Many students in History of Art and Architecture, including those in our popular Museum Studies minor, secure valuable professional experience through internships with Collecting Knowledge Pittsburgh partners.
Carnegie Museum of Art
Abigail Sutherland
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Fall 2017
Abigail worked as an intern at the Carnegie Museum of Art, conducting a tracking-and-timing study. She observed visitor behavior in the museum’s Scaife Galleries, for the exhibit Created, Collected, Conserved: The Life Stories of Paintings. By studying patterns of visitors’ movements and coding the pertinent behaviors, Abigail was able to identify which artworks attracted most attention and which ones tended to be ignored.
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Alexandra Wolf
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Spring 2017
Alexandra Wolf Worked under the supervision of Hannah Turpin, Curatorial Assistant of Photography and Contemporary Art. She helped catalogue their collection of books using LibraryThing, labeling each title and organizing this collection. She logged over 2,000 books into the CMOA system. She also contributed to the planning of the Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh Wikipedia edit-a-thon.
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Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Ilana McAfoos
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Fall 2017
Ilana worked at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History with Assistant Curator Dr. Erin Peters. She helped in the development stages of the new Egyptian exhibit, Egypt on the Nile, creating and conducting audience evaluations on the plans for the future exhibit. This experience gave her greater appreciation of and understanding for the work and effort needed to create an accessible and effective exhibit.
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Hayley Pontia
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Spring 2017
Hayley undertook her internship in the Marketing Department of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Her position included editing and writing content, producing photographs for social media, organizing archives and answering visitor emails. One of her projects involved reorganizing the department’s photos, researching digital platforms that would allow an online space with easy access for all the employees to use.
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Contemporary Craft
Kendall Dunn
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Fall 2017
Kendall worked as an intern at Contemporary Craft researching its founder, Betty Raphael. She worked on her scrapbooks to create a SCALAR storybook project, focused on the 1979 Carnegie Museum of Art exhibition, Arts in Modern Handcrafts. She also did some on-site research on Raphael’s craft store in Verona, The Store, opened in 1971.
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Abigail Meloy
Fine Foundation Fellowship, Fall-Spring 2016-7
Abigail worked under the direction of Janet McCall, Executive Director of Contemporary Craft, and closely with the Exhibition staff. She facilitated exhibition programming, such as writing tours and assisting with events and installation/deinstallation. Abigail coordinated community partners for programming for Contemporary Craft’s upcoming social justice exhibition Shelter: Crafting a Safe Home. In addition, she also spearheaded a summative evaluation process for this exhibition.
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Mattress Factory
Marina Wei
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Spring 2017
Marina worked in the Education Department at the Mattress Factory as a teaching assistant in an after school program.INSTALL: Afternoons @ the Factory. She interacted with artists, museum educators and other staff within the Museum. She also shadowed tours, helped create materials for events and outreach and educational art activities for families.
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Rivers of Steel
Christie Scully
Museum Studies Academic Internship Summer 2016
Christie worked at Rivers of Steel in Homestead, curating an online exhibit called Little Steel. The exhibit documented the lesser-known steel mills in Pittsburgh and the Western Pennsylvania region. Christie discovered several previously-unknown steel mills and wrote biographies for about fifteen steel mills and accumulated over one hundred photographs and advertisements.
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Courtney Krauss
Museum Studies Academic Internship Spring 2016
Courtney worked with Rivers of Steel at the Carrie Furnace about the graffiti accumulated in the area after the site was left empty in 1978. She did her research on the Rivers of Steel archives to gain a larger understanding of Pittsburgh graffiti and the steel industry but she also interviewed former steel mill workers to learn about their memories of the site and their views on the graffiti as they come back to give tours to Carrie visitors.
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Senator John Heinz History Center
Monica Marchese
Fine Foundation Fellowship, Summer 2017
Monica conducted her internship at Heinz History Center. She supported the museum’s curators Leslie Przybylek and Lauren Uhl in historical research towards exhibitions. During her internsgip, Monica worked on background research and checklist development (artifact and image resources) for a future exhibition project focused on Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania’s connections to the film industry, from the late nineteenth century to the present.
