Each week the Brooklyn Museum Summer Interns participate in full-day educational programs that explo

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 -- source link

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