Anna Kelly: Volunteering at a Museum

For my community involvement project I have been volunteering at the museum and archives at the Kyoto Institute of Technology. The museum specializes in different fields of design, and has a wide collection of antique posters, radios, art books, and more. The most recent exhibitions on display were about foreign advertisements related to food, and the Dadaist artist, May Ray, respectively.

The role that I play at the museum changes every week depending on what kind of tasks there are that need to be done. In my time there I have helped take photos to document antiques, set up and take down exhibitions, frame posters to go into new exhibitions, and enter data from old art books. Although it is probably the most tedious of my tasks, I find looking through the art books the most interesting. Some of the books were published as far back as the Meiji Period, so I have had the opportunity to learn something about old kanji that is generally not used anymore. For example, I never would have guessed that 学 used to be 學, 芸 used to be 藝, 十 can be 拾 in official documents, or that the number twenty (廿) has its own kanji!

Because I worked at a museum instead of joining a club or circle at Doshisha or Kyoto University, I didn’t have many opportunities to meet others my age through my CIP. However, I do feel that I am lucky to have had the opportunity to have a somewhat job-like experience in Japan, and although they may have not been college students, the people I met were great and taught me a lot.

 

Here is the museum’s website, if you are interested:

https://www.kit.ac.jp/en/research/museum-and-archives/

4 thoughts on “Anna Kelly: Volunteering at a Museum

  1. Hi Anna! Museum work sounds really interesting. You told me once that you interned at some museums back in the States, as well – how did you find interning at this museum to be different? It’s so cool that you got to learn old kanji. How did working in the archives (versus somewhere else in the museum) affect the amount of times that you got to interact with native Japanese speakers? I’m really fascinated by the CIP that you participated in, it must have been a once in a lifetime opportunity to interact with works of art. 🙂

    • Yes! I interned at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts which you may be familiar with as a fellow Minnesota resident. Interestingly, my tasks at both museums have been pretty similar. At both institutions, my job was to work more with words than the art itself. By this I mean reading Japanese information from the books/artworks and inputting the data into a computer file or database (and translating into English at the American museum, of course). The work is a little bit tedious sometimes, but it really has been so enjoyable and educational for me.
      As I was usually working with the books, I spent most of my time reading rather than speaking. However, on days that I was working on a different kind of task I was able to speak with the employees at the museum. I think it was a good experience to be exposed to a culture very different from that at school.

  2. Anna, your CIP sounds really interesting – I get the impression that you learnt a lot about Japanese culture through it. I will definitely try to visit the museum at some point! When I go there, what would you recommend me to focus on? Also, what was your favorite piece of art that you worked with at the museum, and why.
    I hope that if you continue doing the same CIP next semester you will be able to spend time learning about more and more pieces, and improve your Japanese by learning about their background (and maybe teach me some of the most interesting things you learn afterwards).

    • It was very interesting indeed!
      I did learn a lot, but more about the museum itself than Japanese culture in general.
      It’s a rather small museum, so when you go you should be able to see everything in one trip! If you go soon you will be able to catch an exhibit about poster design related to the artist Man Ray’s work which I helped to set up!
      Although they are not pieces that went into any sort of show, the most interesting items that I worked with were the old Japanese art books that I wrote about. I learned so much about how the Japanese language, book binding, and style in general has changed over time. Some of the books were so unbelievably beautiful, I wish that they would put them on display.
      I do plan to continue at the same place next semester, so I will definitely teach you what I learn!

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