SAYING GOODBYE TO OUR BOARD OF ADVISORS MUTUAL LEARNING FELLOWS

Hood Quarterly, fall 2024

Museums are a place of vocational awe, mainly due to the extreme barriers to entering the field. Graduate degrees, a strong network, and substantial experience are asked of applicants just starting their journeys as museum workers.

In 2021, the Hood Museum of Art, with the full support of the Hood Museum Board of Advisors, sought to rethink what entry level means for our fellowship programs. We reckoned with how race, geography, socioeconomic status, education, religion, and gender identity, as well as the colonial legacy of museums, can create a situation where professionals we want to include are not represented or do not feel they can even apply. Ultimately, we designed a fellowship wherein the less museum experience you have, the better. We would teach the work but create space to learn from our fellows in a mutual exchange of ideas.

As the inaugural cohort of the Hood Museum's fellowship comes to a close this fall, the fellows and advisors reflect on the program and their experiences over the past three years.

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Mutual Learning Fellow Beatriz Martinez and curator Jami Powell visit Carolina Caycedo at the artist's studio in LA in March 2023. Photo courtesy of Jami Powell.

Advisor NEELY MCNULTY
Hood Foundation Curator of Education

Typically, museum education jobs require degrees in art history, education, or museum education. Studio experience is often considered extra rather than central to a museum educator's skills portfolio. From years of studying illustration as an undergraduate, Mutual Learning Fellow Jayde Xu's ways of seeing and problem-solving emerged as valuable assets for our public programs. She brought creative vision to studio planning for our K–12 programs and added art making to several cross-departmental public programs, resulting in more options for our audiences. In 2023, Xu initiated and illustrated a new Hood Museum family activity guide. Its playful imagination perfectly captures the spirit of what we hope happens in our galleries. Through the joy and play they convey, her illustrations serve as a bridge to our resources, subtly but beautifully making the Hood Museum more accessible to our audiences.

Advisor NICOLE GILBERT 
Head of Exhibitions 

We often get wrapped up in the daily grind, and this fellowship program offered members of my department a chance to grow individually and as a team through reflection and new, exciting forms of collaboration. Fellow Nicki Gaumont began the program enthusiastic to learn and has become a colleague that others turn to for information and support. Gaumont learned art-handling skills and then implemented them through individual and collaborative work in collections care, the Bernstein Center for Object Study, and our exhibitions—work that supports the core of the museum's mission to teach with art. From working on AV installations in the galleries to conducting an inventory of time-based media art in storage, Gaumont has also become a key contributor to forward-facing and behind-the scenes digital experiences at the Hood Museum.

Advisor JAMI POWELL 
Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art 

The Hood Museum differentiates itself from our peer institutions because of our collections, exhibitions, and research, but also because Dartmouth is different. Unlike other universities with academic museums and galleries, Dartmouth has relatively few graduate students in the arts and humanities. Therefore, when we established this program, the emphasis on post-baccalaureate fellows (though a bachelor's degree is not required) gave us the opportunity to work with emerging museum professionals at a pivotal moment in their careers when opportunities for museum work are incredibly limited. I hope the success of this unique program can serve as a model for other institutions looking to develop meaningful and transformative training programs for future museum professionals.

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Mutual Learning Fellow Jayde Xu walks community members through an art-making activity during a Community Day event in 2024. Photo by Rob Strong.

Above all, we are a teaching museum, and our galleries and classrooms are spaces to push students, visitors, and ourselves to think critically and creatively in ways that challenge our understanding of the world around us. This fellowship and my work with Mutual Learning Fellow Beatriz Yanes Martinez and the other fellows have truly challenged me in the best ways. Working with Martinez on curatorial projects and particularly acquisitions initiatives to bring more Latine, Central American, and Hemispheric Indigenous art into the collections has been illuminating and will certainly have a long-lasting impact on my own practice and the permanent collection of the museum. 

Fellow JAYDE XU 
Education and Programming 

What was unique about the apprenticeship learning model of the Mutual Learning Fellowship?

