Author: Museum Studies Interns
For this interview, a group of current Pitt students in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Museum Studies program reached out to a former Pitt alumnus to gain insight into her career path since graduating from Pitt in 2003. Sarah Cooper is the Public Programs Specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The following questions help to gain insight into her career pathway to this role. The student group responsible for coordinating this interview was Emma Christensen, Jeffrey Shellenberger, Evelyn Medendorp, Celeste Smith, Eden Singh, and Yingxuan Zhao.
When you were an undergraduate at Pitt, why did you choose to major in the History of Art and Architecture? What else did you study here that had an impact on your career path?
When I started at Pitt, I wanted to be a filmmaker. I signed up for as many film studies courses as I could and took classes at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which at the time was an incredible community of creative, highly experimental people—something like an underground avant-garde. I was quickly introduced not only to filmmakers connected to Pittsburgh, like Tony Buba and Stan Brakhage, but also to key works in the history of experimental film—especially by Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, and Man Ray. These more radical approaches to filmmaking really excited me and opened up a compelling artistic world I had only just begun to explore.
I enrolled in an introductory art history course in my first semester without intending to major in it, but serendipitously it overlapped with the 1999–2000 Carnegie International—an exhibition that remains foundational to my understanding of art and museums. We were in the galleries almost every week, and I chose to focus on William Kentridge’s film-animation work Stereoscope, probably because I thought I was still staying close to my interest in film. But Kentridge—and the International more broadly—revealed the expansive, generous, and absorbent nature of art: a field that could take you in unexpected directions and open entirely new ways of thinking and experiencing the world.
That was the turning point for me. I shifted toward wanting a museum career and never looked back. My interest in film and video (I love the term “expanded cinema”) hasn’t changed, but I now see it as inextricably connected to my interests in underground music, cross-disciplinary art, architecture, and criticism. What I find myself pursuing now is an unencumbered impulse toward experimentalism—one that builds continuity across mediums that are too often siloed.
I think that was basically it for me—I shifted toward wanting a museum career and never looked back. My deep interest in film and video (I enjoy the term “expanded cinema”) hasn’t changed, but now I see it as inextricably interwoven with my interests in underground music, art across genre, architecture, and criticism. What I find myself pursuing now is an understanding an unencumbered “experimentalism”—one that builds continuity across mediums that are too often siloed.
What classes do you remember leaving a mark on you as a student here? While you were in Pittsburgh, what collections or exhibitions were you especially interested in?
By the time I was a senior, I was obsessed with modern and contemporary art, so I was initially devastated to learn that the only senior seminar offered my final semester was on Romantic landscape painting. It ended up being one of the most important courses I took, largely because of the infectious enthusiasm, poetic insight, and inventive approach of Professor Gretchen Bender. She encouraged me to think about J. M. W. Turner’s landscapes—many of them made during his travels across Europe—not only through the lens of social and societal shifts shaped by war and industrialization, but also in terms of their formal compositional construction as expressions of emotional complexity. She encouraged me to frame them as responses to the gap between expectation and reality in foreign travel—the simultaneous search for authenticity and adventure.
This resonated deeply with me because I had just returned from a Semester at Sea program the year before and was still processing my own experiences of movement, dislocation, and discovery. It was thrilling to realize that I could interpret my lived experience through the work of a 19th-century painter. It felt like a form of communication across time, and it marked the beginning of a lifelong interest in connecting with people outside of my own moment through art. That experience is something I would pass on to current students: studying art history is not about mastering a fixed body of knowledge tied to a single period or medium. It’s about developing your imagination and your capacity for interpretation. Those tools are expansive—they will take you far beyond yourself and beyond your initial expectations.
As for Pittsburgh, beyond the Carnegie International, there was so much that shaped my thinking. Pittsburgh is my hometown so I return frequently and I am so impressed by what a unique art scene it is. I would especially point to Mattress Factory, which consistently gave me chills. It remains one of the most consequential experimental art spaces in the country—a rare institution dedicated to permanent installation and immersive experience. It showed me, early on, what it means for art to fully transform space and perception.
You were a student here before we had an active Museum Studies program, but did you get to contribute to any curatorial or other hands-on projects while you were at Pitt?
I did take some kind of nascent museum studies class that was offered and I remember “curating” selection of east Asian prints for a hallway vitrine --- a vague memory! At that point, I think I was still very much in a phase of exploration and discovery, and I didn’t pursue independent organizing in a serious way—and I actually think that’s okay. Jumping straight into “curating” isn’t, in my view, the most important thing. What matters more is developing your critical thinking and nurturing your curiosity. Those are the foundations that make curatorial work possible.
Museum work across roles is meticulous, from cataloguing collections, managing exhibition budgets, tracking shipments as a registrar, to editing and wielding language as a tool for accessibility and interpretation. So as funny as it might sound it all these roles rely on same skills you develop when you are researching, reading, reading, and reading some more, organizing and synthesizing your observations, and then powering through the brutal-but-thrilling writing process. Being able to do this, and respect this, will give you fuel for the hands-on work you’ll encounter in the arts sector for years to come.
How important was the experience you gained in the UK early in your career? Did your participation in study abroad experiences help secure these opportunities?
It was essential! I was a little resentful of being stuck back in my hometown after having gotten a taste for the wider world at my boarding school in Massachusetts where my classmates were from all over the world. I signed up for Pitt in London as soon I as I could, fall of sophomore year. This overlapped with the grand opening of the Tate Modern, which was a phenomenal experience to be present in London for. The Pitt in London program had an internship option, and while I didn’t have a sense of my career path as a sophomore, I signed up to do Pitt in London a second time my junior year and was able to complete internships at both Tate Modern and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. Being able to spend those semesters abroad were extraordinarily formative to my understanding of the impact of museums, especially in a culture like the UK where museum shows are taken so seriously by the general public. I like to think I got indoctrinated early on in the UK style of museum-thinking. I would still give anything to work at Tate Modern!
