Intern Insights – Mount Holyoke College Art Museum

Intern Insights
Keeping Track of the Past
Exhibition Files and Museum Records
Curatorial Intern Lydia Holleck ’25 shares her experience working on a project to digitize the Museum’s exhibition records, ensuring that information from every exhibition dating 1931–2025 is accessible for Museum staff in the online database. In particular, she reflects on one exhibition, “Transformations in Hellenistic Art,” that stood out to her.
Intern Insights
Lotus Shoes
The Stories of Chinese Women and American Women Missionaries
The Almara History in Museums and Stomberg Curatorial intern Keyang Zhao ’25 explores the history of footbinding and missionaries in China by looking into lotus shoes at the art museum.
Intern Insights, Objects of Our Affection
Poetry with Mercury and Argus
Engagement Intern Darwin Michener-Rutledge ’24 looks at the painting “Landscape with Mercury and Argus” through the eyes of a writer and poet. She discovers a moment that connects with her own life and turns the experience of observing art into another form of art.
Intern Insights, Teaching with Art
Global Migration Through A Photographer’s Lens
Engagement Intern Charlotte Smith ’24 reflects on her class visit to the Art Museum as part of Professor Serin Houston’s Fall 2022 geography course “Global Movements.” She describes close-looking activities in the Museum galleries and shares her newfound connections within the disciplines of art history and geography.
Intern Insights
My Senior Project in the Making
Jennifer Villa ’21 describes the artistic influences that shaped her senior project, Upon my Back, and the process of its creation.
Intern Insights
MHCAM Interns – Summer 2019
During the summer of 2019, the Museum was a hub of activity thanks to four Mount Holyoke undergraduate interns whose many contributions ranged from object research to exhibition preparation and installation. This post highlights the summer work experiences of Izzy Chen ’21, Verity O’Connell ’20, Bran Kroc ’20, and Erin Hancock ’20.
Intern Insights
A Baker’s Dozen
A Journey Through Food History with Museum Objects
In summer 2018, Clarissa Adan FP ’19 conducted research on objects from the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum as part of her Lynk internship, which evolved into a culminating project focusing on the history of food. During her study of art and artifacts related to foodways, Clarissa discovered the fascinating history behind many under-researched objects in both the Skinner and Art Museum collections, revealing important insights into how different cultures interacted with this key aspect of human experience.
Intern Insights
Stories Behind the Stones
During her LYNK internship at MHCAM this summer, Architectural Studies major and Religion minor Priscilla (Qizhen) Zhang ’19 studied a group of Tibetan Mani stones in the Museum’s collection. Zhang was especially intrigued by the religious stories present in the carved images and inscriptions on these stones, which she describes in this enlightening blog post. The Museum is grateful for her terrific work, and the important contributions of all of our brilliant interns–contributions that have inspired this new blog series, Intern Insights.
Intern Insights, Objects of Our Affection
For the Love of (Artists’) Books
Curatorial Intern Juliana Cordero ’18 is a book lover. Her affinity for books is so strong, in fact, that she hopes to pursue a career as a book conservator. Here, she shares her favorite books from a collection of nearly 70 artists’ books by women recently gifted to MHCAM by Marjorie (Jerry) Cohn ’60. Cohn, a long-time conservator and curator at the Fogg Museum, amassed this wondrous collection over 25 years. Feminist themes abound in these books, through comedy, tragedy, and the commonplace. Read on…Cordero’s picks are laugh-out-loud funny!
Intern Insights
MHCAM, meet LYNK
This summer, the Museum was honored to host three Mount Holyoke undergraduate interns who chose to use their LYNK internship funding to gain museum experience. Associate Curator of Visual and Material Culture Aaron Miller highlights the summer work experiences of Jamie Collings ’18, Cassie Peltier ’18, and Emily Tarantini ’18.

Blog Category: Intern Insights