A California Dream . . .
From Volunteer to Grad School to Exhibitions Registrar

I wasn't long in Edmonton before an opportunity came up to go to California as spouse on a Free Trade visa, moving there to follow the (first) internet boom. We thought we'd go for just a year or so, to see what it was like, and ended up staying for ten. In these years I volunteered, went to graduate school and then worked in California museums, all the while we had two kids and bought a house and made great friends. It was an amazing decade with a lot of unique experiences for this Canadian gal, one that was very formative along my museum path.

The US didn't need people with History degrees (I know, right?!) as much as they required those with Computer Science and so I was back to my volunteer world as I was not able to obtain a work visa under Free Trade. Lucky for me, I found two amazing places to give my time, and grow my museum experience. For the first year, I was able to dedicate a day a week each at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology on campus at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at the Oakland Museum of California. Both experiences were so thought-provoking, with a lot of learning, and each had staff and fellow volunteers that were very welcoming. At the Hearst Museum, I worked with the Native American basket collection. This was until I said I was expecting a baby . . . and then I was promptly moved to a Japanese netsuke collection as there were a lot of concerns about pesticides used to 'preserve' the baskets. (This was the first time I had really understood what museums did to many Indigenous objects, and I was pretty shocked. I had much more to learn.) At the Oakland Museum, I worked in the History department, and was taught on their database how to properly catalogue and complete data entry. I worked in the storage rooms, and remember how one time I was given a big sheet of foam-core and asked to build a box with a glassine window, so the object could be seen without opening the box. (Oh, how to learn to think in multiple dimensions!) It was a great experience.

As mentioned, I got to work with amazing people. I met an intern at the Oakland Museum from John F. Kennedy University who told me all about their Museum Studies program, specializing in collections management. I was blown away that such a thing might exist! I was given information and an application form and applied when the baby was just a few months old . . . and got accepted (and so I applied for and got a student visa). I started just before she turned a year old, and it was a balance for sure. It was a program designed for working professionals, though, and so classes were in the evenings which meant I had childcare. AND the baby loved to nap, so I had great amounts of time during the day to do my readings and coursework . . . totally doable for this great program of amazing conversations, hard assignments and INCREDIBLY cool field trips, meeting fascinating museum people all over the San Francisco Bay Area. I was in dreamland in this program. 

For my first assignment at JFKU, I had to visit a Bay Area cultural entity
so I took the babe to the the SF Zoo
and wrote about a family visitor experience.

Part of the program was to complete a bazillion hours* of unpaid internship. I worked at two very different museums, getting two unique experiences. My first one was at the Provincial Museum of Alberta, working on a project to reorganize, rehouse and inventory a military cap badge collection. I went back to the PMA because my mum could watch my daughter while I worked full time for a couple of months. It was a balance (again) but we made it work . . . I just wish the supplies had come in sooner because it was such a stress to wait for these very-precise boxes to show up! But they eventually did, phew. The other was at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where I completed paperwork to prepare arms and armour from the collection for deaccession and supported the registration department wherever I was needed. I completed this internship over a longer period of time as I was back at school by then, and I had to commute from the East Bay. I learned a lot there . . . and I found out how interesting it was to work in an art museum. (*may not be an accurate number!)

The final stage of the degree was the masters project. Incredible. So much work. So much angst to find the topic then narrow it and have the topic approved. Once narrowed down, I sent out a survey to make sure it was a topic that made sense for museum professionals in the field. Through that survey, I uncovered that the donor's point of view was rarely part of the information gathered when an object was being considered for the collection. I therefore further researched and then wrote my project and called it "Honoring the Spirit of Donation: Documenting Donors' Perspectives in Collecting Museums". This was a fascinating story to me as it involved not only the documentation of the physical object but also the story behind why a donor thought an object was so important to them that it belonged in a museum. My product from this research - because we were not just supposed to talk about a challenge, but to provide an answer to it - was that I developed a form to facilitate a conversation with the donor at the time of donation. This simple step added a personal dimension to the value of the object, and brought in a way to share the authority of the object's documentation. (If you're interested in a template of the form, please send me an email that you can customize to your collection's needs.)

After graduation, I was able to get a work visa and worked in a few places in the Bay Area, including a children's toy museum and contract work for some small history museums. I also got back to the Oakland Museum of California, this time in the Education Department, where I was responsible for obtaining permissions for historical images that were to be used in their Gold Rush curriculum guides. Later on, I was the OMCA's Art Department registrar for exhibitions, which was an amazing experience that deserves its own blog post, it was just so cool: I managed logistics, I went to an artist's home, I oversaw couriers and of course organized the paperwork of the temporary exhibitions for the art department. It was a challenging role but it allowed me to use all the knowledge and skills I had gained throughout my museum experience and education. 

And so after a decade of working with / through visa requirements while balancing family needs, we made a decision that it was time to move back North. My museum journey in California was such a valuable and memorable experience that has stayed with me: I learned so much through my studies and my work in the rich museum environment in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a time that shaped my career and continues to inspire me as I move forward . .  you might say it was a dream come true!

Well, I certainly kept my documents from California!
Daytimes, planners, portfolios and master's project.
Oh, and journals. Don't forget the journals.