In order to attain certification in Arts Management, the student must complete, in addition to other courses, either an internship or a practicum of 120 hours. I chose to do a practicum. A practicum is similar to an internship except that the student completes it on campus, working with the college faculty. I believed that the level of opportunity to learn new skills and experience more areas in the field of arts management would be highest at Sweet Briar. Though I cannot compare my practicum to an internship, I can say that I do not regret in the least staying here. I was right about Sweet Briar; the entire college is an asset completely at the student's disposal. In my practicum I tackled more projects than I could ever have hoped to get out of an internship.

When I registered to take the Arts Management practicum for the fall term '97 and met with Professor Rebecca Massie Lane, I did not know what I wanted to do. During the first week of school Professor Lane and I discussed this one opportunity that stood out like a tree in a field. Art History Professor Chris Witcombe was teaching a course called Art & Artists. The aim of this seminar, as Professor Witcombe states in his course description, was to "examine the notion of 'art' together with the identity, nature, role, and myths of the 'artist' from the earliest times to the present." The unusual thing about this course is that he and the students pulled together an art exhibit entitled "What is Art? What is an Artist?" to demonstrate the underlying conception of art and the artist. The students picked out the objects, researched them, and gave a gallery talk during the opening reception. Professor Witcombe created a web site specifically for this exhibit which includes images, essays, and handfuls of outside links. So what does this have to do with me? I had originally wanted to sign up for this seminar, but what I ended up doing with it was even better, as I got to not only attend the lectures but to work behind the scenes.

My role throughout this project was as an assistant curator to both Professor Lane and Professor Witcombe. This session served as an introduction to the purpose of the seminar: the exhibit "What is Art? What is an Artist?" would go up in Pannell Gallery on October 30 and would open on December 4. Professor Witcombe planned to interview artists from the VCCA (Virginia Center for the Creative Arts), the Sweet Briar Studio Art majors and faculty, and schoolchildren of various ages. There were grand plans for this exhibit and its web site which could include audio/video clips and interviews of the people involved. As it turned out, there was not enough time to do all of this (is there ever enough time?). Two artists from VCCA and the members of the studio art faculty who had pieces in the exhibit were interviewed. Photographs of these interviews can be seen on the web site; unfortunatly, no audio/video clips were put in - not yet, anyway. The nice thing about having the exhibit catalogue on the web is that the author can continuously make changes, unlike a printed catalogue.

Now that I and everyone else knew what was in store, I needed to be introduced to perhaps the most important part in relation to this project - the art. Professor Lane gave my the tour of the print room and the collections storage in the basement of Pannell where the permanent collection is stored. I read the rules & regulations manual on how to handle the art and how to handle yourself when dealing with it. Now that I had access to the "Head Hoarder's" territory, I was able to get started. My first job was to pull up the gallery data base and list possible pieces for the exhibit; Professor Witcombe knew what types of works he wanted.

After I finished listing all the possibilities, I typed them into either a "yes" or "maybe" list which I distributed to the class. During the next couple of seminars, the class came down to the storage rooms where they culled more works. With everyone's input, we further defined the selections for the exhibit, though there were still a few left in question. Now that the list was basically finnished, I entered the accession files in search of slides or color photographs of each object. Slides were preferred for scanning- a task which unexpectedly took up a large portion of my time as I had never scanned in anything before in my life. I came to enjoy it. Most of the objects had good slides, there were only a few with only prints.

In addition to pictures of the objects, I needed pictures of the students and others involved. This turned out to be harder than I thought! Attaining the consent of the students to take their picture with no previous warning is a difficult task. I was only able to snap shots of a few.

Now that the focus of this exhibit was clear, we were able to start interviewing others about their views on art and artists. With camera and tape recorder in hand I followed the class to our first interview with Studio Art Professor Joe Monk who teaches design and ceramic courses. Professor Monk, upon our second visit to him, contributed a clay pot to the exhibit at our request for the section on decorated pottery. He talked about the battle between art and craft and made some interesting points though I got the impression that he believes the difference lies in the eye of the beholder.

Our next interviewee was Professor Laura Pharis who teaches drawing and printmaking. In addition to interviewing her she showed us some of her prints which we could use in the exhibit. We subsequently chose one entitled Baby's House.

Following Professor Pharis, we interviewed Professor David Johnson who taught painting and photography. He had several paintings for the class to choose from for the exhibit. A large, four paneled painting was selected. Professor Johnson had many interesting and entertaining comments on our topic.

Now the students needed to study the art work It was my job to get the pieces out for them, and I helped direct them in finding information. In groups of two they were to write an essay on their topic, be it painting, photography, decorated pottery, drawing, sculpture, prints, or illustrations which were the areas covered in the exhibit. I had several groups make appointments to look at their objects.

