Art in Focus 2020

When working in a museum, planning ahead is one of the most important things you can do. Exhibitions are planned as far as five years in advance and sometimes even farther.

One of my projects this summer required many hours of research and preparations for an Art in Focus exhibition that will go up in the spring of 2020. Art in Focus is part of a program for Yale undergraduate students known as Student Guides.

This program is offered by the Yale Center for British Art. Students work closely with the education department, learning about the works in the museums collections and getting trained to lead their own tours of the collection. Students also have the opportunity to work with curators and the installation team as they research, organize and hang their own exhibit; Art in Focus.

This year's Art in Focus celebrates female artists in Britain and part of my duties were to gather information on contemporary female artists that are part of the museums collections. This research started with pouring through hundreds of names of female artists and creating a base document that could be used in future research. In this document, I also included the ascension numbers of each work of art for every artists. Eventually, this document expanded to all female artists in the collection, rather than only contemporary artists. This document is over 20 pages long!

Following this collection of names and artifact numbers, I used The Museum System or TMS to collect images of the art works in a digital package. This package was also to be used for future references as the Student Guides conduct their own research. TMS is a digital database that is used to manage the works of art that enter and leave the museum. In this program, there is general information about the work, as well as the history of where is has moved, if it is on loan to another museum, key search words used to bring up the art work in searches and the list goes on. It's a very thorough database! This program was very useful when it came to gathering all the images of the works by these artists and keeping them in one place.

Through out this process, I go to know some of the artist in the collections really well, including Celia Paul, Jo Spence and Gwen John, just to name a few!