Explain Why You Would Like This Position at the Milwaukee Art Museum
Whether information technology happens on a school field trip or wandering past chance into a local fine art museum, anybody has a story about their first memorable encounter with art.
My kickoff feel was really at the Getty. My mother is 1 of the Getty Museum's conservators, and it was because of her that I grew up surrounded past the Getty'due south drove. I was maybe three or four (that's me in the picture in a higher place), and I think being mesmerized by Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Jump. I imagined myself every bit one of the little girls carrying a basket of flowers through the marbled streets, and wearing a crown of flowers in my pilus.
At that age, for me fine art captured a fantasy globe, 1 that was more marvelous and enchanting than I could have ever imagined. As my mom led me through the Getty's galleries, I would pretend to get lost in the landscapes, and imagine what it was like to be i of the people painted in the portraits.
What was your first feel? To hear more perspectives, I recently asked members of the Getty to share their first memorable experience at a museum.
Their stories give a behind-the-scenes look at the individuals who work at the museum and the meaningful, transformative experiences they take had with art. The fact that so many of these stories are gear up in childhood or adolescence demonstrates to me how of import, enriching, and valuable it is to be exposed to art at an early age. These experiences created a foundation to pursue a career in the arts, and to go on a lifelong beloved for fine art.
A Chivalrous Child
As a five-yr old I went with my parents to run into the Hermitage Museum in what was then Leningrad. Or rather, my parents went to see information technology and took me along. They seemed to get lost—and I was about to lose it!—in the Old Master paintings, and particularly the Impressionist galleries. I constantly had to remind them that there is much cooler stuff to wait at, namely the vast arsenal with its rows of full-body metal suits for knights! In her diary my mother complained that considering of me she didn't get to encounter more Monets. To this solar day, having worked more often than not with ancient sculpture, I still accept a preference for three-dimensional fine art.
—Jens Daehner, acquaintance curator of antiquities, Getty Museum
Roaming Complimentary
I grew upwardly in a modest town with an important glass museum. When there was a big flood, they rebuilt the museum in a modified wheel shape with the highlighted objects in the center and more and more objects (different time periods, parts of the world, etc.) as you went further down the various spokes. I call back loving that idea, that you lot could skim over some things and then see everything in other areas, with choice guiding your exploration. I was allowed to roam free and selection my fancy depending on my mood (we went there a lot!).
After in life, I fully understood the importance of looking at art with children when I took my immature daughter to LACMA to look at the Altmann Klimts later they were reclaimed and earlier they were dispersed. I recall to this day getting down on one genu, head to caput, seeing from her vantage betoken, moving picture by movie, while nosotros talked nigh what she saw. Magic.
— Quincy Houghton, associate manager for exhibitions, Getty Museum
Wanting More Time
As a child, I enjoyed three things: itineraries, beauty, and elephants. 1 year, as part of a school trip to Washington, D.C., my class was given a few hours to freely wander any one of the Smithsonian museums. I recall being perplexed equally to why more time (read days) was not allotted to be able to mindfully visit these corking institutions. Seeing this as a challenge, my chaperoning grandmother and I raced Ferris Bueller-style through the National Museums of Natural History, American History, and parts of the National Gallery. I knew exactly what I wanted to see and how to navigate the museum galleries thank you to Encyclopedia Britannica's fold-out maps. Hours later and completely out of jiff, we managed to see the Hope Diamond, the Commencement Ladies' gowns, Leonardo'due south Ginevra de' Benci, and of course the Fénykövi Elephant. That same spirit of chance and discovery—and a desire to maximize every moment in a museum (but no longer at a dart pace)—continues to guide my appointment with art and with visitors at the Getty.
—Bryan Keene, assistant curator of manuscripts, Getty Museum
From Long Embankment to the Getty
When I was a child, each Sunday in the summers my parents used to take us to a park in Long Beach that is right on the bounding main. There they would meet up with longtime friends for a weekly picnic. While the parents played cards and bocce (backyard bowling), the kids would run off to the beach and savor the water. This was in the days when parents would let their kids wander off alone.
The summer when I was nearly ten, I wandered off alone one afternoon and into the Long Beach Museum of Art, which was practically beyond the street. That summer the Museum had an exhibition of videos from its collection, and I was mesmerized. I literally spent hours and multiple subsequent weekends at the museum. And, each summer thereafter, I would spend my Sunday afternoons at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Ironically, those videos I saw then many years ago are at present in the drove of the Getty Enquiry Establish, having been acquired from the Long Beach Museum of Fine art in 2006.
—John Giurini, assistant director for Public Affairs, J. Paul Getty Museum
Walking into the Middle Ages
When I was eight years quondam, my family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, just blocks away from the wonderful Nelson-Atkins Museum. It was one of the first places nosotros visited after the move, and I recall literally walking into the Centre Ages—a complete curtilage from fourteenth-century French republic. It was an immersive fine art experience. I call back feeling the stone (probably non allowed, but I was eight!), the low lights, seeing the delicate tracery etching, and weaving in and out of the spaces, imagining monks doing the aforementioned. Information technology was like being transported to another globe, and I withal carry that feeling of wonder with me today when I experience medieval art.
—Elizabeth Morrison, senior curator of manuscripts, J. Paul Getty Museum
As Soon Equally I Got My License…
I didn't grow up going to art museums, not that I remember. But as presently as I had my driver's license, I started visiting the Art Institute of Chicago with friends. It's the museum where I have spent the most time and whose collection I know all-time—so well that I can visualize works that I think well but whose names I never really learned, such as Chagall's America Windows. For me, art museums take always evoked independence, and being able to choose how and with whom I spend my fourth dimension.
—Michele Ciaccio, managing editor, Getty Research Institute Publications
Ane Mile to LACMA
Growing up in L.A., we went to museums a lot. My dad would circumvolve highlights in the members' magazines (nosotros were members of everything) and march my sister and me through the masterpieces, reading the texts aloud for our edification. At age 9, I did not want to be edified. I wanted to wander costless, finding offbeat, mysterious, weird, touching, and funny things and unlocking their stories. Today I get to practice that for a living.
After my dad died, I unearthed his enormous enshroud of museum takeaways—cards, photos, brochures, hundreds of scratched-up access pins. Taking us to museums meant a lot to him. He grew upwards as a Lutheran government minister's son in Indiana, e'er longing for some other museum trip to Chicago. In 50.A., he could share the civilization of the entire world with u.s., and all we had to do was drive a mile to LACMA.
—Annelisa Stephan, manager for digital date, Getty Trust
Source: https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/what-was-your-first-memorable-experience-at-a-museum/