Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte - Melanie Torres Crespo, Week 1

 Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte

Melanie Torres Crespo - Week 1

Hello everyone! Welcome to a recap of my first week at the Museum of History, Anthropology, and Art!

This museum is part of the University of Puerto Rico, and it counts with a vast collection of paintings, artifacts, and documents that many professionals seek to use for their investigations and research. Also, its location has given me the opportunity to explore the area and use the train system of the island, which I really like but sadly never had the chance to use before this experience. 

In the very first day of my internship, this past Monday, I had the opportunity to see the museum's exhibition for this year: Gráfica Vital.  This exhibition main goal is to showcase Puerto Rican artworks that mainly utilize printmaking techniques. I met the amazing staff and volunteers and learned what their everyday tasks and roles look like. 

I mainly focused on organizing the storage with educational materials and then restocked the interactive area of the exhibition. It was really nice to see the visitor's drawings and their creativity!

On Tuesday, I started brainstorming for potential themes and topics I could base my individual investigation on. I looked at all the displayed artwork and took my time to understand the techniques used, their respective themes, and other things that stuck out to me. Then, I discussed my ideas and questions with the education office staff, Lisa and Oneida (we took pictures together at the end of the week). 

Furthermore, I gave daily maintenance to the "huerto", a small garden created by volunteer student that has different vegetables and plants growing. 

One of my favorite tasks of Wednesday was working with the sorting and digitalization of last year's exhibition material. 

The museum is constantly rotating the displayed artworks, thus they also change the interactive sections in order to maximize the experience of all visitors.

Each person had to answer one of three prompts, and they were free to draw or write their thoughts and opinions. 

Subsequently, I was able to categorize the visitor's responses, count them, and then scan them all. In the following weeks I will working on creating statistics for a report of the impact and success of the section. 

Lastly, on Thursday and Friday, I assisted visitors and had the opportunity to be part of a tour. I also chose what pieces and theme I wanted to use for my research. I loved all the artwork in the exhibition so it was quite hard to narrow down which ones I desired to use! I assisted in an origami workshop. And, of course, we took some pictures to commemorate this first week.

I am so excited for the upcoming weeks and all of the new adventures I will have! Specifically, in regards to assisting in more workshops, exploring the archives, and gaining much more knowledge on what it entails to work and maintain a museum. Also, tomorrow is my reading activity in the community library so I will let you all know how it goes in next week's blog. I'm very nervous but also very excited!!

Thank you for reading up to this point! 

See you next Friday :)