This past week marks the beginning of my summer internship with the Museum of Arts and Sciences (MOAS) as an intern for their Education Department. As an education intern my main work will revolve around the summer learning institute that the museum host for kids ages 4 to 13. The camps cover a wide variety of subjects (art, paleontology, history and other natural sciences) and as such it reflect the extensive scope of MOAS own collections.
For the most part, the week consisted of become acquainted with the facilities and the different members of the museum but, mainly those in the education department. On Monday, the other education intern and I met with the main director of the Education Department to discuss projects and the collections that we would have to become familiar with. Apart from aiding teachers in the classrooms we will also be giving tours to the children so, it is essential that we become comfortable and knowledgeable in terms of the diverse collections. We were given the opportunity to explore the museum and begin our research on the collections.
The follow days we shadowed different members of the education department to get an idea of how they presented material and interacted with a younger audience. In par with that, we began to setup and arrange the three classrooms that would be used throughout the summer. Amongst all these activities, we also began the completion of an ongoing project that would eventually be placed in the Charles and Linda Williams Children’s Museum.
While this week was the calm before the storm, I really look forward to the beginning of the summer camps. The educational aspect of children within a museum setting is one that I haven’t had the ability to actually participant in and I think it will be a great addition to my experiences as an Studio Art major and gallery assistant at the Hand Art Center.

Before starting my internship, I had experience working with museums/galleries since I do work-study with the Hand Art Center as a gallery assistant, so working with museums is nothing completely new for me. However, the Museum of Arts and Sciences offers more, and for this first week I began preparing to take on the duties of an intern for the Education department. Next week, I will begin giving tours to guests, so I had to start learning about the exhibits, particularly the Root exhibit and the Ground Sloth exhibit. Besides reading and memorizing information, I shadowed several tours that my supervisor gave. Most of the guests consist of children, thus it’s important to deliver information in a way that is engaging and easy for them understand. This often involves asking fun little questions like, which U.S. president are teddy bears named after?

The Root gallery mainly consists of Coca-Cola related items that the Root family had collected, then later donated to the museum. The Root family had owned a glass company and entered a Coca-Cola contest to design the bottle. Obviously their design won, having a resemblance to “the hobble-skirt”, which was part of women’s fashion at the time, and the design had also looked like a cocoa bean. The design of the bottle has been slimmed down, but otherwise it’s still a fair trademark for Coca-Cola. The hobble-skirt bottle is one of many coke bottles on display. The family also donated two race cars and train cars, even Mrs. Root’s collection of over 800 teddy bears.

The Ground Sloth is an interesting exhibit since the bones on display were found three miles away from the museum, and the animal had an impressive size of being at least ten feet tall. This particular species was the largest of its kind. Despite its size, it was a slow-moving herbivore.

As of now I’m still studying the exhibits, but as I mentioned earlier, next week I will begin giving tours on my own as well as assisting teachers during the summer camp.

Over the past few days I made Art Gallery posts for Gisela Alvarez, Taylor Gunderson, Erin McCollum, and Natasha Schaidt’s Senior Thesis Exhibitions.

A few of the images in their portfolios had file sizes that exceeded the WordPress limit of 9 MB. I cropped and scaled down pictures as needed using my laptop’s photo editor and GIMP so they could be uploaded to the media gallery.

I wasn’t sure whether to include Gisela Alvarez’s dialogue with Andy Warhol on her Senior Thesis Exhibition post. It seems relevant to her senior show in terms of her not wanting to influence the spectator with an artist’s statement. It also serves to express the source of her artistic inspiration, but it’s lengthy, casual and might detract focus from her exhibition’s specific meaning.

I couldn’t find the name of Taylor Gunderson’s Senior Thesis Exhibition, nor the titles of five of his seven sculptures at first. I’m thinking the title of his exhibition might literally be “Senior Thesis Exhibition”, because that’s what was printed on his postcard. Images of his sculptures weren’t captioned with titles in his portfolio. I would seek him out for clarification, but he doesn’t seem to have a Facebook profile anymore. The titles of two pieces are included on his postcard, and I managed to figure out a few of the remaining pieces once I zoomed in on the sculptures’ nameplates in the gallery photos. A few titles were blurry and unreadable, so I have three with unknown or uncertain titles.

This past week I started my apprenticeship at Endstation Theatre Company in Lynchburg, Virginia. My apprenticeship is in stage management and the show I am stage managing (The whipping Man) is the last show (of 3) in the season so I will not start working on it until later this summer but I have been in contact with the director and will be working on preparing paperwork and other materials very soon. I will also be doing a teaching assistantship for their Embark Conservatory program, which also will start later this summer. The first couple of days of my apprenticeship I assisted the stage manager and assistant stage manager of the first show with prep work for their rehearsals. This included cleaning out and preparing the rehearsal space and taping out a visual ground plan on the floor of the rehearsal room. Since then I have been working with the scenic paints department. Within the paints department I have mixed paint colors from paint samples for things such as brick mortar, walls, signs, wood, etc. I have also been doing a lot of painting scenery pieces. The past few days we painted wooden strips to look like wood flooring using layer processes. We started with an off white base/primer coat and then went over it with a two color directional blend. We followed this with a glaze, followed by another layer of glaze in a different color, and then we did two coats of semi-gloss sealer. There were three different “types” of wood that we painted but they were all painted using the same processes.

