Internship Experience#1: Past Exhibition Files

Hello! My name is Miyuki Nishimura and I am an international student at Washburn.

I’m interested in arts (especially modern arts), and graphic design. I’m majoring in Art History, and also studying Mass Media as minor. I’m hoping to become an art manager in the future, who organizes arts exhibitions and art-related events. For this goal, I wanted the experience of working at an art place. A half year ago, I found an internship offering at the Alice C. Sabatini Art Gallery by chance and I thought, “This is what I’ve looking for!” I immediately contacted the gallery and started working as an intern in June. Working at an art gallery is just fascinating. Since I started working at the art gallery, I’ve worked on a several projects, such as organizing past exhibition files and creating a mailing list for the future exhibitions.

The Alice C. Sabatini Gallery has been holding arts exhibitions since 1970s, so we have a lot of exhibition files so far. Through looking at those files, sometimes I found old yellowish newspaper, small old camera films, and typewritten documents, which made me feel a sense of history and excitement. Also, I learned the process of holding an exhibition through meeting documents which were kept in exhibition files. I could see selecting art works/artists, budgets, exhibition title, and all kinds of information, which was, in other words, how to put your ideas into an exhibition. The most exciting thing about file organizing was that I could get so much inspiration from the past exhibition files. For example, there was an exhibition called “Carpets of the Caucasus” in 1980, which was a showing of a variety of patterned carpets from Caucasus. In the exhibition file, there were photos of the carpets that were shown in the exhibition, and I was fascinated by every carpet because of its beautiful pattern. (I even thought that I want to take one of them for my apartment.) Although this exhibition was held before I was born, so I couldn’t attend it, with this exhibition file, I could get a lot of ideas for the future exhibitions that could I hold!

The greatest thing about working as an intern at an art gallery is that I can have first-hand experiences. For me, as a person who aims to be an art manager, these first-hand experiences are so valuable, as well as fascinating. Of course, there are a lot of great things for working at the Alice C. Sabatini Art Gallery, other than organizing exhibition files, so I would like to introduce them next time.

Miyuki Nishimura

Hi! I’m an international student at Washburn and am from Japan. I’m interested in arts (especially modern arts), and graphic design, and I’m currently majoring in Art History. My future goal is to become an art manager, who organizes arts exhibitions and art-related events.