Interns’ Blog Archives

  • Maura Ferrigno, Fall 2022
    For the past month and a half, I have been working as Exhibitions Intern for the Bates Museum of Art. My work has consisted of researching the artists that the museum will feature in upcoming…
  • Isabelle Job, October 2022
    My internship at the Bates Museum of Art has been educational and informative and has opened my eyes to the ways in which museums operate. It has exceeded my expectations in regard to museum work,…
  • The Power of Speech and History from Lesley Dill’s Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me
    So far this semester, my involvement in the installation process of Lesley Dill’s exhibition, Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, was one of the most influential experiences I have had working at the Bates Museum of…
  • Three Big Heads: Inside Bernard Langlais’ Sketchbook
    Much of my everyday work as the Collections Management Intern at the Bates Museum of Art consists of cataloging pieces received by the Museum into our EmbARK database. In 2013, the museum was gifted a…
  • Julia Oliver, Midterm Reflection
    Finding myself already in the middle of this semester it’s nice to have the opportunity to look back and reflect on what I’ve accomplished and learned thus far. Given the task of researching the artists…
  • Laura Littlefield, Midterm Reflection
    As someone who is hoping to pursue a career in the art industry, working as an Exhibitions Intern at the Bates College Museum of Art has given me exposure to the process and challenges of…
  • Grace Devine Midterm Reflection
    Working as an exhibition intern with the Bates Museum of Art has been a highly rewarding, educational, and enjoyable experience. My internship has focused on researching the incredible collection of photographs kindly gifted to the…
  • Jeremy Bruce, Midterm Reflection
    So far, my time as an exhibitions intern alongside Grace Devine, Julia Oliver, and Laura Littlefield has been incredibly fruitful. Although I had previous experience in art education when I entered this internship, I never…
  • Lucy Sherman and the Goodbody Collection
    I have had the utmost pleasure of working as an intern with the Bates Museum of Art this Fall. My fellow intern, Sophie Cappello, and I were presented almost immediately with our task for the…
  • Sophie Cappello and the Goodbody Collection
    Reflecting on my internship involvement at the Bates Museum of Art, I can truthfully describe my experience as a positive one. This program offered me opportunities to exercise my writing, critical thinking, and research abilities…
  • Delving into Bernard Langlais’ Works on Paper
    My work at the Bates College Museum of Art started as a way to gauge my interest in the field as a future career. I was, and still am to a degree, uncertain about what…
  • To Be Framed: Curating Figures and Fruit by Beth Van Hoesen
    I had an awesome semester at the Museum. It commenced with a research project on recently donated work from the Jane Costello Wellehan Collection (see our previous post). For the latter half of our internship,…
  • Initial Beauty: Chinese Cultural Revolution-era Propaganda Posters
    I have thoroughly enjoyed my time as a Bates Museum Intern this fall.  Although it was not a normal semester, by any means, I still found myself engaged and surprised by all the wonderful opportunities…
  • Exploring the Great State of Maine – Artists of the Jane Costello Wellehan Collection
    Our first internship weeks were marked with an extensive research project on approximately 50 artists, many who have some relationship with Maine. Their objects were generously donated to the Bates Museum of Art’s permanent collection…
  • Looking at Maine Landscapes from Tennessee
    When I was creating my presentation for Rollin’ to Olin, a program the museum offers annually for all Lewiston 4th-graders, I came across an amazing painting. I was in awe of its composition, subject matter,…
  • Education Internship
    I have greatly enjoyed being involved in the Bates Museum of Art and working as the Museum Education Intern this winter. I have had so many wonderful opportunities, from helping with block printing workshops to…
  • Chenoweth Hall (1908-1999)
    Chenoweth Hall was a musician, sculptor, writer, painter, and art professor who has over a dozen pieces in Bates College Museum of Art’s collection. Hall was truly a woman of the arts, having played violin…
  • Carl Sprinchorn and his Maine Odyssey
    Many times, in my years at Bates thus far, I have thought to myself, “How did I end up in Lewiston, ME? I am not at all disparaging the school that I have called home…
  • The Unexpected Find
    As a Collections Management intern at Bates Museum of Art, I spent most of my time interacting directly with works of art: observing them, describing them, and cataloging them. For the majority of the time…
  • Oh Dear! (My Experiences with Deer Woman)
    As a Collections Management Intern with the Bates College Museum of Art, I examine works of art that the museum has acquired quite closely, and I get to see a lot of interesting things. Recently,…
  • Challenges and Rewards of a Museum Educator
    For my internship at the Bates College Museum of Art I was involved with educational programming, working under the Education Fellow Abigail Abbott who upheld the position. Museum studies, a field I had recently been…
  • Looking Beyond the Surface
    The pieces that come through the Bates College Museum of Art are diverse to say the least. As a Collections Management Intern, I have seen a variety of pieces that were acquired through donations, as…
  • Art Not Seen: The Purposes of Museum Storage
