Author: Lei Li
What does it take to build community in a museum department? As an intern at Education Department of the Carnegie Museum of Art, I contributed to building a coherent community among the large and diverse staff. The education department organizes programs to engage the public with the art museum’s content including the summer camps for youth and drop-in programs. Summer camps and Art Connections provide art classes for kids and teenagers annually. Other programs, like ARTVentures, happen every weekend for gallery visitors of any age to engage with art. These programs are led by part-time staff drawn from Pittsburgh’s art community.
To help build that community among the teaching artists, full-time staff, and volunteer docents, I needed to get to know the programs in the department. To start, I assisted teaching artists with the Art Connection class for 9th grade students by setting up and cleaning up materials, discussing the kids’ thoughts on their artworks and providing them feedback. I participated in several docent training programs. Learning the programs for the docents offered a window on communication and interactions among the department as a whole.
Through these experiences, I learned about techniques for gallery engagement and the day-to-day of museum educators. Based on these conversations, the next phase of my internship addressed the specific needs of the part-time artists and developed methods to keep the artists informed on relevant matters and promote a friendly environment for networking. This broad view helped me understand how having a scheduled meeting weekly and an annual trip which could hold the docent community tighter
One of the projects in the scheme of community building is creating a manual for part-time staff. After a series of meetings and discussions with all the education department staff, I catalogued materials about the museum’s vision, part-time staff duties and evaluation, and art education ideas. I organized these resources under the big topic of “museum education as profession”. By organizing relevant materials into one handbook, we aimed to create a sense of identity and belonging for part-time staff in the education department. This manual affirmed the value of their efforts as a contribution to the museum’s mission, defining their position and contribution, and offering helpful resources for them to generate new ideas for lessons and programs.
In the end of my internship, I designed for the content of the training manual and laid out the blueprint for it. I feel very grateful to intern at the CMOA education department to discover how the museum runs all public programs smoothly through administrative efforts behind the scenes.
Lei Li, Museum Studies Intern at Education Department in Carnegie Museum of Art, Spring 2020