Post-internship Reflection
By: Sophie Kressler
As a social media and digital marketing intern for I AM Art House, I spent the summer of 2020 creating posts to promote upcoming auctions and networking events and serving as an administrator on the LinkedIn and Facebook pages. This was the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college, so it came at a crucial time in developing my skills and interests in the field, and I felt so lucky to be able to be working that summer, as many of my peers’ internships were cancelled due to the pandemic.
I am a senior now studying Art History and Digital Marketing at the University of Notre Dame, and thanks to my experience with I AM Art House, I am pursuing a career in art business. I began my undergraduate journey as an architecture student, but in the middle of my sophomore year decided to switch gears. I was minoring in Art History at the time, and I noticed I was much more interested in and excited about those courses, so I made it my major. At first, I was not sure what direction this new path would take me. I was not very interested in the curatorial route and did not know yet what other roles would be available to me, but my experience working here with young, emerging artists made me realize that I wanted to pursue work where I could interact with both the artwork I love and the people who make it, who come to see, or who want to buy it.
When I returned to school that fall, I felt that my eyes had been opened to an entirely new world: the world of art business. I became aware, almost serendipitously, of a minor in Digital Marketing offered through my university’s business school for non-business students and applied immediately. I had already been considering adding a minor in another area, but felt that this option would better prepare me for the work I wanted to do and showed some sort of continuity between my work experiences and coursework. I also began applying to internships at both auction houses and museums in their more business-end departments to begin to try to land any more opportunities that would help me discern between the for-profit and the non-profit paths before me.
The summer of 2021 I was an intern at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in their Visitor Experience department, and now I intern remotely, part-time from school for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Marketing & Membership department. I think that my experience with I AM Art House was crucial in helping me land the internship at The Met, and the experience of working with the Visitor Experience department helped me get a better understanding on the interaction between frontline and back office operations that goes into running a museum of that magnitude smoothly. In my current role with the Whitney, I oversee monitoring the competitive landscape, especially around the timeframe of the upcoming 2022 Biennial, and send marketing emails for the retail department. It has been a very exciting opportunity so far because I finally get to put to use the things I have been learning about in my business courses. Working in two non-curatorial departments of major museums, has shown me how much I could enjoy a career equally in a non-profit or a for-profit business, which in turn gives me more options for my future. As I prepare to graduate and begin my job search, I am looking for more opportunities like these three where I get to bring art to the world, whether that is through social media, face-to-face interaction, marketing, or any other channels.