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Alessandra Pazzaglia
Fine Foundation Fellowship, Summer 2016
Alessandra completed an Internship at the Senator John Heinz History Center within their Italian American program. She worked on a project that focused on a group called I Campagnoli, an Italian folk dance and singing group. Working with this community, she compliled a collection of pamphlets and photos and other memorabilia to develop an online exhibition for the group.
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The Andy Warhol Museum
Abigail Brady
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Fall 2017
Abigail interned at The Andy Warhol Museum as curatorial assistant for the Milton Fine Curator of Art, Jessica Beck. She did research work for two upcoming shows, Adman: Warhol Before Pop and Cry Baby: Devan Shimoyama. She used Pitt’s University Library System and compiled bibliographies on Warhol’s Boy Book drawings and photography to provide sources of reference to the curatorial team.
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Leslie Rose
Fine Foundation Fellowship, Summer 2017
Leslie conducted her internship in the curatorial department at The Andy Warhol Museum. Leslie assisted Jose Carlos Diaz, the Milton Fine Curator of Art, on the 2017 Farhad Moshiri show and the 2019 Vatican show. Also, she assisted Jessica Beck, Associate Curator of Art, on the 2018 shows on Warhol and contemporary artist Devan Shimoyama.
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The Frick Pittsburgh
Xiaoyuan Zhang
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Spring 2017
In this internship at the Education Department of the Frick Pittsburgh, Xiaoyuan facilitated the museum’s public programs, including gallery talks, adult and family programs and special events. The internship was supervised by Amanda Dunyak Gillen, Director of Learning & Visitor Experience. Xiaoyuan helped run special events such as the annual Women’s History Program and designed public programs for the upcoming Undressed exhibition.
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Isabella Sigado
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Fall 2016
As a curatorial intern at Frick Pittsburgh, Isabella worked with Chief Curator and Director of Collections Sarah Hall on research and project coordination for The Frick Collects: From Rubens to Monet, a major survey of the collecting habits of Henry Clay Frick and his daughter Helen. Her work towards the exhibition included research assignments on object provenance, exhibition label development and copy editing.
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University Art Gallery
Madeline Schatten
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Fall 2017
Madeline worked as an intern for the University of Pittsburgh Art Gallery (UAG). She transferred the online exhibit Configuring Disciplines: Fragments of an Encyclopedia from the Constellations website to the UAG website. She also digitized old posters and programs at the University of Pittsburgh Archives Service Center and archived past UAG exhibits on the website.
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Raka Sarkar
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Fall 2016
Raka assisted UAG Curator Isabelle Chartier to organize and enter information into CollectiveAccess, the gallery's collection database. Because the UAG has a collection of over 3000 objects, Raka needed to work with large groups of objects at a time, researching their origins and related entities while filling in discrepancies in data. She worked on the Inuit Art Collection and helped setting up the online exhibition for Exposure: Black Voices in the Arts.
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University Library System
Breanna Baldwin
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Fall 2017
Breanna worked in the Archives Service Center, University Library System, at University of Pittsburgh, on the papers collection of the Pittsburgh artist, activist, filmmaker, professor, creator, and researcher Steffi Domike. Starting by updating the finding guide and researching different aspects of Domike’s life and career, Breanna placed and catalogued new materials in the permanent collection.
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Maureen Jones
Museum Studies Academic Internship, Fall 2016
As an exhibit design intern in the department, Maureen’s primary responsibility was the construction of a Libguide for each Fall exhibit. This brought together the exhibit catalogs with images of the display space and relevant supporting visuals, as well as secondary research to complement the exhibition. Maureen also researched the Black Panther newspaper collection, ranging from the photographs that accompanied the articles to the supplementary drawings of the back covers.
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