When I was compiling images and information to include in Elizabeth Frates’ and Danielle Grischam’s art gallery posts, I made sure to provide specific details, such as titles and mediums, whenever possible. After publishing, I looked through the old blog posts and noticed Katie Mackey’s detailing her mistake of not using the “media gallery” option when inserting images into posts. I made this same mistake, and went back to update my gallery posts.

In my posts, I present the artist and their art in a way that might be fully informative and appealing to whomever might come across them in the gallery. I would like it to be possible for whomever may be interested in the artist to find their public social media page or professional website, and continue to see more from them. Based on my own assumptions and a few specific google-searches after posting, the creative arts website doesn’t seem to get that much or that kind of traffic, but it’s a possibility that could better serve Stetson alumni and the Creative Arts Department.

I considered contacting the various graduates by email, once I couldn’t find any links on Frates’ or Grisham’s facebook pages. The issues are: I don’t know if the stetson email remains valid after graduation and if it were still valid, they probably don’t check it anymore, and I’m not sure if I want to contact them through non-academic platforms. I’d prefer a professional approach instead of directly pestering them via their personal facebook pages.

At the beginning of my internship with Stetson’s Creative Arts Department, I posted Grace Aguda’s profile. It was straightforward, I only had a few issues tagging and titling the post. I wasn’t sure whether to tag her as a graduating senior or as an alumnus considering she had graduated by the time I posted her profile. I looked at previous posts to see what other interns had done. The previous profiles are tagged according to the context of the interview, not according to the real-time graduation-status of the person who was interviewed. I backdated the post to around the time she submitted her interview, and tweaked the wording in the snippet and meta description to optimize the post a bit.

Additionally, I had been making trips to campus to work in the ceramic studio at Sampson hall. My trips were mostly unfruitful. The entire building was blocked off at one point due to roof maintenance so I couldn’t enter the building without technically trespassing.

I’ve been met with a few absurd-but-manageable obstacles, such as losing my wallet and needing a new glasses prescription. Not to mention my driver’s license was in said wallet, so I can’t legally drive. Until I am in a better position to be making regular trips back to campus, I will put my sculpting plans on hold.

In the meantime, I’m drafting my ideas so the physical details of my sculptures are more thought out and planned, and I’m designing characters for my future web comic.

This summer I am working at Darice Incorporated in their Product Development department in the Trends area. Darice is a local art supplies company in Cleveland who started by becoming a wholesaler to stores like Joann Fabrics and Pat Catans Craft. As I have been here I have been able to witness them grow and make deals with large buyers like Dollar General, Ross, TJ Maxx, and Target. I have been fortunate enough to be included in the preparation for these meetings by designing trend reports, putting together presentation boards, accumulating information and creating info graphics, being involved in Photo Studio Tech, designing show room exhibitions, doing work in the comp room to show examples of the work our products are capable of and much more.

Since our growth as a company, we have been recently bought by Michaels craft stores and are in a transitional state. Since our new Chief Executive of Creative and Vice President of Creative have started, the environment has changed and become much more welcoming and supportive. Every month we have a “Three Cheers” meeting where the entire creative team meets and thanks or commends each other for the work the team has done (attached are a few 3 cheers notes). Everyday our CEC pops popcorn and brings it to everyone at 3 o clock because he “understands how the end of the day drags”. I work directly under the Director of Visual Marketing & Consumer Research alongside specifically typography designers, photo studio designers, and logo & graphic designers.

Last Tuesday I arrived in my home country—Venezuela— for my graphic design internship at the Zulia Museum of Contemporary Art, which aims to improve the lives of the citizens by showcasing the work of local artists from low socioeconomic backgrounds and by organizing educational initiatives in the community to promote the importance of the arts. On Wednesday, I met with my supervisor to discuss some of the projects I am going to be working on. The next exhibit is scheduled to be ready by the end of the month, so I have started working on print and web publications to send out to the community while I look at the museum’s newsletter and website to gain a better understanding of their visual identity. Although they do not have a corporate identity manual, they have a set of parameters when it comes to the color palette, use of the logo and design elements.

I am mostly going to be working with Adobe Photoshop, In Design and Illustrator. However, my supervisor needs help setting up an HTML page with the schedule and program of the month, so I’ll be also working with Dreamweaver for this project. This week I visited the current exhibits with a more experienced intern who gave me a tour and explained the layout of the information/text panels and labels in the exhibits.

Although the people working in the graphic design department mostly focus on promoting current and future events and exhibits, they sometimes collaborate with the education department to advertise their different activities. In conclusion, there is plenty of graphic design work for different purposes and I look forward to learning about the work dynamics to complete it.

This is the ID I was given to be able to walk around the Museum freely