Exploring Museum Careers: My Experience as a High-School Intern at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to work at a museum? Have you ever thought about the various people and disciplines that come together to make a museum function? These are questions I used to think about frequently. Every visit I made to the Cleveland Museum of Art as a young teen only further inspired me to pursue a career in museum work, amazed by the precision and care that informed its every aspect. The catch, however, was that I had very little idea what the various fields of museum work involved. Museum occupations like curation and security are well known, but I was eager to learn more about other career paths available at museums like the CMA. 

The perfect opportunity for this was presented to me this past June in the form of the new Toni M. and Donald S. Scherzer Endowment Internship in education and design, a three-week internship for high-school juniors and seniors designed to introduce them to career paths in the art museum and provide them with early-career professional experience. During this internship, I had the opportunity to learn from, shadow, and work with members of different teams at the museum. I spent my first week with the education team and my second week with the design and production teams. I’m now glad to share my experiences and some things I’ve learned, along with how they’ve impacted me. 

I began by shadowing Reggie Musnuff, a gallery teacher at the CMA. Gallery teachers use the museum galleries to teach students and campers valuable and creativity-fostering lessons about art and its connection to their lives. They aim to inspire and educate them in ways different from traditional schooling—and even from many people’s perception of traditional museum education. Reggie said that this is his favorite part of the job. He enjoys the freedom they have to teach, and the lack of rigidity regarding time and place in their lessons: “It’s probably what I most enjoy about it.” 

Gallery instruction at the CMA is not lecture based or even focused on a certain time or place topically, which allows gallery teachers to use and connect many different artworks across the museum in thematic lessons. The theme when I shadowed Reggie as he taught a young group of CMA summer campers was World and Wonder. Lessons included writing campers’ names in Egyptian hieroglyphs, building treasure boxes out of Lego inspired by what campers most valued in their lives (a lesson based off of the artwork Treasure Box by Ai Weiwei, on view at the CMA), and many more activities.

I also had the opportunity to learn about the diverse backgrounds of education-team members at the CMA. People from several different educational backgrounds, such as Reggie, who has a background in history, have come to work in the department. This shows that it is accessible from a variety of fields, not limited to art history or education. “A lot of people think you have to be some sort of artist or come from an art background to work here,” said Reggie. “There are tons of people who work here who have never painted before . . . the art museum is a place where anyone can find a home.” It was very interesting to learn about the education team at the CMA, and to have a close look into the unique and valuable work they do in the museum. 

During my second week at the CMA, I worked with the design and production teams. Starting the week with design, I worked especially with Mary Thomas, senior graphic designer, and Jim Engelmann, exhibition designer. They taught me about exhibition design and the many considerations that go into exhibitions, from the wall graphics made by the design team to the methods used to regulate the humidity around artworks using silica. They taught me much of this while giving me a tour of the recent Africa & Byzantium exhibition after it had closed and while it was being dismantled. This was an amazing and unique opportunity that I learned an incredible amount of information from, regarding exhibition floor-plan design, the process of image selection for exhibition graphics, the work the CMA does with museums it collaborates with for exhibitions, and much more. 

Following this, I was given a project to work on that related to the experience: determining the location of artworks in the upcoming Picasso and Paper exhibition that require very low levels of light. Much of the content of the Picasso and Paper exhibition was leased to the CMA on the condition that it be displayed at a light level of 25 lux or lower for preservation purposes, roughly half the light level of Africa and Byzantium, very dark for an exhibition. In order to see if the exhibition light level could be raised in any areas, the location of these low-light-level pieces was needed. I completed this work over a couple of days, highlighting all low-light-level pieces on a large paper map of the exhibition floor plan. 

As I worked, I also took opportunities to visit the production team. The production team creates many elements of the museum, from printing out the signage and graphics that the design team designs to creating the mounts that artworks are placed on for display at the CMA. I met with Robin Roth, head of production, who showed me various parts of the department, including printing and the paint shop. I was also introduced to Danté Rodriguez, mount maker, who gave me a detailed look into his work in the mount-making shop and fascinating insight into the national mount-making community that he engages with. Experiences like these are something I never would have imagined without the opportunity of this internship and were an incredible opening for professional development in the field of museum work. 

At the end of my internship’s second week, I had the opportunity to give a presentation at the CMA’s intern capstone event, an event where CMA summer interns gave presentations on the projects that were the focus of their internships. It was wonderful to learn about the work of other interns, many of whom I had met over my first two weeks, and to present to those I’d worked with on my experiences over that course of time. 

As I finish the final week of my internship, which I have spent reflecting and writing about my experience, I am filled with gratitude that such an opportunity now exists to teach high-school students like myself about the field of museum work. I would like to express my thanks to Toni M. and Donald S. Scherzer for making this possible. It is an incredible and enjoyable opportunity for early-career professional development, which I am sure many other interns after me will find just as expansive and fruitful as I have. My time as an intern for the Toni M. and Donald S. Scherzer Endowment Internship in education and design has been fantastic, and I look forward to seeing how it will help shape my future.