Teenie Harris Archive Internship
This project examines the work of Pittsburgh's Upper Hill district native, the late Charles “Teenie” Harris, through the eyes of high school students enrolled at University Prep. Its goal is to allow African-American high school students to curate their own racial storylines as if they were exhibits in a museum, and to encourage among them individual self-reflection and pride in the life one lives, hardships and all. Students and their mentors are introduced to the more than 80,000 photos shot by Harris in the online archive of the Carnegie Museum of Art. With the help of undergraduate interns, the high school students learn to navigate this archive and select pictures that speak to them and their personal stories as they wish for them to be portrayed to the community in a final exhibit to be displayed outside the library in the Frick Fine Arts Building. It encourages students to think like museum curators and take dimensions and other specifications of space and area into account when telling their visual stories, ultimately empowering them with the confidence and motivation to strive towards educational and career goals that they find fulfilling, and reminding them that such goals are well within their reach.