Each year for the past 20 years the Catalina Island Museum has received a grant from the Getty Foundation to fund an internship in the museum’s curatorial department. This year is no exception.
Aiming to increase diversity in and provide support for Los Angeles area museums and visual arts organizations, the Multicultural
Each year for the past 20 years the Catalina Island Museum has received a grant from the Getty Foundation to fund an internship in the museum’s curatorial department. This year is no exception.
Aiming to increase diversity in and provide support for Los Angeles area museums and visual arts organizations, the Multicultural
Undergraduate Internship program has funded substantive, full-time summer work opportunities for students at Los Angeles area museums and visual arts organizations. Since the program’s founding in 1993, 150 local arts institutions, as well as the Getty Center and the Getty Villa, have hosted over 2,700 undergraduates, exposing these students to career possibilities in the arts.
This year, the Catalina Island Museum welcomes this year’s Getty Foundation intern, Brooke Garcia.
Garcia grew up in Long Beach and is a recent graduate of Brown University. She received a bachelor of arts in archaeology with a concentration in Egyptian and Western Asian archaeology. As part of the Multicultural Undergraduate Internship program, Garcia previously interned in the Long Beach Museum of Art’s education department.
After graduation, Garcia knew she wanted to return to Southern California and was drawn to the Catalina Island Museum internship for a variety of reasons. She is really interested in the curatorial side of museums and viewed this opportunity as a way to explore the island’s unique subject matter, especially the museum’s extensive archaeological archive.
“Since arriving, Garcia has been a crucial part of the curatorial staff. She helped install the museum’s most recent exhibition “Gimme Some Lovin’: The Spencer Davis Group,” helps maintain the galleries each day and is conducting research for our next exhibition about William Wrigley, Jr.,” said Curator John Boraggina.
“Walking through the galleries, I sometimes see people reading portions of the exhibition that I helped install and it’s like our work in curatorial is touching them. That’s why I want to go into the museum field. I want to take knowledge I’ve found and researched and share it with the world,” said Garcia.
Over the years, interns funded by the Getty Foundation have completed a variety of important projects for the museum including the documentation of artifacts, research for exhibitions and publications, transcribing oral history interviews, and assisting with education programs. The museum appreciates the efforts of the Getty Foundation to expose interns to a breadth of visual arts-related jobs opportunities, leading many students into careers at museums and visual arts nonprofits.
The Catalina Island Museum is Avalon’s sole institution devoted to art, culture and history. The museum, its digital theater and store are located on the ground floor of Avalon’s historic Casino and are open 7 days a week, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
