Halfway Point

I can’t believe I’m writing this—our Getty internship is more than halfway complete. We were warned during the first week that we would feel this way by Week 5, but I think we’re all still shocked at how quickly the time has passed.And it’s no wonder! We’ve had very busy schedules for the past few weeks. In addition to the trip to Culver City and the Getty Arts Summit I blogged about, we also went to a Surrealism lecture at the Getty Research Institute and a Genji Symposium here at Scripps. We met conservators Aneta Zebala and Hisaji Sekichi. And a couple weeks ago, we spent a day in LA with Samella Lewis and Alison Saar. One of my projects this summer has been to research pieces in the Scripps College Samella Lewis Collection and write about them, so meeting Samella and Alison was especially exciting for me. Alison told us about the projects she’s been working on lately and her experiences with public art projects. She was wonderfully down-to-earth and kind.And talking to Samella Lewis was kind of surreal. Have you ever read so much about someone’s life and work that you started to feel like you knew them? That’s how I was beginning to feel about Samella Lewis. But it turns out there was a lot of information about her that I simply couldn’t have learned from my research. There are so many intimate details that get left out of academic articles and museum catalogues and even transcribed interviews. It’s really impossible to know someone without actually looking them in the face and hearing what they have to say come straight from their own mouth. Samella had lots of personal anecdotes about her life to share with us. She regaled us with stories from her time spent in Bayou Tesch, Louisiana, which is a place that has inspired several of her pieces. (A few of which are in our Permanent Collection.) It was really a treat to here her talk about her work.And today we painted tiles at First Street Gallery. I think McKenzie is going to post about that soon, so I’ll let her tell you about it. When we aren’t busy traveling around and meeting exciting, new people, I’ve been working on planning the fall exhibit for the Clark Humanities Museum at Scripps. It’s going to be a show that features several pieces from our Permanent Collection. I just finished my preliminary checklist and proposal today, but I’ll post more information about the exhibit soon!

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