by Kendall Clawson da Silva
My passion for art and museums can be traced to a cold, December day in New York City when my parents took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time. I was fourteen years old and had never been to a major art museum before. My mom, who had previously worked as an adjunct art history professor at the local community college, had taught me about various artists, but I had never seen them in person until that day at the Met. I was mesmerized by Pollock’s chaotic patterns and Monet’s dreamy depictions of cathedrals. It was an experience that I would never forget.
In January of this year, I began working as a curatorial fellow for Dr. Janalee Emmer, the director of the MOA. After years of loving and researching art, I was ecstatic to finally get the chance to work in an art museum. My experience at the MOA ended up surpassing my expectations; I had the opportunity to research art, help write exhibition labels, attend curatorial meetings, and interact with art every single day. I gained important skills, such as art historical research and navigating TMS, the museum’s collection database. Through my fellowship at the MOA, I realized how much I loved museum work, and it prompted me to seek a museum internship for the summer. I applied for BYU’s Berlin internship program because of my interest in German history, which helped me get an interview with the director of the DDR Museum in Berlin. The skills I gained at the MOA ended up being important factors in helping me land this internship, as the director was impressed by my previous research experience.
The DDR Museum has a distinct motto: “Geschichte zum Anfassen.” In English, this roughly translates to “history you can touch,” and the entire design of the museum centers around this interactive philosophy. For example, visitors can ride in a Trabi simulator which takes them through the streets of Berlin in the classic GDR-era car or write a note on a functioning typewriter from the Cold War. The museum aims to provide an experience for visitors to better understand what it was like to live in East Germany during the Cold War.
At the museum, I had the opportunity to participate in various departments. I researched collection objects and wrote captions about them for the social media team; I translated German materials into English, such as wall labels and the museum’s online articles; and I worked directly with the objects by cataloging them both in the online database and in the physical collection. Additionally, I got to practice German every single day. My most meaningful day on the job was one of my last days as I was helping the collections manager catalog old newspaper articles. As I sat in the office, sorting through the newspaper clippings, one particular article caught my eye. It was a local newspaper from East Berlin, and the date read November 10th, 1989. As I sat reading the article, I realized that I held a significant piece of history in my hands: an article from East Berlin written the day after the wall fell. I felt humbled and honored that I could interact with such important historical objects firsthand.
When I started my fellowship at the MOA, I had no idea that the skills I learned would eventually lead to an internship on Museum Island in Berlin. However, my time at the MOA was instrumental in both preparing me for further museum work and deepening my interest in the museum field. Because of my experiences at both the MOA and the DDR Museum, I had the opportunity to encounter history more profoundly than I could have ever imagined. One could even say I “touched” history.
