This summer, I
completed my internship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American
History (NMAH) in the Division of Home and Community Life (HCL). HCL is the
largest division in the museum, responsible for the care, research, and
development of collections that illustrate the daily lives of Americans since
the country’s founding.[1] As such, curators in the
division research a variety of topics, such as home furnishings, domestic
production, patterns of migration and immigration, and the development of
leisure time.[2]
As a curatorial
intern at NMAH, my experience involved several components. I worked on two
projects this summer; the first involved conducting archival research for an
exhibit my supervisor is guest curating at a smaller history museum. This
research was done as part of collaborative team—I worked with a fellow public
history graduate student from California, and an American Studies graduate
student from New York. The three of us approached our work in different ways,
yet we worked extremely well together. The second project (which I worked on
independently) involved the accessioning and cataloging of a new collection
which documented the life of an African American family that moved to the Montana
Territory after Emancipation. As someone who has been interested in collections
and collections management, this was an invaluable experience, which I will
explore in more detail in future posts.
The second
component of my internship involved learning about the both the museum and the
Smithsonian as institutional entities, as well as their commitment to research.
I attended a variety of meetings: meetings of the HCL curators, collections
meetings concerning “born digital” collections, planning meetings for upcoming
public events, and a teach-in centered on making the Smithsonian more
accessible to visitors with a variety of physical and emotional needs. I also attended
the museum’s monthly staff meeting, in which curators from NMAH, the National
Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and the soon-to-open National Museum of
African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) discussed the ways in which
language can be used to communicate powerful and complicated ideas in a more
purposeful and inclusive manner. On Tuesday afternoons, I attended the weekly
Colloquium, in which Smithsonian fellows shared their research in process,
covering a wide array of topics, from art history, to latent narratives in
collections, to the history of human modeling for computer graphics.
My supervisor
introduced a third component to my internship—visiting other museums to examine
and analyze museum practice in other settings. We visited NMAI, the National
Museum of African Art (NMAfA), and the American Visionary Art Museum in
Baltimore. It was an interesting experience to visit these other museums while simultaneously
wearing the hats of “everyday visitor” and “graduate student figuring out how
these sites function”. On these excursions, we were able to take mini
deep-dives into the different exhibits, learning the politics behind how an
object gets included (or excluded), and just discussing if and how curation for
a history museum is similar and different from curation for an art museum.
Currently, the
cultural and civic relevance of museums is rightly under critical scrutiny.
Knowing and understanding this heightened my awareness not just of the spaces I
inhabited throughout my internship, but also of the objects being collected (or
not). In my future posts, I am interested in exploring the history of NMAH and
how it is related to the nature of its collections.
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