Curatorial-track Ph.D. student spends summer internship at Biggs Museum of American Art

Curatorial-track Ph.D. candidate Genevieve Westerby was the proud recipient of a 2024 curatorial summer internship at the Biggs Museum of American Art, which was generously funded by the Choptank Foundation in partnership with the University of Delaware and the Biggs Museum. Working with curator Laura Fravel and registrar Emily Carnwath, Genevieve had the opportunity to complete a range of rewarding and intellectually challenging projects that allowed her to learn about the chronological scope and diverse histories the Biggs collection contains.

The gift of art

She began the summer working on a portfolio of material related to the early 20th- century artist Orville Houghton Peets that was offered to the museum as a gift. Peets was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but spent many years based in Paris and travelled around France and Portugal depicting scenes of daily life and views of nature and historic architecture. Because he spent his final years near Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Peets has been adopted as a Delaware artist and is therefore of particular interest to the Biggs. Genevieve built a database to catalogue the objects in the portfolio—which included original prints and oil sketches, journal illustrations and various ephemera related to the artist—and researched the artist’s time in Europe to determine which objects in the portfolio should be acquired by the museum. She wrote accession justifications for eleven prints and four oil sketches, all of which were approved by the museum’s collection committee at the end of last year.

Adopt-an-Artwork

Genevieve also had the chance to contribute to the Adopt-an-Artwork program for the 2024–2025 academic year. Each year, the museum provides local teachers with the tools they need to introduce their students to and engage with a group of objects in the Biggs’s collection. Teachers and their students participate in workshops at the museum and teachers work to integrate the Adopt-an-Artwork objects into their lessons over the course of the school year. For the teacher’s guide, Genevieve wrote a one-page text for each of the selected artists—Rick Bartow, Alexi Natchev, Emilio Sanchez, Roberto Lugo and Edward Loper, Jr—that included a short biography, a general introduction to each artist’s body of work, a description of the Biggs’s object and questions teachers might ask their students when studying these objects. 

Cataloging the collection

Genevieve’s final project was related to the museum’s decision to implement a new collection database system. Drawing on past museum experience, Genevieve wrote a style guide for cataloguers to follow when entering information into the Biggs’s new system. She worked closely with museum staff and was invited to meetings with their database liaison to ask questions about the system and to help tailor it to fit the museum’s needs. For this project, she learned to use a previously unfamiliar collection database and thought deeply about the Biggs’s unique cataloguing issues.

The Misty Rocky Mountains

Genevieve also spent time researching a painting by William Louis Sonntag in the Biggs

collection. She investigated the picture’s provenance and exhibition history to better understand its current title, The Misty Rocky Mountains, which likely originated from an art dealer in the 20th century. Overall, Genevieve found her time at the Biggs rewarding and is glad to have had the chance to work with generous colleagues, learn about new artists and become familiar with the collection at the Biggs.