Fine Arts Career Services

Well, with the entire Demographics project completed, it’s time to move on to the next thing.  My next project is an organizational project.  At the museum, the whole front desk staffing situation has changed, simultaneously with my starting interning there.  Before February 2009, the front desk was staffed by paid employees.  This consisted of a few people working full-time to fill the position’s 10-evening shift, 6 days per week.  The total number of employees needed to cover all of these shifts was very few, and the total number of people who worked per day was rarely over two.  Now, however, this job is staffed entirely with interns and volunteers.  The complications arise in scheduling and training; instead of one person working an 8 hour shift or so, now volunteers work shifts of 2-4 hours each.  This means that during any given day, 5 or even more people might be working the shift.  In addition, schedules are not necessarily set or regular, as volunteers may have to work around other jobs and committments.  Hence the need for an organization strategy, as managing up to 30 employees is drastically different than managing 2 or 3.

Eric and I have been brainstorming about a way to streamline scheduling and communication towards and within all of the volunteers and interns.  We’ve decided to start a Gmail email which will host a calendar, which will be automatically synced to Eric’s scheduling calendar, so it will be constantly updating and will reflect changes immediately.  This way anyone can look at an updated schedule instead of a paper or downloaded schedule which may not be current.  We also decided to create a bulletin-type board on which we will post everybody’s photo, bio, and some sort of a personal blurb; this way we can know who eachother are, as can everybody else who works in the museum, and it will facilitate communication, such as if we wanted to get a shift covered or share an idea.

The project is fun, and it is underway.  I love organizing and creating systems, so this is a fun project for me.  Also, I like the idea that I am making something that will be helpful in the future, even after I complete my time there.

My job at the Austin Museum of Art just keeps growing.  I keep getting to do all kinds of different things, which I really enjoy - I love that there are always new projects and new formats in which to work.  I’ve been going back over the Demographics project I did, and reformatting some of the slides.  Before, I had been instructed to just use charts, with no images.  However, when we went back and looked at the giant amount of information, the format of numbers and words was a bit confusing.  So now I’m going back in and making graphs and other images in order to help the data to be more understandable.  It’s amazing how things just look like confusing sets of numbers until you add a graphic image to them - they suddenly represent something!

I am also working on a PhotoShop project using the demographics data.  I’ve collected all of our show’s sampled visitor data and made a graph listing how many people from which zipcodes in Austin have come in.  Then I’m taking a map of Austin, plotted out by zipcode, and color-coding the regions which have our greatest to smallest draws, based on an analysis of the zipcode data.  Fun!

I’m slowly realizing that the semester is soon ending!!  It is shocking that my job will soon come to an end - I’m realizing also that I would love to stay.  I’m moving to Boston, however, and I’ll have to stop.  This job has really made me appreciate the value of interning.  Where I didn’t know much about a non-profit museum before, now I understand so much.  I also understand how an internship could be a great way to lead into a job!

Whew!  Well, I am done with the demographics project.  It was so interesting.  I must say, I learned a lot about Excel, and I’m glad to have learned it.  After putting all of our collective data into tables and charts, I made graphs so make the data easily understood, thus allowing interpretation of the data.  Depending on the type of information, I chose my graph type and setup to best illustrate its findings.  Then, after I finished working on this project for our most recent exhibition, I compiled data for the last seven exhibitions into one giant powerpoint presentation which shows trends and consistent or inconsistent figures.  I worked on setting these into an understandable set of images, and then comparing and contrasting them with themselves and with other demographic data.  It was truly fascinating, and I enjoyed the work very much.

My supervisor and I then brainstormed about my next project.  The museum has many new volunteers and interns like myself, and so now the need for a broad organization system of all of us is inevitably necessary.  So I get this fun job.  I’m going to make a communication board with everyone’s photo and pertinent information, so that we can all recognize eachother and know how to communicate among ourselves.  I’m also helping organize ideas for volunteer incentives, such as thank you gift certificates or tickets to shows.  This is a really fun job, as I love to organize, and really enjoy creating systems.  I think I will enjoy helping people put ideas together and be able to communicate effectively.  I’m looking forward to my new job!

This blog comes at a strange time, when Spring Break has just ended and I’ve just returned from a long vacation.  I haven’t worked at AMOA in almost two weeks.  I thought I’d take a break from writing directly about AMOA and put down some thoughts about museums and the community, and what that means to me as I’m learning and working here.