You spent seven years working at the Museum of Modern Art in increasingly senior roles. What projects are you most proud of from your time at MoMA?
It’s hard to fully summarize how much working within—and observing—the machinations of projects at Museum of Modern Art shaped my understanding of museums. The impact was vast and nuanced. But that experience was foundational in helping me develop an ethos around programming that engages the dynamic dialogue between art history and the work of living artists—across disciplines, and often at the fringes of the traditional art world.
One of the most formative experiences was being a founding member of the PopRally committee, a special initiative launched by the museum’s director to engage younger audiences. It brought together a group of younger staff from across the museum’s departments to devise creative, experimental events that responded to exhibitions and the broader cultural moment. The programs we developed took many forms—concerts, screenings, performances, and hybrid formats that didn’t always have a clear precedent. I organized a large-scale game of Twister tied to an exhibition on color theory, with mats covering the entire atrium floor. We staged an early “cell phone lock-in,” where visitors surrendered their phones into a wall installation that lit up as numbers were called. I produced a crowd-sourced one-minute experimental film festival—well before the era of TikTok—and helped organize a participatory screenprinting workshop to create album covers using surplus vinyl from Christian Marclay’s installation at MoMA PS1.
Looking back, I think we were part of a broader shift in how museum spaces could be activated and experienced. These projects challenged the idea of the museum as a purely contemplative, quiet space, opening it up instead as a site for collective, sometimes loud, forms of engagement. PopRally coincided with a period of real transformation—expanding audiences, increasing flexibility around programming, and testing what was possible within institutions that traditionally prioritize preservation and control.
Importantly, this work required deep collaboration across departments—visitor services, security, legal, and senior leadership—to build trust and create new operational pathways for more adventurous programming. It demanded strong communication, patience, and a willingness to adapt in real time. What’s most meaningful to me is that PopRally has had a lasting influence—not only on audiences, but on a generation of museum professionals thinking differently about participation, access, and the role of live experience in institutional spaces. It also developed alongside the growth of performance-based curatorial work at MoMA, reflecting a broader institutional shift toward embracing more complex, embodied forms of engagement within the museum.
Tell us about your current role at the Getty and a project you are currently working on that you are excited about.
I currently work in Public Programs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where I develop and produce a wide range of live and interdisciplinary programming—concerts, performances, screenings, and large-scale public events that activate the museum in ways that extend beyond traditional exhibition formats. A core part of my work is collaborating with artists across disciplines to create projects that are deeply responsive to the Getty’s architecture, landscape, and collections, while also engaging the diverse creative communities of Los Angeles.
One of the projects I’m most excited about right now is 24-HOUR CARE, a new performance work by the artist collective FXR, composed of Los Angeles–based artists who are also educators, parents, and caregivers. The project explores what it means to care—for students, for family, for community—acknowledging care as something that is both deeply sustaining and often exhausting. We just carried out the first stage of this performance at the Getty two weeks ago as part of my Ever Present series—an experimental performance program I developed to explore many of the impulses I’ve described above, particularly how permanent collections can be placed in conversation with lived experience.
What’s especially meaningful is that in just a few weeks this project will travel to the Venice Biennale, where it will be presented at the Japan Pavilion. It’s a powerful opportunity to help platform Asian American diaspora artists from Southern California on an international stage, and to extend a project rooted in lived experience and local community into a global conversation. That kind of continuity—between Los Angeles and Venice, between process and presentation—is exactly the kind of work I’m most energized by right now.
Has your previous work with collections changed or impacted the way you now work with live and performance art at the Getty?
While at the MoMA, I worked as Department Manager in the Prints and Illustrated Books Department during the acquisition of the Gil and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. It brought together work by a radical group of artists from the 1960s and ’70s, including drawings, posters, newspapers, and typewritten “scores,” as well as Fluxus kits—small boxes containing multiple conceptual artworks, sometimes activated through touch, language, or simple instruction.
What was striking was that these works didn’t fit neatly into the museum’s medium-based structure—painting, drawing, photography, and so on. Fluxus was explicitly invested in breaking down those boundaries. Watching colleagues figure out how to catalog and integrate these works—sometimes requiring entirely new systems—was incredibly illuminating. It revealed just how limited traditional institutional frameworks can be when faced with experimental, idea-driven practices. At the same time, I saw curators and conservators grappling with how to collect and preserve forms like performance, music, and dance—works that resist objecthood and require entirely different approaches to care, documentation, and display.
That experience has had a lasting impact on how I approach my work at the Getty Museum. I’m deeply interested in creating programs that embrace this provocation—bringing liveness into museum spaces not just as an event, but as a way to question and expand the institution’s structures. It’s about recognizing and honoring artistic practices that don’t conform to traditional categories, and that often exist outside market-driven definitions of value. It has also led me to think more expansively about what it means to integrate ephemeral work into a museum context. I’m increasingly interested in performance conservation—how we document, archive, and potentially reactivate live work in ways that remain true to its conceptual core.
Looking ahead, I hope to continue developing this work by building an archive of performance at the Getty and experimenting with new models of conservation embedded directly into the commissioning process—thinking of the “audience” not only as those present in the moment, but also as future viewers encountering the work through the archive.