#museum intern

Hi there!

My name is Sarah, I am a history major and a Junior at the University of Central Florida, and I want to welcome you to my journey through my internship at Osceola History’s Pioneer Village at Shingle Creek.

I have been interested in living history since I was a child. Growing up in Wichita, Kansas I was extremely lucky to have the chance to volunteer and then later work at an incredible living history institution: Old Cowtown Museum. This is where I truly fell in love with history and the idea of developing ways to get kids like me, more involved and excited about the past. I helped with school groups, tours, and learned so many tools to help me in the development of museum education programs later in my career. In addition to my interests in creating and implementing education programs, I also have a love of food history and find myself gravitating towards historical cookbooks and cooking technologies whenever I get the chance. Working at a living history museum meant learning how to cook, and thus I learned how to cook and bake on a wood-burning stove and over an open fire before I became proficient at cooking in a modern kitchen.

When I was accepted into UCF, I knew that the first thing I wanted to do was get involved in the local public history community. After speaking to a couple professors, I applied for, and was given, an internship with Osceola History as a Museum Education intern. This opportunity gives me the ability to work on a project that I find myself being excited by more and more every single day.

When I first met up with the Experience and Engagement Director, he took me on a tour of the Osceola History’s Welcome Center where I learned about the era of Florida history I would be focusing on; roughly from the 15thcentury to the beginning of the 20th century. Then, we made the trek over to the actual living history part of the museum: Pioneer Village at Shingle Creek. I had a tour of the buildings and was very excited to see that many of the artifacts I was familiar with from my time at Cowtown! As I begin my work for this museum, I feel prepared and I hope that my background knowledge of this time period will assist in my creation of engaging topics that students will appreciate and enjoy.

Intern spotlight: William Satloff, Collections Department. 

I arrived at the Brooklyn Museum on a sunny morning in early June. Still healing from a brutal week of final exams, I had not yet prepared myself for the first day of my internship in the Museum’s Marketing and Communications Department. I was so unprepared that I felt no nerves at all– no butterflies, no sweaty palms. I hoped for a peek into the inner workings of a large arts institution and to engage in meaningful work. My internship experience fulfilled both these wishes, and gave me a gift I could have never anticipated. Through thoughtful and passionate conversations, my fellow interns have changed my relationship with museum spaces. The interns take on a variety of responsibilities in departments across the museum, bringing their commitment and drive to every corner of the building. William Satloff is an intern in the Collections Department. This is what he shared about his role: 

— Ginger Adams

I’m William Satloff, the Brooklyn Museum summer intern tasked with inventorying and conservation-grade repackaging boxes of commercial textiles. I work primarily with textiles related to L. & E. Stirn — cloth merchants that set up shop in NYC in the 1890s. Because most of the materials I handle are more than a hundred years old, they’re often dusty and sometimes completely disintegrated.

First I protect my nose, mouth and lungs with a particle respirator; then I cover my hands with latex exam gloves. (The gloves are also to protect the paper and textiles from the oils on my hands!) Then I’m ready to get to work. 

Each box has roughly 2,000-3,000 textile swatches and samples. To process all that, I’ve developed a routine to get through one box every four days. To lay it out for you... First I unpack the box — removing each item one-by-one, inspecting for any labels or tags, taking note of format and dimensions.

As I make my way through the box, I group the items in categorical stacks, considering what types of categories would be helpful to someone archiving the materials in the future. I subsequently write a brief description for each stack on a slip of paper that will stay with its respective materials through the packaging process. Next, I photograph examples from the most interesting categories (i.e. reflective sheers, metallic thread embroidery) to represent the box’s contents.

Then I type a categorical inventory, outlining what companies, fabric and paper formats, and types of textiles (i.e. stripes, plaids, sheers) are in the box. I print the inventory and photographs to include in the repackaged boxes. After that, I wrap each category up in archival materials so they can be stable in a box for 10-15 years, or more. This step includes measuring and cutting acid free board to support the paper-backed specimens, sealing loose textiles in polypropylene bags with twill ties, and more. Finally, I pack the materials back into their original box. Usually I need to find better housing and expand to a second box when repacking because the conservation materials increase the total volume of the contents. 

