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The Office of Curatorial Affairs (OCA), including the Centers, facilitates the intellectual work of the Museum by collecting artifacts, ensuring collection preservation and stewardship, conducting research and scholarship, and sharing the rich history and culture of African Americans and all people of African descent with a diverse public in accessible, multifaceted ways including exhibition, digitization, and publication. 

The exhibition, A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond, explores contemporary black life through stories about the social, economic, political, and cultural experiences of African Americans.  From the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the second election of Barack Obama, the coverage is broad. Large-scale graphics and original artifacts lead visitors from the Black Arts Movement to Hip Hop, the Black Panthers to “Yes We Can," and Black is Beautiful to #BlackLivesMatter. This exhibition also considers the challenges faced by African Americans-- challenges compounded with experiences of class, gender, and immigration-- as they continue to fight for racial equity and social justice, issues as relevant to the 21st century as to the 20th.   

A Changing America Curatorial Interns will assist the lead curator and other members of the A Changing America (ACA) team with preliminary research about post-civil rights social justice movements, strategies and leadership. The interns will provide research assistance and examples that will help the exhibition expand its representation of contemporary social justice movements. Working with and under the supervision of the ACA exhibition team, they will select 2-3 movements and outline the historical context and organizing strategies, identify important locations, legislation, dates, leadership, and impacts. The interns will: 

  • Develop issue specific research skills about historical and contemporary issues 
  • Develop/improve presentation and communication skills
  • Gain insight into how new content can aid an existing exhibition
  • Learn and assist the development of an issue-specific museum collecting plan 
  • Establish and increase knowledge of behind-the-scenes curatorial work 

They will also conduct research in the museum’s permanent collection to understand how movements are currently represented and suggest new acquisitions that might fill holes in our current collection based on their research.

Duties Include (but are not limited to):

  • Perform research to establish historical context, organizing strategies, important dates and figures, and social impacts for social justice movements identified by project leads 
  • Search the museum’s permanent collection for relevant stories and objects 
  • Make recommendations to the A Changing America team about potential acquisitions
  • Support content development related to social justice for A Changing America projects, programs and initiatives