Another great week at CMA! This week was a shorter week, since the museum took Monday off for Juneteenth. On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to attend the most important meeting of my time here so far: the quarterly exhibition forum. As the title suggests, this meeting occurs once quarterly and involves all key members from the curatorial, advancement, and learning/interpretation teams. At this meeting, the audience reception, marketing, programming, and retail sales of all current and upcoming exhibitions were reported. This included the current exhibitions East of the Pacific and Greater Columbus, as well as future exhibitions Clare Rojas: Returning, Queer Constellations, and Barbara Crane: Human / Nature. It was incredibly fascinating to discuss all aspects of the exhibitions within a larger timeframe and it helped me put my own work into perspective! Another highlight of my week was our professional development session with Dr. Lomax and City Year’s executive director Ruth-Marie Lomax as our guest speaker on Wednesday. Ruth was an absolutely wonderful speaker and I learned a lot about her successful career in nonprofit work and her insightful perspective on personal relationships in relation to fundraising. Dr. Lomax also led a thoughtful discussion about the importance of knowing one’s strengths and larger purpose, tying back to our previous discussion about power. I also had lunch with fellow fellow Eva after our PD session!

My time at the CMA has been split between meetings, program events, workshopping the College Night Shift program, and ongoing research projects. My current ongoing projects include research on tours and special interest clubs at other art institutions, post-event survey trends and strategies, and, mostly recently, listening bars. A listening/vinyl bar is a venue focused on vinyl audio and an intimate, chill atmosphere for listening. My supervisor Julie tasked me with researching and collecting inspiration from listening bars to help her conceptualize a potential future program at CMA Pizzuti’s Bar Room in the upcoming fall/winter season. In our weekly touch-bases, I present findings and progress on all of my projects and Julie provides feedback and future action items. We have found that this rhythm helps to keep projects moving forward! This week, I also completed two more 1-on-1s with Katherine, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Nicole, Senior Director of Collections and Exhibitions. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn about the experiences, responsibilities, and insights of the future of the museum from the directors of my department!

Lastly, I want to reiterate my appreciation for Julie and the CMA team for being so supportive of me, as well as my gratitude for Dr. Lomax and the Columbus Foundation Fellowship Program for this wonderful opportunity! Looking forward to next week!

-Muji