It’s a lot of steps, but it’s really fun. I get to handle the art as opposed to looking at it behind a glass case. Because of the work I’m doing, these historic textiles will get a life beyond collecting dust and falling apart in some storage area. I’m given the independence and responsibility to make decisions about how this set of the Museum’s objects will be received by future collectors, curators, and conservators. I was hoping my internship would give me an opportunity to see how a major museum really functions and to get practical, hands-on experience with a key part of museum operations — this summer’s experience met and exceeded those expectations.

Each week the Brooklyn Museum Summer Interns participate in full-day educational programs that explore the roles of museums through on-site visits and field trips to other institutions around the city. Look out for our weekly posts where we’ll share what we’re doing and learning in the program.

Week 9: The BKM summer interns gathered Tuesday morning in the boardroom for the ninth installation of our days of education programming. Even after nine weeks at the museum, we still have plenty to learn about the internal operations of such a large cultural institution. To help us puzzle together the various moving parts at work in the Museum and complement our understanding of museum management as a whole, we met with Megan Bill, Curatorial Assistant to the Arts of Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Islamic world. Megan, a former intern herself, framed the conversation by defining with more scrutiny the vocabulary we’ve been tossing around this summer. These terms—which include decolonization, provenance, and source community, have arisen as particularly relevant to our ongoing discussion of the responsive museum. Megan recounted the emotional experience of working with communities to uncover the histories of previously untraced objects. 

After our conversation with Megan, we migrated to the library. There we roamed amongst historic exhibition documents specifically pulled to contextualize our afternoon visit with Catherine Morris. The documents centered on the historical place of quilts and a 2013 exhibit in the Elizabeth A. Sackler for Feminist Art, Workt by Hand: Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts. 

At noon we settled in the sunlight of the courtyard for lunch. We compared plans for the remainder of our summers and shared disbelief at the impending conclusion of our summers at BKM. An unexpected gift from this summer has come in the form of a camaraderie and found kinship between the interns. Our friendship is certainly owed to our Tuesdays together and has made moving through Museum hallways and work spaces feel more comfortable and more ours. 

After lunch we reconvened in ‘Our house,’ the resource room of Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall in the Elizabeth A. Sackler for Feminist Art. Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator met us there for a discussion facilitated by Erika Lively, Internship Advisor, on the sociocultural role of quilts and the distinctions between feminist art and art produced by those who identify as female. 

We then moved to the auditorium, where we set up our stools on stage. There we met with Brooklyn-born artist and educator Iviva Olenick, whose beautiful work we saw in the museum's archives during our second week. Ivivva grows her own indigo and uses its natural pigments to dye fabrics which she embroiders with words and images. It was an honor to handle her work and learn her process after feeling struck by its delicacy a month ago in the archives. We retreated into the auditorium’s seats as Iviva handed out needles and embroidery loops. After an introduction to elementary techniques, we had time to experiment with our own pieces. Embroidering, we learned, is uniquely meditative. A wave of serenity flooded into the space as we manifested our creativity. We’re a pretty artsy bunch of interns after all. 

We were released early, a rarity I personally capitalized on by going home and lying in bed. Exhaustion has set in from a very full summer, to be relieved all too soon next Friday. 

My time this week did not go as planned. On the 1st, which was my birthday, I was exposed to COVID-19 by someone related to my “pandemic pod” friend group. I only found out that the person who had exposed me was positive on the 3rd when my friend started to show symptoms. Given the circumstances, I decided to wait for a couple of days to see if I would exhibit any symptoms before going for a test, in case I received a false negative and had to get tested again a few days later. Since Wednesday, I have begun to show symptoms of some sort of cold which has gotten in the way of completing schoolwork and has thrown my self-prescribed schedule off. I have not yet taken a test but I plan to within the next couple of days. I hope that it’s negative and I just have a bad cold. As of right now I am still able to complete my schoolwork and I fully intend to. I have been isolating since the 3rd and I will continue to do so even if I have a negative test.

