My name is Monica Conary. I am a fourth year Museum Studies and Anthropology major. I’m most interested in exhibition design and visitor engagement! I love working on projects that integrate audience interactives. I’m also interested in how museums incorporate activism into their exhibits, and how their ideas can push a movement forward or create their own movement within the museum. My favorite museum is the Tropenmuseum, an ethnographic museum in the Netherlands. In my free time, I love to knit, walk my dog, and read as many books as I can get my hands on.
I have completed an internship with the New York Folk Society, listening and transcribing interviews, and also cataloging photographs. I also had the opportunity this summer to intern at the Kawanhee History Museum at Camp Kawanhee for Boys. Some of the projects I completed while I was there included organizing the extensive photograph collection and working on several of the exhibits within the museum. I also created several exhibit posters and worked on the history kiosks that were located around the camp. I was able to interact with the campers and create activities that related to the camps history. Besides working in the museum, I also had the opportunity to work in the camp store after dinner and I had an awesome time interacting with the campers! I stayed onsite so I was completely immersed in camp life and the community. It was a great summer experience.
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| The Kawanhee History Museum |
Hi Monica! We share some interests, with interactives and activism in museums. It's exciting to think about how museums can respond to social and political movements. I have less experience with exhibit design, but hopefully, I'll hear more about your ideas about it this semester.
ReplyDeleteIt must have been interesting to work at a camp. It sounds like you got to experience a wide variety of roles there. That probably made it more fun to not be doing the same thing the whole time.
Hello Monica
ReplyDeleteits so cool that you have a favorite museum. I cant seem to make up my mind of which one I prefer. I have a Shiba Inu dog and there is nothing better than to walk him. I see that you worked on some exhibitions over the summer, what were they about?
Hi Carmen,
DeleteI worked on a couple of small exhibits during the summer! My two favorite ones would probably be "A Prince At Kawanhee" (One summer the camp had the now King of Spain come to the camp) and the "Lost Message" (Every summer a message is buried by the previous years campers and is dug up at the beginning of every camp season. One year the message could not be found, and wouldn't be found until about 20 years later.)
Hey Monica! We almost had a similar summer, my summer camp was just minus the museum. It seems like it was a unique internship opportunity outside of a traditional setting that one might think a museum internship entails. What was your favorite part of the museum and the work that you did?
ReplyDeleteHello Grace,
DeleteMy favorite part of the museum was probably the museum's photograph collection! Although I also loved searching through the camp catalogs that dated back to the 1920s!
Hi Monica, I enjoyed reading your post and thinking about crossovers between summer camps and museums. What might that look like? Can you imagine a museum camp? There are some programs held at museums, such as Conner Prairie's and GCV&M's summer history camp, but what else might be possible? I look forward to seeing where your interests take you this semester!
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