on land owned by Mr. Courson, who has a huge interest in archaeology and the plains area of Texas.  Since 2000, geophysical surveys and archaeological survey and excavation projects have been carried on land used for grazing cattle and for farming.  For the first two weeks of this three-week project in 2011, I dug test pits at an Archaic site called Spider Peak; we found a lot of chert debitage as well as bison bone fragments.  During the third week, when I was not in the lab, I had the chance to use a metal detector twice as we searched for historic sites with metal remains that may have been used by Native Americans, soldiers, or both.

Marley (center) on a windy day at Spider Peak.

Student Leah Thomas at the Sid Richardson Museum in Fort Worth, TX

This summer, I spent eleven weeks as an intern in the Sid Richardson Museum Education Department in Fort Worth, Texas. The Sid Richardson Museum is a collection of Western Art, primarily that of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. I was fortunate to work with a very caring and encouraging staff who spent the first four weeks teaching me about museum resources and introducing me to the Sid Richardson collection. My internship project focused on a new family education program to be implemented later this year. The final product will be an iPad program consisting of an audio script, images, and sound effects. My part in the development of this program was to research two assigned artworks, write the audio scripts based on this research, and compile relevant images to appear on the iPad. I additionally created an associated Young Viewers’ Guide for each piece of art, intended for five to seven year olds. I now more fully appreciate the extensive research, editing, and time that is required to develop children’s museum programs, and am inspired to see the positive influence art can have on people’s lives.

Leah is a junior Archaeology and Art History double-major at UE.