MIMA: Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art

Student Placement Profile 1

Student Name:

Christie

Programme of Study:

Art Museum and Gallery Studies (MA) 2016 -2017 Academic Year

Career/ Sector Interests:

Curating and Interpretation.

Placement Venue:

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima)

Placement Duration (30 or 12 days):

30 days June -July 2017

What type of activities did you undertake whilst you were on placement?

Completing condition reports, cataloguing, archiving, doing artist research, arranging or producing materials for display, compiling artist fact sheets, etc.

What were you placement highlights?

Time flew while I was working in mima because I enjoyed the experience a lot and the people were lovely - every day has been enriching. There was  one day when the artworks in one of the galleries needed to be rearranged because some of them had to be returned to the collection store. That day, I worked alongside mima’s assistant curator and we worked out the new layout of the exhibition and on new labels together. I was greatly involved in making suggestions and decision making processes; I really appreciated the opportunity.

Student Placement Profile 2

Name:

Celine

Programme of Study:

Art Museum and Gallery Studies (MA) 2016 -2017 Academic Year (Part Time)

Career/ Sector Interests:

Museum and gallery sector – special interest in fine/contemporary art collections.

Placement Venue:

mima

Placement Duration (30 or 12 days):

12 Days  January – June 2017

What type of activities did you undertake whilst you were on placement?

I worked on a wide variety of tasks: installing work, preparing work for transport, condition-checking work, editing/researching  interpretative text, writing literature for use by committee deciding commissions, researching future exhibition content, environmental monitoring of gallery space over a long period (temperature etc.), auditing collection for origin/gender etc of artists (prepared a statistical analysis of findings) in order to inform future acquisitions policy, collections management within stores, interaction with public in gallery/improving access to stores, attended meetings.

What were you placement highlights?

I enjoyed working ‘behind-the-scenes’ preparing spaces before shows opened physically, learning about the importance of monitoring the environment etc.  I also enjoyed researching work/artists for future exhibitions.