There was now one thing that needed to be done: there remained several works that needed to be photographed as I could not locate any slide or print of them. Charles Grubbs is a professional photographer whom the gallery uses for photoshoots. I set up an appointment with him. He first came to the storage rooms to look at the works which needed to be photographed in order to estimate price, time, and materials. Mr. Grubbs returned a few days later and we set up the photoshoot in a nearby classroom. Everything went smoothly.

There was now another thing that needed to be done: the slides of all the objects had to be scanned into Professor Witcombe's file so he could put them on the exhibit's web site. Dave Blount, the Director of Electronic Communications, showed me how to scan and manipulate images in Adobe Photoshop, and Professor Witcombe showed me where to put the images. He and I then discussed the design of the web site, where the images were to go, and what he needed. The following day I scanned in slides.

Next on the adgenda was planning the gallery layout. I had a piece of paper with the gallery floor plan drawn on it and went from there. I did not bother with measurements much (except for the actual hanging, of course) since I already knew that there would be plenty of space for everything. Instead I just went with what I thought looked good. Eventually, I came up with a plan and, thankfully, that plan worked. Ana Marie Liddell, the Art Gallery Assistant, helped me locate all the display cases that I needed. Ana Marie also showed me how to make the identification labels which go next to the work of art and helped me make a few. (I always wondered how those neat little labels were made).

As October came to an end, Ana Marie and I made plans for the hanging of the exhibit. A few days later we brought all the art work up to the gallery and began to hang it . I had never hung an exhibit, nor had I ever thought about the process when looking at one. It takes a lot of basic math and the ability to remember several numbers at once. Ana Marie, with tons of practice, zipped through numerical sums as I was left wondering what I was suppose to remember. Ah, the price of experience. I caught on though.

Now that the exhibit was hung, Professor Witcombe had two artists from VCCA come and talk to the students about the exhibit and what it represented. Karen Klein and Scott Ponemone talked over some of the various categories with the students who had researched them while I watched through the eye of a video recorder.

Since the exhibition and the web site were ready to go, there wasn't much else to do except wait for the opening and help out when and where ever I could. I designed announcements for the gallery reception, had them printed up, and distributed them.

Finally, the afternoon of the reception arrived. Professor Witcombe gave an introductory speech and then turned it over to the students to give their gallery talk on each of the objects in the exhibit. There was a good turn-out and a good lingering crowd. I found that during this whole affair, I liked being the silent one who snuck around snapping photographs and video taping the students' commentaries.

I was proud to know that I had helped in the realization of this art exhibit. This was my first taste of curatorial work and I found that I loved it. There is a great amount of satisfaction in seeing people enjoy an exhibit in which you played a part.

This entire project has taught me much. I leaned how museums and galleries come to acquire works of art, how to handle it, how to properly care for it, how one hangs an exhibit from the beginning planning stages to the actual physical hanging, and how to scan in images. And though this exhibit will eventually be taken down and replaced, I will never loose all that it has taught me. I am grateful to all who helped me in this project. This has been a true Sweet Briar experience!

But wait! My practicum is not finished! I have more to do!

The art exhibit served as the main project for my practicum. The second half, which I tackled over the three weeks before spring term, was to create an addtional site to the Sweet Briar Art Gallery home page. Professor Lane wanted there to be a site on significant works of art in the permanent collection. Thus, I developed a site entitled "The Highlights of the Permanent Collection." I was anxious to get started as I had never before created a web page. This project also gave me the opportunity to familialize myself with Sweet Briar's own art collection, something that I had always wanted to do but never had the time. It would have been a shame to graduate as an Art History major and not even know the history of my college's collection - a collection that was right in front of me, waiting to be examined.

I began by looking at other museum and gallery web sites on the Internet in order to find out what kind of things I could do. Even though you can do just about anything you want with a web site, I could only figure out how to do so much! Hey, it's my first try...Besides I like the way it turned out - not a lot of flashy stuff floatin' around to distact the eye from the artwork. After I decided on my basic design for the site, I needed to select the objects that I would put on it. With the help of Ana Marie, I chose 25 pieces. Ok, step two is done.

Now, I had to research the works and come up with a little blurb (as I came to call the text about these pieces) to put in next to the image. It is always fascinating to learn about an artist while you are stareing at his or her work. Writing these blurbs took some time, and I searched through text and through the web for interesting links.

With the text out of the way, I turned visual; I needed to scan in all those images for which I had written blurbs. Of course, this was not a problem because, due to all the scanning I did for Professor Witcombe, I had become quite fast at it! It is fun to do but can also be frustrating when you can't do that little thing that must be done. But, as we all know, technology is ever advancing forward.

Once I scanned, sized and copied all my images, I went back to my written document and translated it in to HTML, inserting all the images in all the right places and so on. Eventually, I ended up with what you see now on my page.

And that concludes my Arts Management practicum experience. Everything that I did was something that I wanted to learn how to do and to experience. Funny how it works out that way!