The apprenticeship model allowed me to become more detail-oriented through tangible, lived experience. Learning how to run a program entirely by referencing an event-planning document is one thing, but running multiple programs start to finish, with all the potential highs and lows, is quite another. Throughout my fellowship, I've most appreciated becoming proficient in an established structure around executing a project and then having the flexibility to ideate and reshape those structures into projects and programs I felt uniquely equipped to create. 

Some examples of foundational experiences I've gained include event planning the education department's Community Day, curating pop-up exhibitions for affinity group tours, and creating content for posters, activity guides, and blog posts. From these formative experiences, I've been able to hone the technical skills needed to implement the ideas and initiatives I feel strongly about. 

Two highlights of the past year were launching the museum's first-ever Lunar New Year program and an Asian languages transcription project. It was a new and exciting challenge for the Lunar New Year program to rework an existing program format—Community Day— into a multifaceted cultural program and then champion it in the Upper Valley. With the language transcription project, I am grateful for the opportunity to support and collaborate with museum intern Ash Chinta, who brought their own expertise and insights. Together, we built a process for more in-depth research of Asian artworks by recognizing the value of in-art text and language to improve the museum's methods of transcription and translation. Both projects were rooted in using existing museum formats to hold space for deeper understanding and personal expertise in service of a communal experience and resource. Three years of collective experiences have led me to prioritize a generosity and people-centric mindset in my future work and to advocate for structures of actionable public service. 

What advice would you give to the next round of fellows? 

Feel empowered to set your own boundaries for both what you want to try, learn, and do—and what you do not. As I finish my fellowship, one of my proudest takeaways has been the work the mutual learning fellows have achieved as a collective: trust and support your co-fellows as advocates for each other. There are so many experiences, from our co-curated exhibition to day-to-day brainstorming and professional development opportunities, that were made possible or better through their collaboration, and I'm grateful that we were a team that always supported one another.

Fellow NICHELLE GAUMONT
Registration and Collections

What was unique about the apprenticeship learning model of the Mutual Learning Fellowship?

For me, the last year of the Mutual Learning Fellowship has been about using and building on the skills we've been acquiring for the past two years. I still feel like I'm constantly learning in my position, but I've also been taking more ownership and accountability for my work. The biggest examples of this are the exhibition that Jayde, Beatriz, and I organized together, From the Field: Tracing Foodways through Art, and the condition assessment of our time-based media art collection that I initiated this winter. In meetings, we framed these long-term projects as our "capstones"—a way to synthesize and present all that we've been learning throughout the fellowship. While this is true, and they have been some of the most collaborative and generative projects I've worked on, I'm also finding satisfaction and confidence in my day-to-day work. 

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Mutual Learning Fellow Nichelle Gaumont arranges artwork to be photographed as a part of the museum's digitization initiative. Photo by Dana Kerdesky.

I handle art most days of the week, whether it's staging objects for a class in the study center, packing art for transport in our box truck, or assisting in an exhibition installation. When I first started learning to handle art, I shadowed my supervisor, Nikki, and other museum preparators and registrars. I asked questions like why paintings were leaned on the cart in a particular order, or why a sculpture was packed a certain way, and usually received a two-part answer: the practical one (framed works should be stacked face-to-face or back-to-back to prevent damage; extra tissue paper helps support the weak points on the work and minimizes shaking), and the reassurance that eventually this would all be second-nature to me. Two-and-a-half years later, it turns out daily/weekly/monthly practice does yield results! This isn't surprising, except for the fact that a three-year fellowship is quite uncommon in the museum field. Now, with only five months left, I realize the longevity of the Mutual Learning Fellowship is one of its greatest strengths. I've been able to shape the course of my fellowship based on what kind of work is exciting and engaging to me. Coming into the museum as an apprentice means I've also made a lot of colleagues into mentors (wittingly or not), and I'm forever grateful for the generosity of my coworkers at the Hood Museum, who are always willing to let me poke my head in with a question or ask for a hand moving a painting. 

