Name: Mir Finkelman

Major(s)/Minor(s): Art History

Year: Senior

Position: Barb's personal assistant

How long have you worked in the Art Library? 5 semesters

What does your personal job consist of? Working in special collections, researching books, handling and working with artist's books

What is your favorite part about working here? I get to see so much exciting material coming into and passing through the library and talk to people about their interests or the projects they are working on

Have there been any projects you’ve worked on or seen others working on that seem particularly interesting? Working with the Tannenbaum collection has been really great. I've gotten to see the project through almost from start to finish, going to the house of Barbara Tannenbaum and her husband and packing up the books for donation, then inventory-ing them and seeing them make their way into the stacks has been quite exciting.

The art library puts up little costumed figurines of the employees every year. Which theme has been your favorite? For halloween this year I was a Chihuahua dressed as a taco, which I thought was pretty swell.

What is your favorite book that the Art Library has? Justseed's Artist's Cooperative

What has been your favorite class in your major and why? The four upper-level art history courses I have taken, including two seminars have equipped me with tools of critical thought and analysis that will be unspeakably useful in my work to come. Beginning with a Methods of Art History course which examines the discipline itself and provides the allowance that not all questions have answers, my practices of thought in art history became truly critical. Following the modes of canonical analysis and interrogation set out in this requirement for the major, a course on Critical Theory and Aesthetics brought me to grapple with infuriatingly dense texts and build my vocabulary not only in reading but also in my articulation of my own misunderstanding and confusion. The two seminars I have taken this year are Cultural Property? and Slavery and the Problem of the Visual. Each of these courses challenges traditions of art history in its own way, digging deep and always asking the question "for whom?" For whom have these discourses evolved? Who have they served in the past? And how can the discipline of art history make use of the answers to these questions in moving forward, even if the answer is silence.

Where do you see yourself working/where would you like to work after you graduate? I would like to work in a museum or a gallery, hopefully in the curatorial or public engagement departments. I believe that there is always more than one narrative to be told, whether through one work or a group of works, and that only presenting one story does the others an injustice. I hope to expand curatorial practices to engage viewers in the multitude of possible themes to be found in any interaction with art, thus placing themselves within the ongoing narrative, as well.

Name: Mattis Deutch

Major(s)/Minor(s): GSFS

Year: Senior

Position: Kay’s Assistant

How long have you worked in the Art Library? I've been here for a year

What does your personal job consist of? I'm Kay's assistant so I pretty much do any old thing that needs to get done--some of the jobs I like are putting colibri covers on large books, handling carrel forms, and searching for missing books in carnegie storage

What is your favorite part about working here? My favorite thing to do is repairing books---there's a whole section in the everything list on book repair, and we don't have the materials to do a lot of it any more, but I do what I can.

Have there been any projects you’ve worked on or seen others working on that seem particularly interesting? Explain. I worked on the flats project for a while---flats are books we store on their side because they're so big, and I think the metal flats cabinet is also the oldest locked storage space in the art library aside from special collections (we had it before the Limited Access shelf and the glass door shelves), so it's kind of a repository for valuable and interesting books. A lot of them don't have records, so the project is to write down their information and, if they're not bound, make sure all the pages are there. I like spreading three-foot-tall books out on the table.

What is your favorite book that the Art Library has? My favorite book here is in the superflats cabinet. It's a book of hand-painted reproductions of stained glass windows.

What has been your favorite class in your major and why? My favorite class in my major was probably Gender, Sexuality, and the Law. It's all supreme court case law, which I really love.

Name: Nicoline Meyer

Major(s)/Minor(s): Classical Civilizations and Latin Literature/Language double major

Year: 4th

Position on staff: Barcoding and Updating records for the Dewey move

How long have you worked in the Art Library? This is my second semester working at the Art Library.

What does your personal job consist of? After the Dewey books are pulled I go through them, and add new barcodes if they have the old sigma barcodes, change the records if they are marked "Library use only" in the book but not in Sierra, and then update their location and status to Art Storage and In Transit, so that they are ready for the movers to take them into storage. I also keep track of how many books I update so that Kay and Barb have an idea of how many books we have already moved and the pace we are going at. 

What is your favorite part about working here? I love getting to see all the old books that we have, they are incredibly beautiful and they cover so many cool subjects. It's also great to interact with my coworkers and the patrons, who are all super nice.  

Have there been any projects you’ve worked on or seen others working on that seem particularly interesting? Any project that works with Special Collections; there are so many interesting and beautiful books and I love seeing people work with them.

The art library puts up little costumed figurines of the employees every year. Which theme has been your favorite? I think this year is actually my favorite: the Yzma and Stormtrooper costumes are brilliant!

What is your favorite book that the Art Library has? There is a series about the early excavations of Crete, specifically the palace of Minos at Knossos, that I really like. Not only is the subject matter interesting, but there are some really neat site maps and discussions about Linear A and B. If you're interested, the title is The Palace of Minos at Knossos by Arthur Evans and it is located in the Dewey section (913.391.8 EV15M)!

What has been your favorite class in your major and why? My favorite class for my Latin major is probably the one I'm taking now on Martial or last semester's on Tacitus. They both give really interesting insights into different parts of Rome and Roman culture during a really interesting part of the Imperial period. For my Classical Civ major, it's probably the Greek and Roman Myth class.

Where do you see yourself working/where would you like to work after you graduate? I've applied for an internship with the Egyptian Art Department at the Met and I'll learn if I got the job soon (fingers crossed!) and I've been looking at other positions in museums as well as teaching Latin in elementary and/or high schools.