Somerville High School student Ray Switkes clearly loved their work at the Harvard Art Museums, and after a brief internship during a school break in April, Switkes was invited back.
If not for some quick thinking from Harvard Art Museums and a partnership with a Somerville nonprofit, though, Switkes would not have been able to participate in the paid summer program.
Harvard’s Summer Youth Employment Program paid initially only for those living in Boston or Cambridge.
“I absolutely loved, loved, loved my experiences with the museum, and so when they emailed asking whether I wanted to do a six-week internship and have a real project attached to it, I was so incredibly excited and I accepted immediately,” Switkes said.
The logistical problem over home address become clear soon after.
The new nonprofit Somerville Foundation, after being told of the problem by Cunningham fellow in academic and public programs Sarah Lieberman, said it would try to pull together some money. “The Somerville Foundation is committed to assisting the people of Somerville overcome barriers whether they are based on geography, race or ethnicity, economic status and/or disability,” the foundation said in a July mailing that noted the hurdle facing Switkes.
Lieberman managed to secure funds through the museum even before the foundation could step in, and Switkes got to work with two interns from Cambridge to put together a by-teens, for-teens audio guide aimed at making the museum more accessible to a younger audience. It was published Thursday via Bloomberg Connects, a free app that museums worldwide use to publish tours of their facilities, said Jennifer Aubin, the museums’ assistant director of media relations.
Just download the app on a mobile device, search for the Harvard Art Museums, click “Start Guide” and look for the “By Teens, For Teens” audio guide, Aubin said.
The goal is “to make the Harvard Art Museums feel welcoming to young people when I know that museums in general sometimes can feel intimidating or boring or inaccessible – and that’s something I want to demystify, but I’m not the right person to demystify that for young people,” Lieberman said. “I want young people speaking to young people.”
The virtual tour has three broad themes – gender and sexuality, coming of age and the relationship between the artist and the viewer – that the teen guides apply to each of nine objects, Switkes said. The first painting on the tour, “The Art Lover” by Mervin Jules, sets the stage.
“It’s a painting-within-a-painting. It’s an old white man with his glasses off looking at a painting of a labor strike. And, to us, it was very reflective of our roles,” Switkes said. The gallery text reads: “Jules satirizes the myopic gaze of a bourgeois connoisseur scrutinizing a painting,” showing an infamous 1937 strike where police shot at unarmed steelworkers.
After long consideration, the Harvard Art Museums tried a high school internship program this summer with a project led by Lieberman.
“I think it was a moment of, ‘We have the funding, the staffing, the moment was right,’ especially with having me here as another pair of hands on board, and somebody who is specifically interested in working with teens and young people,” Lieberman said. “All of the pieces fell into place.”
For Switkes, the program was a success. “I had just the most incredible time,” they said. “It really opened me up to this industry that now I’m so excited to be a part of, and incredible people who I’ve gotten to work with, and just the incredibly accepting environment that this specific museum created for me.”
The Harvard Art Museums’ ongoing internships are open to kids from Somerville as well as Cambridge and Boston.
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