If I have learned anything this week, it’s the importance of relaxing deadlines and taking time to evaluate my limits. When it comes to schoolwork, I have a tendency to not stop when I need to and my sleep cycle has been irregular since March, this is definitely not a good thing when one is ill and trying to remain self-sufficient. I have to wonder, how do full-time researchers do it? As much as I enjoy reading and writing and going through the depths of internet archives, how do you take care of yourself and continue to manage deadlines when you are responsible for those deadlines and yet can’t even stare at a screen for more than a couple hours a day.

Osceola History reached out to me about scheduling a meeting and we were not able to schedule an exact time, but I hope within the next couple of days we will be able to meet over Zoom. I have continued reading, although this week I have not been able to finish a lot of material. I apologize for the shortness of my blog post this week, hopefully I can make up for it next week when I hopefully will be on the mend with a negative test result.

This week I spent my time going back over the Seminole unit and editing it to fix the details I was asked to clarify last week. This included specifying the role of Osceola in the naming of Osceola County and the nature of his role during the Seminole Wars. I also continued working on me background information for the other units I need to finish, particularly the development of railroads throughout Central Florida.

I think that next week I will want to contact the museum about possibly going through some of the archives to look at Maps of railway development. I also know that Shingle Creek has a house where a family of English immigrants moved, and the family had an interesting experience when the wife got off the train and saw what Florida looked like. This sort of anecdote is very entertaining and show some of the humanity of history. It also shows how alien Florida's landscape must have looked to those who decided to settle here in Florida. I also want to look at some of the information from the plant museum which has some interesting information on the rise of tourism and the use of railroads and steamboats. I would like to see how connected this extensive tourism industry was between places like Tampa and Osceola County during the latter part of the 19th c. and into the early 20th c.

I also started reading a book quite recently about the 1920s economic boom that Florida went through leading up to the Great Depression. While this is a little bit later from the area I’ve been focusing on in my prior units, the Welcome Center has artifacts that date all the way up through the WWII era.

. Without the development of the railways there wouldn’t have been a development of towns in Florida, with those towns came more people and more technology, in a growing cycle that affected the people already living in Florida and the environment of the state itself. I believe that adding details of this later time period or even hints to how the early part of the 20th century would have impacted the mid 20th century with the crises to come still is an important part of history an important part to include in this historical unit. Students need to learn that history doesn't happen in a vacuum and that history shouldn't necessarily be defined by specific dates. Rather, it should be considered a fluid continuation with smaller events impacting other smaller events and building up to larger events.

In addition to all of the research I have been doing this week and the editing, I received an email from ALFHAM the Association for Living History Farms and Museums and they are having a virtual conference next year with a focus panels and talks about how museums are functioning with current constraints due to the pandemic. I have been considering talking to Osceola History to see if they would be interested in submitting the project I have been working on for a talk at the conference. The due date for proposals is November 15th so there is still time to think about it but, I think it would be good to try and submit something.

As a side note just in time for Halloween, yesterday the video that I participated in last week was posted on YouTube. I have added the link below so anyone who wants to can learn about the ghost of the Historic Kissimmee Courthouse.

This week I spent a lot of time continuously continuing to read the books and binders that were given to me by Osceola county. I still have not had an actual meeting to discuss my Seminole unit, however I was able to get a few notes on things that I need to correct including double checking the history and accuracy of Osceola’s position as a member of the Seminole Tribe.

On Tuesday I was given the opportunity to participate in a social media post series for the Halloween season. So, I was finally able to put to use some of my historical costumes from my previous institution. One of my favorite 19th century ensembles that I got to pull from the depths of my closet is an 1880s wool walking dress. Pictured below is my bodice along with my bustle pad and ruffled petticoat that fills in the poufs around the skirt.

Thanks to quarantine unfortunately it doesn’t fit anymore and so I had to make some adjustments to the dress itself. I spent the next 48 hours doing just that. One of the aspects of living history that I like the most has always been the historical costuming and the chance to wear garments from different areas. The hardest part of getting this outfit back in wearing order came from the fact that I haven’t worn it in five years. Five years is a very long time for someone to continuously not wear a gown and so I had to go back and analyze the original pattern and design of the dress. Thankfully I was able to find some of the Godey’s fashion plates from 1889, which is the year that I would be portraying, I did need to make a new pattern for my skirt so I bought a new pattern from Truly Victorian and then spent the entire night before filming making an under skirt for my outfit.

