Tag: Art

To start off my third day at the North Carolina Museum of Art, I finished checking floor plans for the galleries I hadn’t gotten to yesterday, a task that only took about half an hour. After that, I spent my day bouncing between different members of the design team, helping with odd jobs and tasks. I helped Rand and David move display cases, moved furniture out of Gallery 4 with Clare, and put up labels for artwork with Sean.

I was able to get a tour of the conservation department, whose current big project is a marble statue called Bacchus. His torso and head are ancient Roman, his legs and one of his arms are from the Renaissance, and his other arm is being built by the museum now in order to display the full statue. I was also able to walk around the African galleries, parts of which are being rearranged next week.

My second day at the North Carolina Museum of Art, I was helping Molly, a different member of the Design Team with her project. Said project had me checking gallery spaces against floor plans to make sure that all the art was where it was supposed to be. For me, this meant a lot of walking around and puzzling over which ID numbers went with which pieces and being very confused when some of the art was mysteriously missing. No, nothing had been stolen; the issue was that the floor plans were kind of old and when pieces got moved around or sent to storage, the plans hadn’t gotten updated. By the end of the day, I was able to get through nearly all of the West Building of the museum, except for part of the Modern/Contemporary galleries, a tiny part of the European galleries, and the American galleries, which, luckily, had been completed beforehand. Meanwhile, work continued on de-installing the art in the Ancient American gallery in preparation for the new exhibition, and plans were made regarding swapping out pieces in the African galleries.

Arriving at NCMA this morning, I was pretty anxious. Maybe it had something to do with driving a route I’d never driven before, but I think it was mainly my internal monologue of ‘Oh my god, I’m interning at the gosh dang Art Museum! I cannot mess this up or I’m pretty sure the Art Police will kill me’. Turns out,  actually entering the building was the hardest part of my day. I was assigned to work with Clare, part of NCMA’s design team. She told me that she does a variety of things at the museum, but today we had to spackle and paint a wall since the art handlers had taken a few paintings down and there were holes from where said paintings had been hanging. (I don’t have pictures of that–it was just a white wall, y’all.)

While that was going on, art handlers and a variety of other people from other departments in the museum were moving pieces from one of the ancient American galleries into storage. They were going to replace it with an exhibition showcasing a ‘grain mummy’ (no, I don’t really know what that is either), which is supposed to be opened in late July. I was able to observe, but understandably enough, they didn’t let the 17-year-old intern touch the precious art pieces.

I was also able to get a tour of the Judaic gallery from two docents whose scheduled morning tour group were unable to get to the museum. Did you know that NCMA has a Hanukkah lamp that was shipped to the white house for Hanukkah a few years ago?

I was told the story of a wedding ring that was used for the weddings of every Jewish woman in a certain village for a length of time. The reason for that was that none of the women should be arrogant enough to have a ring more beautiful than the others.

I also saw the Design DT when they came to NCMA for inspiration for their projects and I was able to feel self-important since I was working at the museum and theoretically, would have authority over them should they become unruly.

So, yeah, all in all, my first day at NCMA was pretty great.

Sources Cited:

Hanukkah Lamp– Lucidon, Amanda. “Hanukkah Reception 2015.” The White House, 9 Dec. 2015, bit.ly/2QxZWr9.