Finishing up my first two weeks with the DMFAH has certainly been an exciting and memorable experience, as I am now able to immerse myself in the hands-on dispensing of history that has always been my fascination. With my time as intern, it is imperative for the museum to undergo vast reorganization of its collections so that the museum can achieve accreditation with the American Association of Museums. To contribute to this, I have learned how to use PastPerfect as an accessioning tool and have personally entered into the museum’s database numerous entries relating primarily to material that is part of a collection of the museum’s but found recently to have been stored away without proper knowledge or accessioning. These items, which included elegant silk dresses and authentic fox and beaver furs, all belonged to the collection acquired by the museum from the estate of Danville native Camilla Williams, a famed opera singer and the first African American to receive a regular contract with an American opera company. Showing the need for reorganization if such items were in limbo since the museum’s acquisition of the collection in 2012, it is essential that this work be done, and there is much of it at that.
So too did I assist in many facets of museum operation, such as being a greeter as well as scanning historical documents and summarizing them for digitization purposes. The museum is also preparing many new avenues of outreach to get the public more involved with our community’s historical and creative heritage by planning for new and novel events and for bringing art installations to the new gallery operated by the museum on Craghead Street in Danville. These are expressed in my attached pictures, wherein the first is of myself helping to rewrap a prototype for the museum’s Wanderlove exhibition of public yarnbombing on Danville’s scenic riverwalk coming in July. The second is of myself working as a greeter at the Craghead Gallery on the opening night of Tim Duffy’s Blue Muse exhibition of tintype photographs of blues musicians, most of whom are African Americans, whose contributions to music are invaluable but whose names have often been eclipsed, among others who continue to carry on these musical traditions. In just my first two weeks all of this has been put on my plate, but with the assistance of the director, staff, and other interns I have been welcomed and cannot wait to continue helping the museum regain its footing as a beloved cultural dispenser in the region. Many disparate stories can be told in just the building alone, from the days of the Sutherlin Mansion’s use as Jefferson Davis’ last capital during the Civil War to the Civil Rights battles waged within when the building was the public, segregated library.
