Rice Thresher recently featured this year’s William A. Camfield Graduate and Undergraduate Fellows, Eilis Coughlin, PhD candidate, and Ayla Davis '24, and Jameson Fellow, Ella Langridge '25, who were selected from amongst a competitive pool of applicants to gain work experience at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Bayou Bend Collections and Gardens.
Learn more about their daily work at the museums and why these fellowships are integral for any student interested in art history or museum studies:
“One of the founding ideas of [the fellowship] is that it’s really substantive, that there’s no busy work involved, and the students are really plunged into the workings of a curatorial department,” said Leo Costello, Rice art history department chair and Camfield fellowship faculty liaison.
Ella Langridge’s job, as this year’s Jameson Fellow for American Painting & Decorative Arts at the Bayou Bend, is to research artifacts, uncover their histories & communicate their uniquely American stories to the collection’s thousands of annual visitors. “Decorative art is such a great way to engage with art history,” Langridge, a Lovett College junior, said. “It’s objects that people would have lived with every day [and] used in their day to day lives.”
Graduate Camfield fellow Eilis Coughlin said she cherishes the opportunity to physically interact with works she has spent so many years learning about. Coughlin works in the prints & drawings department at MFAH alongside curator Dena Woodall to write labels, set up exhibit mockups with images she helps choose & write acquisition reports on works the department wants to acquire.
“I got to go to the Hirsch Library and look at all the books that I thought would fit well with this hanging that we’re going to do,” Coughlin, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Rice’s art history department, said. “There’s something personal about being able to hold the book and knowing that someone else did that before you hundreds of years ago.”
Written by Noah Berz
Read the full article here.
The Department of Art History offers a number of museum fellowships to undergraduate and graduate students every year with applications opening in February.