Career Path of a Head of Exhibitions at UC Santa Cruz Arts and Sciences Institute

In undergraduate, I studied studio art and minored in education. For my education minor, I had a practicum where I was placed in a public school and supported two teachers. I worked with middle school-aged kids.

For art-related things, I worked as a work-study student in the art department at the print studios' paper store. That's how I was introduced to artist materials. I was also an intern at the campus LGBTQ+ Center for about a year. Throughout college, I worked at the movie theater and as a resident assistant in the residence halls. So, it was a mix of art and education.

Following graduation, I worked at an art supply store. My experience working in the paper store, selling printmaking papers and tools, helped give me a leg up. It was retail, but familiarity with art materials was definitely helpful. I was there for about six and a half years, really working with the public and artists who came in trying to problem-solve.

The art supply store also had a frame shop, so I gained experience learning about best practices for framing. People from museums or galleries would come in, as well as professional artists buying mat boards and things to frame their own work.

I would say something that happened throughout my career path was that my experiences kept building off each other. After working at the art supply store for a long time, I left that job and worked as an art installer at the community hospital. I hadn't even thought that hospitals had art collections, but then when you think about it, there's art in different offices and patient rooms, and someone put it up.

This particular hospital was well-resourced and had its own staffing to install all the artwork. That's where I learned museum registration because we had such a large art inventory. I learned how to catalog and sort things. It was a part-time job, but the curator there knew I was looking for more work, so she referred me to a paintings conservator.

The paintings conservator typically took on undergraduate students. At that point, I was many years out of college, but he was having a slowdown and didn't have many students applying. Art conservation is very specialized; most students studying it have backgrounds in art history and chemistry, and then pursue master's degrees in material science or attend specific conservation schools. There aren't many programs, especially in California.

He didn't have any interns or students interested. Then I just kind of popped up and said, "Yeah, I worked at a frame shop, I know how to handle art, I know about materials." All of those things together led me to apply for a job at the university in the academic gallery. I worked as a preparator, the person who works with art objects to install exhibitions. I did that for three or four years, and now I'm the head of exhibitions.

Describing it this way, it sounds very linear, but to me, all the experience, even working in the movie theater and with the public, and some other things like teaching art workshops, I find that I use all of those skills in my work today.