Thursday morning I headed over to the historic Osceola County Courthouse and we went up to the 3rd floor where we filmed the video that will be posted sometime next week. I didn’t even end up wearing my dress because we were able to go directly in to the room we wanted to film in and take pictures, which was great since the dress did have some mistakes in it.

The video we filmed tells the story of Laura Upthegrove and the ghost story surrounding the historic court house. Apparently the ghost of a woman with a candle appears in the windows of the third floor, which is in my opinion, terrifying but I know that a lot of people enjoy ghost stories around Halloween so it was kind of exciting! The presence of the candles in all of the windows on the third floor was a little disconcerting though, as someone who doesn’t like horror movies.

This week I spent much of my time going through the resources I’ve been gathering and going over activities to start on future units.

I have not had a review meeting yet of the first unit I completed but, I’ve decided to go ahead and start working on developing future units. Last week I started looking over the games from my previous museum and trying to see if I could replicate the games and rules, although some of this is kind of hard to do without access to a carpentry or blacksmith shop. In addition to the lack of access to materials, there is also the matter of the current pandemic. Common playground games are difficult to do now, so unfortunately hoop games like “Graces” are virtually impossible. I think that games like “Question and Answer” might be more doable but it still involves a deck of cards, so once again, we have the problem of passing around cards which is not really safe right now.

However, I have had some luck with creating independent activities for students to do on their own. Focusing on The One Room Schoolhouse, I have been looking at some excerpts from McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader to use as a primary source for students to analyze and compare with the readings in their own modern textbooks. Given the different focuses of education (the 19th c. focus on memorization and recitation vs the modern focus of critical thinking).

Image Source: McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader- Gutenberg Project

I am also planning to take some pictures of and in the schoolhouse itself and some of the elements within it, make a PowerPoint or a video tour for students to take a virtual field trip, and recreate some of the common school lunches that students in the late 1800s might have had. I think that looking at the daily experiences of students in the past and comparing it to the activities that students are going through now should be fun and interesting.

Outside of developing activities related to 19th c. schooling, I recently found these cute Halloween paper houses that can be folded up into boxes. I put tealights in them and made little lanterns, but if I was able to create versions of wagons or the buildings at Pioneer Village, students would have their own paper village; a 3-D map of the museum. Not to mention that this activity would be easy for students to do by themselves.

This week, I didn’t end up doing as much material work as I have done in weeks past, simply because of having to study for midterms, and preparing idea for future unit proposals.

However, with the work I did get done, I tried to continue finishing up some of the minutia that came with the first unit I completed and looking over outside additional material for ideas on children’s activities to go along with other units.

Hopefully, next week I will be able to edit and go through my completed unit with museum staff and discuss what needs to be altered, corrected, or added.  I find the editing process to be interesting. I put so much work into creating the materials and staring at the same pages for weeks that sometimes I forget that not everyone will be able to simply look at these pages and immediately know how to complete the tasks.

I still need to assemble a PowerPoint presentation with more historical background information for teachers to present to students: including maps, primary source readings, and comprehension questions however, I will wait to construct those until I hear back about what additional steps I need to take to edit the work I’ve already completed.

I’m honestly just thrilled that I was able to complete something by the midterm date, so I would have something to show for the work I’ve been doing.

The next unit that I would like to begin working on is the unit on Pioneer Daily Life. Having worked with mid to late 1800s daily life programs before, I think this would be a fun and relatively quick unit that I could put together easily. Although I would have to adjust my interpretation of the era and the decades that I would be covering a little bit, simply because Florida was settled at a different time period than Kansas, I think that the topics would still be similar, and the activities I know could be altered for social distancing or distance learning at home. Not to mention that this could also be a topic that would give me the chance to explore more of Pioneer Village itself and showcase the contents of the homes, farms, and schoolhouse that are on property.