I can’t believe my time at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts is almost half way over! After spending the first two weeks of my internship completely engrossed in the catalog for the DCCA’s first satellite show, Young Country, I thought that sending the raw materials to the publisher meant that our part was complete, but boy was I wrong! Once the designer was finished working his magic he sent the PDF back to us and everyone in the office got a copy and we all went over the catalog with a fine-toothed comb making sure that everything was perfect. I’ve learned about aspects of Adobe Reader that I never knew existed!
Now that the Young Country catalog has officially gone to press, my duties have shifted back to the everyday duties of a curatorial assistant. My big project has been to organize files on the DCCA server. There’s a lot of redundancy in the computer system, so it has been my responsibility to restore order and clear out duplicate files.
Another of my tasks related to the computer has been resizing installation shots of the exhibitions at the DCCA. One of our generous board members comes in at the beginning of every exhibition and takes photos of the work in the galleries. The shots he takes are beautiful, high resolution .tif images, which if I placed on our internal server would take up all the space we have, so it has been my job to resize the images and file them away in their respective artist’s files. While doing this, I noticed that not all of the installation shots from previous shows had not been resized before they were filed away, so I am now going through and resizing all the images from the past six years of installations. It's a daunting task, but something I enjoy doing.
Also during the past two weeks I have dusted off my InDesign skills and created Call For Entries for both the upcoming MFA Biennial and the 2013 Member’s Solo Shows. I have also been doing a lot of research on curatorial practices and theories as well as artists who use social media as a basis for their artwork. It’s really exciting to see first hand how popular culture affects the art scene. Next year the DCCA will be having an exhibition dedicated to social media’s influence on contemporary art.
DCCA Summer Art Camp 2011: Explore, Imagine, Create started this week and even though I’m not directly involved in that aspect of the museum, I cannot wait for the end of the week showcase where the children will present the projects they have been working on all week.
Hi Laura -- You are getting some good experience, and you sound like you are having a good time, too. I will be interested to learn more about your research on social media and contemporary art. I think a lot about social media as a way to communicate with the public about programs and exhibits, but this is something completely different.
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