No longer on the prowl for permanent employment

Jess on July 11, 2010

I am very excited to announce that I accepted a position as curator of the Andrew County Museum and Historical Society in Savannah, Missouri on Friday. I have been in the process for interviewing for this position for about two months, so I’m glad that the whole journey ends with my receiving the job. Not only is it nice to have any job, but this is also a great job for me as I begin my museum career.

The museum staff consists of a director, an administrative assistant, and a curator—so you can imagine that my work is pretty well cut out for me. The job description puts the curator in charge of developing a temporary exhibit program, starting a public education program, continuing collections management activities, supervising volunteers and assisting the director.

The temporary exhibit program builds on their permanent exhibition, “A Rural Way of Life,” that opened in October 2009. The exhibition tells the story of Andrew County as a market town in Missouri through 2001. While a lot of rural history museums I’ve visited focus solely on farm life, this museum focuses on life in town and on the farm and covers a lot of ground. Some of the ideas the director and I have for temporary exhibits would fill in gaps not in the exhibit, such as exhibitions of Andrew County history related to specific time periods (World War II, etc.), pre-American indigenous settlement of the land, and ecology.

Public programming will focus on the Rural Way of Life exhibit and likely will involve the creation of travelling trunks that allow the museum collection to visit schools, retirement centers, nursing homes, or hospitals to do educational programming for people who can’t make an on-site visit. We also want to reach out to the home schoolers in the area to find programming that can meet their needs.

While this is certainly a lot of work for anyone, I am excited for the challenge. Plus, I really like to multi-task and stay busy all the time, so I work better when I have a lot going on. It’s awesome that I get to start my career working on education and exhibits. It seems like most of the curator/educator positions I’ve found want 3-5 years experience after graduate school. Likewise, most of the entry-level positions are fairly collections management heavy and, to me, not that exciting. It’s not that I don’t like collections management so much as that I get bored if it’s all that I’m doing. So I’m glad that this job will let me use, and polish, all of my skills in museum science.

I start the week of August 9 (with a long first weekend as I have the minor interruption of Kristin and Stephen’s wedding in Dallas on the 15th!) so we’re in the process of housing hunting (to rent or to buy) and I am dreaming about paint colors, DIY decoration projects, and … having an income. Awesome!