Valeria Serrano (AB, ’15) interned at the Georgia Museum of Art in two different departments while an undergraduate at UGA, putting in a full year of work learning how museums operate and discovering that she wanted to continue in the field.
While interning in the education department, she worked on Art Adventures, the museum’s free summer outreach program; helped develop gallery guides for monthly Family Days; and did research on upcoming exhibitions to help train docents as well as on materials that made their way into teaching packets. She then moved to the curatorial department, where she did research, developed preliminary and final checklists for exhibitions, generated loan letters to institutions and collectors, worked on budgets, assisted with exhibition layouts and the reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection (a major summer undertaking) and translated wall labels into Spanish.
Now she’s entering a new phase in her career, after obtaining a master’s degree at CU Boulder, but she says her experience at the museum was invaluable to pursuing her dream.
After years of debating what my major would be while I was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, I finally decided on art history and was accepted as an intern in the Georgia Museum of Art’s education department the summer before my senior year. What an amazing experience this was! While I worked with Carissa DiCindio (then curator of education) and Callan Steinmann (the current curator of education), I learned how to lead engaging gallery tours, how to plan the museum’s monthly Family Days and how generally to educate the public in a museum setting.
On a more personal level, I realized that I wanted to continue working in museums or galleries, which was so satisfying to learn after my very first internship! I strengthened my public speaking abilities as an intern and learned how to educate others in a more democratic manner. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that when I got accepted into the master’s program in art history at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), I got a fully funded package with a teaching assistant position precisely because of everything I learned from this internship at the museum! I believe that experience really set me apart.
During the two years I spent at CU Boulder, I taught three classes a semester of world art history to undergraduates, and it was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had. I loved being able to connect with students while getting them excited to learn and talk about art! I also learned so much more about myself and art history through teaching others. Inspired by my love of museums that started at UGA, I included trips to the CU Art Museum each semester with my students and led some learning activities there on occasion. These two experiences combined prepared me to apply to Fulbright’s English Teaching Assistant program in Germany, to which I was accepted.
Another very important part of my experience at UGA was that, after I completed my internship in education, I moved on to a year-long internship at the museum working with the curator of American art (Sarah Kate Gillespie). Similar to the earlier internship, this curatorial internship left a lasting impact on me because it was then that I decided to become a curator! Looking back, I cannot overstate how integral this internship was to my personal and professional development.
Today, I am a gallery manager for Denver’s newest art gallery, Union Hall, and am curating some of my own exhibitions independently. I use my experiences at the Georgia Museum of Art on a daily basis, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of both departments at such a young age. I use the curatorial foundation I learned as an intern when I am planning exhibitions, working with artists, creating budgets and designing the overall creative vision. I then use my education experience when I am at work in the gallery to educate visitors on our current exhibitions and when I am planning exhibition programming. Ultimately, my time at the museum had absolutely everything to do with the life I lead after graduating from the University of Georgia, and I will forever be thankful for the people I met there, the experiences I had and all that I learned!
Authored by:
Hillary Brown
