Samek Art Museum, Lewisburg
Going to museums with her dad was part of growing up for Neyda Francisco ’19. In high school, she became a volunteer docent at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. So, when the anthropology and political science double major and Posse Scholar saw that the Samek Museum was looking for student guides, she applied.

Now, Public Programs and Outreach Manager Emily Izer is helping Francisco and 10 other guides learn how to do original object research and create a conceptual tour, so they can share the depth of the Samek’s 6,000-object permanent collection more widely.

What She’s Doing:
Each guide is creating a video tour that focuses on specific pieces from the permanent collection. Francisco chose Death and the Woman (1910). “It was very dark,” she says. “And I was curious about the context behind the piece.” When she found a collection of diary entries written by the artist, Käthe Kollwitz, it enriched her historical analysis. “Reading the artist’s words gave me so much insight.”

What She Loves:
The guides traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to take a “Hack Tour” — an unconventional tour that helped them learn how to share art more widely. “They taught us their tour format, which was a cool way to learn how to make art relatable to people through storytelling,” she says.

While Francisco hasn’t decided exactly what she’ll pursue when she graduates, she knows it will be connected to a museum.
— Paula Cogan Myers