About Me
Philosophy Statement
Museums are some of the most important, relevant, and inspiring institutions in the world. They can tell stories through its collections. Museums highlight the beauty and issues throughout history. They are places for people to learn and explore topics through inventive and interactive ways. They provide intimate experiences for visitors that is different for every visitor based on their background, ethnicity, and groups that they identify with. Museums are here to stay, and this is what inspires myself to work with these fantastic institutions.
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Working in museums for a limited time has already started to form my identity as a museum professional. My goal is to curate exhibitions that highlight the awe-inspiring, mesmerizing, and extraordinary stories of various artists from any period. Artists are the ones that hold the mirror back onto society, meaning that they reflect what they see into their work. Whether it’s done with intent or subconsciously all artists portray their situations and opinions about the world around them. My efforts will be to show these unique stories through engaging, innovative, and interactive curatorial practices. There are so many ways to learn and experience artwork and to show them in the most interesting way possible while staying true to the artists’ intentions is my inspiration for museum work.
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This work of mine needs to be inclusive and explore all sorts of different peoples, nationalities, and ethnicities. This provides the most diverse experiences for visitors and will provide them with stories that they did not even know they needed to experience. This may be controversial in many ways, but this sort of difficult work is what needs to be done to progress society. Making visitors question what they previously understood could act as watershed moments for their beliefs. The goal is to not sway their opinions but to show the complexities and gray zones of the world that shows that everything is not so clear cut.
Statement and Area of Focus
As stated in my philosophy statement my goal is to curate exhibits that explore a variety of stories, peoples, and background in the most creative and innovative ways possible. Through my studies there have been many topics explored within the museum field. The ones that are most relative to my career path are exhibit planning and design, collections care and management, and museum education. These are all topics that are relevant to museum curators and have helped to build my knowledge in the areas most relevant to my career. As an inspiring curator wanting to work in an art museum it is important to know how to educate my visitors, how to carefully care and handle artworks being used in the exhibit spaces, and how to properly plan and design exhibits. These all helped to form a base upon which I will stand, and this was supplemented with the internship experiences throughout my academic career. The internships with the 10th West Gallery and the Herron School of Art + Design Galleries revolved around being a curatorial assistant where I helped with the installation/deinstallation of exhibits, was involved in the design process, and helped with other logistical processes of planning an exhibit. These are the most crucial to my future career path. The third internship experience was with the Eiteljorg Museum, a Native American and Western art museum. In this position I was responsible for visitor research and evaluation and my work involved compiling comment card responses into spreadsheets, organizing survey results into clear and readable documents to be evaluated, and conducting in-person visitor interaction patterns across the various exhibits. This is another aspect of museums that will help to inform how I evaluate the effectiveness of my exhibit designs. This all combined together has shaped who I will be as an active museum professional.
Personal and Professional Growth
During my time with the Museum Studies Program at IUPUI my personal values, professional objectives, and personal ethics have evolved. Going into the program I was unsure on the path that I would take or the type of work that I wanted to do in museums. I was unaware of all the various jobs that museum professionals can pursue. Starting the program, I immediately gravitated towards curation and exhibit design elements in museums. I want to be a part of this creative process in museums that highlights various stories, peoples, and other subjects that are often underrepresented. I learned much from both my class Exhibit Planning and Design and the internship with the Herron School of Art + Design. I learned much about the process, development, and creation of exhibits and all the different aspects that are involved. This truly showed how collaborative and team-oriented this type of work is. All the members of the team at Herron were involved in multiple aspects of every exhibit and showed the importance of collaboration in museums.
My professional objectives have shifted to pursue a path as either a curator or exhibit designer in an art museum. Art museums are my focus because I majored in Art History during my undergraduate career at Franklin College. I have a base knowledge on the various periods throughout art’s history and will help me to better create exhibits. I want to create innovative and explorative exhibits that challenge the thoughts of visitors through engaging exhibit design.
The ethics in museums was a key topic discussed in every course taken at IUPUI. It showed the complexities and issues with museum work. Whether it be repatriating objects to the original groups of peoples who owned them or discussing the equity and inclusion of all groups of people, ethics are a significant part of museums. They are places to explore these difficult topics and enlighten the general public on these issues which is critical to the museum experience.