Curation Lab Assistant Intern

Stephanie Keating, who ran the Center Gallery at Middlebury’s McCullough Student Center, will be assisting in the curation lab during the next phase of the Inventory Project. Stephanie will be completing collection summaries based on our previous inventory work and organizing volunteers to inventory the archive materials. In addition to planning and designing two exhibitions for the Center Gallery, at the Center Gallery at Middlebury’s McCullough Student Center, Stephanie also aided with the design and set up of three other exhibitions at 51 Main, another of the College’s galleries. In her time running the Center Gallery, she also helped develop a better way to manage the Gallery’s resources working with the Museum of Art’s exhibition designer to improve storage and refurbish the gallery’s frames and tools. Additionally, she began to archive the Gallery’s exhibitions, photographing them for both the Gallery’s archives and the artists’ portfolios.

At the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Stephanie worked on a variety of research projects, specifically researching at least 15 objects for the museum’s forthcoming Collection Handbook and publishing entries the the Object of the Day blog. Additionally, she helped edit and proof the French translation of the exhibition catalogue House Proud for its move to the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris. She also worked directly with the Drawings, Prints and Graphic Design collection by photographing various works on paper as the Cooper-Hewitt began its project to digitize its collection. In assisting with this digitalization process, Stephanie also helped input over 600 of the museum’s accession cards – each containing descriptions and information from provenance to conservation efforts of the various items in the collection – into The Museum System Database Software, which helped to create an online database for the museum. Additionally, Stephanie volunteered at the Middlebury College Museum of Art where she helped give tours through the Museum Assistants Program that worked with local schools to increase students’ visual literacy through a program called Visual Thinking Strategies.

Stephanie Keating was born in the small village of Capas Tarlac in Philippines before settling with her parents in Orange, California. Growing up she developed an interest in history and art – although her interest in art was stronger in its appreciation than its creation. Spending her youth in southern California, she enjoyed visiting the various cultural institutions as well as the diverse environments from the beach to the mountains to the desert. These visits showed her the importance of connecting the public with these places. After graduating as salutatorian from her high school in Southern California, she decided attended Middlebury College in Vermont for a change of scenery and the chance to experience “real” seasons. Now back in California, Stephanie looks forward to her time at the Imperial Valley Desert Museum and learning more about the operations of the museum, particularly its innovative approaches to developing a museum in the 21^st century. She hopes to eventually get a PhD in art history and curatorial studies so that she may continue to work in museums and create an engaging museum environment for 21^st-century visitors.