olivia kay morris

by Olivia Morris 

            I am a DePaul intern pioneer for all future marketing interns at the DePaul Art Museum. The first of my kind! It's pretty awesome. Being on the business side of the art and museum world can be exciting, fun and rewarding. It takes excellent communication and organizational skills, a creative and open mind, and a willingness to try new things.

            You might recognize our now iconic Lincoln Park space located immediately East of the Fullerton El Station (We just had our 2nd birthday!)-  

              I started at the DePaul Art Museum two years ago as a gallery monitor. I was asked a year later if I wanted to be the collections intern, and then stumbled/gracefully fell into the marketing intern position.  The administrative staff consists of Louise Lincoln (Museum Director), Laura Fatemi (Associate Director), Greg Harris (Assistant Curator), and Alison Kleiman (Administrative Assistant and Events Coordinator).  We have a small administrative staff, four interns (I am counting myself twice here), and twelve gallery monitors.   

            This is the office space upstairs where I get to hang out with the administrative staff on what I now know as Marketing Mondays-

                                                My goal for the end of my ten weeks as the marketing intern has been defined as: raising awareness and attendance of the DePaul student community to the museum. With no one on staff that handles marketing exclusively, Alison has been focusing marketing efforts on the city of Chicago and the greater Chicagoland area. Hoping emails will get passed along to students through the faculty, putting up fliers around campus, and having an excellent social media presence has been an effective way to promote to students thus far. The marketing intern role is now exposing me to all different channels that students utilize within the DePaul community.             Here I am having a fun Marketing Monday with Alison and spending some time with our Twitter @DePaulArtMuseum-

                                                My daily tasks have been formed along the way after first defining my role within the museum based on our most pressing needs. I put up fliers around the Lincoln Park campus, and will be putting up fliers around the Loop campus in the next few weeks. I get to research and create content for our social media platforms. This includes researching artists that we have on exhibition and creating tweets about them, diving into our collection of 2500 art objects and picking weekly features for our Instagram account, and sharing events on our Facebook page. Here I am creating content for our Twitter-

                                                My daily tasks also include adding events to the Events.DePaul.Edu page weekly, so they can now pop up on the ever-famous Campus Connect that all students are happily forced to utilize. I am also in the process of strategizing how to get information about the museum to students most effectively.

            Here I am researching our collection in the Collection Study Room and then awkwardly shuffling papers like any good employee does-

            I've gotten to learn a lot about how a relatively small art museum runs. I've been exposed to how a museum's collection is acquired, processed and stored. I've assisted in planning and executing 17 different exhibitions over the last year and a half.  And now as the marketing intern, I get to think about how to communicate effectively to a certain audience in a world that is saturated with people who are trying to do the exact same thing. To me, marketing is problem solving, creativity and innovation through a greater organization's lens. You have to look at the big picture and the details at the same time. Marketing for an arts organization like the DePaul Art Museum is a great way to utilize both sides of your brain (getting class credit is a plus, too!).             This is my last quarter at DePaul, and I just hope that the next hundred marketing interns have as great of an experience at the DePaul Art Museum as I have.              Right now we have the exhibition We Shall: Photographs by Paul D'Amato on the first floor-

            ...and the exhibition Histories / Photographies on the second floor-

              The DePaul Art Museum is free for everyone everyday, so stop in on a break between classes, schedule an appointment to view pieces in our collection, or just come by whenever! And don't be shy on social media! :) Twitter (@DePaulArtMuseum) Instagram (@DePaulArtMuseum) Facebook (Facebook.com/DePaulArtMuseum)

               Thanks for reading,