I just returned from Boston, another city blooming with art and community resources.  I visit Boston often, and actually plan to move there this summer when I graduate.  This time I visited the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, as well as the MIT Museum (more of a science and industry museum than art - although the Arthur Ganson sculpture exhibit  http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/ga…) is incredible).  The Boston MFA is a giant spectacle; the building itself is absolutely huge and the collections are vast, varied, and expansive.  It’s quite a different experience than going to AMOA, a much smaller museum with galleries downtown.  However, I thought about accessability; the MFA was a destination trip; we planned our subway route and only visited the museum once we got there.  The MFA has a food court and glorious grounds full of trees and green grass, and even has the SMFA, its associated school, nearby in a separate location.  AMOA, on the other hand, is much more of a place one might pop into unplanned; its central downtown location makes it much more of an accessible, less overwhelming trip.  Though it doesn’t have the grounds, the space, the food, and the school right there, it feels more manageable, which could be more attractive depending on the visitor.  Its downtown location makes it more like a part of a day, as opposed to a completely separate and planned excursion.

Location certainly has a lot to do with these differences, but so does the way location fits into the idea a visitor has about the museum.  I liked thinking about this from a sociological and urban planning perspective, too.  I’ll be sure to make note of the way art and museums fits into a community in the future.

This was another interesting week at the Austin Museum of Art.  We have two new shows up.  The first is a series of photographs by a photographer named Clifford Ross.  His series is called Outside Realism, and involves amazingly detailed images of hurricanes, coastlines, mountains, and more.  Using some black and white and some color, he captures distinct characteristics in feeling detail of each image.  Some huge in scale, some small, each photograph is powerful.  The second exhibit is called States of America, by a Texan artist named Lordy Rodriquez.  He has created a series of fantastical maps of America based on his ideas of America.  As a child, his family took many road trips, and his interest in maps spun out of his fascination by the difference in perception versus literal mapping.  His maps are all hand-drawn, using no computers whatsoever.

I’ve been working at the front desk, and also continuing my work analysing our sample demographic data.  I’ve been using Excel and have made charts and graphs, and then placed them into Powerpoint to make a cumulative presentation of the data.  I’m also combining the information from the most recent show with other shows of the past two years, to create a total idea of the longterm demographic situation for the museum.

I’m going in tomorrow to continue this process!  I keep loving this internship.

This week has been different at the Austin Museum of Art.  The galleries have been closed, as the exhibits from the last two months were taken down, and two new exhibits have been installed.  On Friday the 20th, I got to enjoy my first benefit of being a member of the museum (one of the perks of my internship) by being invited +1 to the Member’s Preview opening of the new show.  It was a fun party, with a band, drinks and snacks, and a dressed-up showing of Austin’s art lovers.  The two artists featured in the new exhibits were present, and it was the first time the show was open to anyone.  It was exciting and fun!

Otherwise, I’ve still been working my normal shifts; they’ve been different, however.  The main doors to the museum stayed open while the galleries were closed, and people still came in to visit the Museum Store or to (sadly) find out the status of the galleries.  I helped people find alternative places to visit in the area and became really familiar with showing people around and offering suggestions, such as visiting Arthouse at the Jones Center or the Mexic-Arte Museum or the Blanton.  Meanwhile, since my job was obviously different than normal, I also did some demographic analysis based on samples we take as people come in the door.  In doing this, the museum can find out which areas of Austin are finding out about shows and which are not, as well as what age groups, genders, ethnicities, etc. we are reaching and which suggest a need to reevaluate our outreach goals in order to gain broader access to the Austin community as a whole.

I’m excited about my shift tomorrow, as the doors and galleries will be wide open for the new show!!

I’m in my third week now at the Austin Museum of Art. My days there have been interesting and fun; I like talking about art, and leading people into their experience of the museum. It’s interesting how different people’s desires can be; some people are eager to hear all the information I can possibly give them about the artists, their backgrounds, and the pieces in the exhibits, while others simply want to experience it on their own. I’m learning how to interpret what people might want and be better able to accommodate their particular needs. Luckily I have been given a lot of information about the artists and the shows, so I feel comfortable telling people anything they might want to hear, or at least knowing where to find it.

Sunday the 8th was the last day of the two exhibits we had at the museum, so on Saturday morning I distributed flyers about the shows in an attempt to get people in before they are taken down and changed. I went to the Neill-Cochran Museum, the LBJ Museum on campus, Spiderhouse, the Art Department at UT, and a couple of other places. Everyone I talked to was very friendly and eager to accommodate. I liked these interactions.

For the next couple of weeks, the galleries at the museum will be closed for the installation of our two new exhibits. The museum will still be open for questions and access to the museum store, so I’ll maintain my regular hours there. However, in my greater free time I’ll be doing more research and have some special projects to investigate. I’m looking forward to everything I will learn and my continued involvement!