What advice would you give to the next round of fellows? 

When I started the Mutual Learning Fellowship, I was very self-conscious about my lack of experience in the art and museum fields. Coupled with Dartmouth's intimidating reputation as an Ivy League institution, I felt a surge of imposter syndrome every time I stepped on campus during my first few weeks here. However, as I started to engage more deeply with my work, I realized I had as much to offer the museum as I had to learn from it. As a museum worker, your labor and desire to make positive change is critical to the success of the institution, regardless of the academic degree or prior work experience on your resume. If you find yourself experiencing these same feelings at the beginning of your fellowship, know that you already belong.

Fellow BEATRIZ YANES MARTINEZ 
Curatorial and Exhibitions 

What was unique about the apprenticeship learning model of the Mutual Learning Fellowship?

Over the trajectory of my fellowship at the Hood Museum, I've had the opportunity to grow and nourish my curatorial practice. What is unique and successful about the apprenticeship model is that it provides enough avenues and resources for fellows to grow within their respective departments and assignments while also acknowledging the wide array of skills and experiences that each fellow brings to the table. As someone who entered the museum through a bit of a non-traditional, winding path, I spent the first year of my fellowship wondering about my place within the museum world and whether this was the right path for me. However, I was able to commiserate with the rest of my fellowship cohort as we learned our way through the museum while always receiving support from my advisor, Jami C. Powell, and the rest of the staff at the museum. 

The first year of the fellowship was dedicated to bringing me up to speed with understanding the mechanics of working within a museum, from doing research into different areas of the collection to writing curatorial reports, supporting the development of exhibitions, and acquiring artworks for the museum. Most notably, during the first year and a half of my fellowship, I worked as the onsite curatorial assistant for the traveling exhibition Printing the Revolution: The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965–Present, a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian American Art Museum that was presented at the Hood Museum of Art in 2023. Together with Hood Museum curator Michael Hartman, we worked to translate the exhibition from its origins in a public art museum to our academic museum setting and engage our student population, both undergraduate and K–12 students, with these powerful artworks. This exhibition gave me an opportunity to develop the skills and gain the experience to manage a traveling exhibition, develop programming, create interactive opportunities for engagement with the content, teach classes, and host tours, among other things. 

The opportunity to support different curatorial projects, in turn, helped me curate and co-curate my own exhibitions. For example, together with fellows Nichelle Gaumont and Jayde Xu, we co-curated the exhibition From the Field: Tracing Foodways through Art. In this collaboration, we each utilized the skills we'd learned within our respective departments. One of the themes of the exhibition is connection through food, which our cohort-style fellowship practiced amongst ourselves throughout our time together.

Concurrently, I worked on my first solo curated exhibition, [Un]mapping: Decolonial Cartographies of Place. This exhibition examines how Black, Indigenous, queer, and diasporic artists are contesting, critiquing, and reimagining the map. Through the works of Shana Agid, Sarah Sense, Kiara Aileen Machado, Nell Painter, and Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez, I pose this question: How can we engage in different forms of geographic representation that refuse maps as the primary tool for understanding our relationship to place? In both curatorial projects, I have learned and unlearned a great deal through the generosity of the artists and artworks with which I've engaged— this work creates spaces to host entangled conversations about the legacies of mapping projects, food sovereignty, and justice and shed light on environmental issues while also opening pathways to carve belonging for queer, Indigenous, Black, and diasporic communities.

What advice would you give to the next round of fellows?

One of the most important elements of the fellowship, and what I believe will be the longest-lasting, is the connections and relationships I've fostered both within the museum and outside with fellow colleagues, artists, museum cultural workers, curators, and more. While many challenges still plague the art world regarding equity, accessibility, and inclusion, the relationships I've been able to foster have provided me with the support I need to navigate them.

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Beatriz Yanes Martinez presents her exhibition "[Un] Mapping: Decolonial Cartographies of Place" in July 2024. Photo by Rob Strong.