    This semester as a Collections Intern, I’ve spent a lot of time accessioning and cataloging donations or museum purchases and adding them to the database. In doing this, much of my time was also spent…
  • Maika’I Tubbs and A Connection to Place
    Upon working on the exhibition, Anthropocenic: Art About the Natural World in the Human Era, I found the topic of place to be quite common in the artists’ interests. Many of the artists emphasize their…
  • Interview with Jaime DeSimone
    My name is Katie Bull and I am a senior sociology major at Bates. I am the education intern at the Bates Museum of Art and have learned so much from working at the museum…
  • Thai Tran ’19: My Experience as a Collections Intern
    Categorizing items and managing databases are things I had been doing extensively prior to being an intern at the Bates Museum of Art, and an opportunity to apply these skills to art was something I…
  • Calvin Reedy and His Experience With the Bates College Museum of Art
    My name is Calvin, I’m a senior, and I spent the Winter semester here at the Bates Museum of Art interning as a curatorial assistant to Dan Mills. Before I go into detail about what…
  • Landscape Rap
    We are rapping about landscape this week. Students wrote poetry that made them think about colors in a landscape. How does a color taste, feel like, smell like? We all started with a piece of…
  • Museum Curatorial Internship Reflection
    As the winter semester winds up and the internship concludes, I realized I would have never known about the different roles and jobs in a museum and how they collaboratively optimize its functions and performances,…
  • A Short Interview with the Senior Art and Visual Culture Majors
    For my blog, I interviewed the senior studio art majors during the Senior Thesis show on Friday, April 6, 2018. Saleha Belgaumi “I’m not inspired piece by piece, I just make work as part of…
  • Combining Environmental Studies and Art into a curatorial internship
    Over the past year, I have been working with the museum’s director, Dan Mills, as a curatorial intern for the exhibition, Anthropocenic: Art About the Natural World in the Human Era. This exhibition, which highlights…
  • Three Pure Ones
    Being the Art Museum’s Collections Management Intern for the semester has been nothing but fascinating. Getting the opportunity to explore a recent acquisition of Vietnamese and African pieces, with similarities to the collections at the…
  • What Makes a Presentation Better
    Since I started working as an Education Intern at the Bates College Museum of Art, I have been thinking quite a bit about what the function of a museum is. In my very first few…
  • Trying New Things
    Going into this internship, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I could assume, I could hope, I could believe that I wasn’t going to be in over my head. But what I really didn’t…
  • Alen MacWeeney’s Photographs
    This fall semester I worked as a Collections Management Intern for the Bates College Museum of Art. I am interesting in pursuing a career in museum work, and being able to learn from Corie Audette,…
  • Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”
    A recent exhibition at the Bates Museum of Art titled “In Yor Way,” focused on Kate Gilmore, a feminist performance artist famous for her videos that depict women struggling against a barrier. For example, Kate…
  • The Nugamshi Open Studio Video
      Two and a half months in the making but it’s finally here! The video of Nugamshi’s Lewiston, ME visit.  Nugamshi is a celebrated Saudi Arab artist that was part of our curated show “Phantom…
  • Working for the Museum, Susan Bell
    Jefferson Pinder, Music Missionaries     Art  is like the metamorphosis of a butterfly.  It starts with an idea and  transforms itself into something unique and beautiful.  Like a butterfly, sometimes  the physical transformation can…
  • Educational and Interpretive Programming Intern: STEM to STEAM
          As an Educational and Interpretive Programming Intern, I am taking on the role to develop education programming at the Bates Museum of Art. I am thankful to be working with the Education Curator at…
  • Daisy: Collections Management Intern
    As a Collections Management intern, my main tasks include registering museum pieces into the database embARK. I am gaining exposure to artists and finding new favorites every time I come in. I added a piece…
  • Interning with the Bates College Museum of Art
    With my fall semester as an intern for the Bates College Museum of Art completed and the year 2016 behind us, I would like to start this post with acknowledging just how amazing the staff…
  • An Introduction to a Cultural Phantom Punch with Saudi Artist Nouf Alhimiary
    During opening weekend of Phantom Punch: Contemporary Art from Saudi Arabia in Lewiston at the Bates College Museum of Art, I had the pleasure of meeting contemporary Saudi artist Nouf Alhimiary to speak about her…
  • Seeing the Creation of Art From an International Lens
    This fall semester I worked with the Bates College Museum of Art curating the show, Phantom Punch, which exclusively includes artwork from young, contemporary artists from Saudi Arabia. I was immediately drawn into the project and…
  • A Brief Look at Marina Abramovic
    As a curatorial intern in the Bates College Museum of Art, my main task thus far has been to research female performance artists to use as background for an upcoming exhibition by Kate Gilmore. Gilmore,…
  • Re-invented Intern’s Blog
    It is difficult to revive a project that has been inactive for a year, however, having the resilient spirit of Bates College, we decided to undertake the project of revamping our blog, through the lens…