Art history major wins prestigious museum internship

Jillian Husband, ’15, an art history major with minors in business and Spanish, is spending the summer as an intern at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). She is one of 18 graduate student and undergraduate interns but is the only intern working in the paintings department.

Husband’s main responsibilities are to update the “object files” of the Spanish paintings in the MIA's collections. Each painting has a paper file and a computer database record that includes all documentation on the painting’s provenance, photography, exhibitions, conservation/frames, and times it has been written about or reproduced. Husband works to ensure that the paper file matches the computer database, and searches other databases such as JSTOR and Getty, to ensure that no documentation is missing.

The experience has allowed her to become more familiar with various Spanish paintings and discover how a museum chooses to lend a work. She also had the opportunity to observe a photographer taking Infrared and UV photos of a Goya painting and then examining the photos for underdrawings and conservation work.

“Being at the MIA has allowed me to see the multiple occupations one can have at a museum,” Husband says. “My office is next to the head curator of the paintings department, and it has been interesting to see what he does on a daily basis.”

Founded in 1883, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts enriches the community by collecting, preserving, and making accessible outstanding works of art from the world’s diverse cultures. The museum’s collection includes over 83,000 objects spanning 5,000 years.