This summer I interned at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem under the supervision of Dr. Adina Kamien, the senior curator in Modern Art at the museum. As a rising third-year student, double majoring in Art History and Religion, I wanted to gain experience in a job that was connected to both academic fields. I have done coursework in Modern Art, Contemporary Art, Indigenous Art, and the vernacular architecture of Montreal, as well as coursework in musical cultures of both Judaism and Islam, Israeli cinema, and theological cinema more broadly. In addition to coursework in Jewish history, I have also studied Islamic history, and the Quran. I have also completed the equivalent of two years of Arabic language and will be continuing upper intermediate Arabic in the fall. I have recently begun coursework that explores the connections between religion and art, and that is what interests me most. I am extremely interested in Jewish art, and how its definitional borders have developed, which is where I plan to focus my further studies.
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, founded in 1965, is the largest and only encyclopedic museum in Israel. Huge collections of art and archeology tell both the local history of the Holy Land and its region, and broader global history, including artifacts from various periods and empires. I have served as an intern in museums and galleries before, but not one of this scale. Both the size of the museum as well as my role assisting a head curator have shown me so much about how much work it takes to run a museum of this scale and impact. I had planned even before this internship to pursue a career in museums, and this experience has only affirmed this desire, showing me how many careers, I could have within the same place.
As an intern for Dr. Adina Kamien in the department of Modern Art, I mainly assisted her in the planning of an exhibition on the theme of dreams set to open in 2024. Marking the 100th anniversary of Andre Breton’s first publication of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, this exhibit features Surrealist and Dada works relating to dreams, as well as art throughout history relating to dreams from all around the world.
With the goal of being as comprehensive as possible, Dr. Kamien began working on this project more than ten years ago. The level of research required to mount such an exhibit has taught me a lot about curation, research, art politics, and –of course – about dreams.
Our main task was researching specific artworks that would relate to the exhibition. In a PowerPoint was a list of works which I had to label with the correct information and research each piece. I was tasked with composing a short paragraph relating it to the theme of the exhibition essentially drafting a gallery label. Other tasks included writing letters to potential corporate sponsors, as well as neuroscientists studying sleep and dreams asking about their research and forming loan requests for the works housed in other institutions that we wanted for the exhibition.
Highlights included attending a lecture by Leah Dickerman, a colleague of Kamien’s from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and our tour of the conservation labs in the museum, as well as the storage rooms. To discover artworks related to dreams in the Israel Museum’s collection, we met with the curator of Asian Art, who brought us into her storeroom to show us a print relating to the Japanese concept of Hatsuyume, which is the first dream one dreams in the new year that is said to predict one’s fortune. From being in the storage rooms and getting to ask questions to other employees at the museum, I learned a great deal about how art is acquired, preserved and handled.
A challenge I encountered was how to know if all the research and writing about each work was meaningful. To overcome this, I had to self-advocate to receive meeting time with my boss, in which I would ask questions on which artworks to prioritize.
The funds granted to me by the Kostman Family Internship Award and Ms. Judith Kostman aided in the purchase of my plane ticket, payment of two months of rent, and purchase of food while I was in Jerusalem for the summer. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to spend the summer in Jerusalem, which is itself a city rich in religious art and architecture that allows you just by walking to explore various layers of religious civilization. In addition to everything I was able to gain through this internship, an added pleasure was the ability to further improve my skills in spoken Hebrew and Arabic by virtue of being in a bilingual city and working at a bilingual museum. Since the exhibition is scheduled for 2024, I plan to continue my relationship with my supervisor, Dr. Adina Kamien. For instance, even after leaving the museum this week to return to Canada I will continue my research about artwork relating to dreams. Some of the artists I was researching are even based in Montreal, and I look forward to forming a relationship with them, being a link between Canada and the Israel Museum.
