No one knows why they were chosen to work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 我很幸运，我的上司， 金缕梅Tolles纽约大都会博物馆的玛丽卡. 美国雕塑和绘画策展人, saw my application to intern for the iconic museum at the right time. 我也很感激我的 艺术历史 主要的顾问, 亚历山大Alberro, 弗吉尼亚·布洛德尔·赖特51届艺术史教授, 谁在申请过程中支持我.
On my first day at the Met, I was given my own desk and research station in the library of the 美国的翅膀的办公室. The encouraging staff even gifted me a small plaster cast of 弗雷德里克·罗斯的哥伦比亚狮子雕像 从仓库搬到我的办公桌上.
作为一个策展实习生, I helped Tolles — whose office was down the hall from my own — with all of her ongoing exhibition planning and development. This included exhibition projects that were both at the beginning or end of development phases. When I wasn’t watching an installation or helping to review gallery labels and audio guides, I spent my time at the museum digging through archives and research portals of the 托马斯J. 沃森 和美国图书馆.
While I was digging through some random archive at my desk one day, Tolles walked in and handed me a piece of paper with information on 路易朗的绘画 艺术的学生. The work was being prominently displayed in the exhibition “纽约艺术世界，1870-1890,” and she wanted me to take a stab at a question that had not been solved by any past interns or staff: Where — and by extension, 这幅画是什么时候?
Tolles gave me the object file and a former intern’s research, saying that it wasn’t a priority but if I found anything she would appreciate it. 每次我报到实习的时候, I would search little by little through the different newspapers and books in the museum’s archives to find out what Lang was doing around the 1860s. With another stroke of luck — on the last day of my first semester — I found what I needed to crack the code.
绘画经常记录历史和生活的点点滴滴. 在…的情况下 艺术的学生, which can be found of the Met's mezzanine floor as part of the ongoing exhibition, it's life within the art world of the mid-19th century. 艺术研究者依赖于记录, 信, 早期的照片, and being able to match a painting with this kind of corroborating information provides another avenue of understanding and discovery.
Painting shouldn’t usually be taken as a direct translation of an artist’s vision for their artwork, but it was through the visual information [such as the furniture, 道具, and recognizable sculptures] in the painting that I was able to discover Lang’s previously unknown studio location — almost certainly in a building that once stood at 1193 Broadway, 近西28街. It was in this studio that he offered art and painting lessons to the young women of 1860s New York.
Without Lang’s act of recording this kind of information in the painting, I am unsure if I would have thought to type the search terms “路易朗” and “art instruction” into a database. This discovery added new information to the early history of American women painters and their education. 现在, we can use this knowledge as another starting point to identify or place more of those women who attended Lang’s classes — and who tried to be some of the first female artists to break into the confined New York art scene of the middle to late 19th century. Eventually, as the pieces came together, my collaborative research with Tolles culminated in a “密切关注”功能 发表 在大都会博物馆的网站上.
惊喜和感激
It was with Tolles’ mentorship that I learned to navigate the evolving nature of 艺术历史. I was surprised that I was able to use a painting as a form of concrete historical evidence and that looking at a painting could also be its own window into new knowledge. I will never forget the moment I found the right newspaper that matched up with the painting. 我从没想过, 作为实习生, I would do any kind of impactful art historical research for such a celebrated institution. I am still shocked that I discovered anything significant at all. It just shows how the act of looking closely — the kind that sometimes takes months — can facilitate important discoveries.
I’ve known that I wanted to pursue 艺术历史 since I was in high school because of the cultural institutions available to me growing up in Charleston, 南卡罗来纳. Being a part of Barnard’s Department of Art 历史 has affirmed and cultivated my ambitions. 我的每一位教授, 十大电竞游戏综合排名大学和哥伦比亚大学都有, have gone out of their way to have conversations with me after class and offered ways I could engage with art. Being able to discuss what I was working on at the Met when returning to a classroom setting with expert professors in American 艺术历史 truly enriched my internship experience.
——塔拉·特拉诺瓦25年报道
