End of Summer in 2018

By Virginia Bradford'19
Over the summer, I worked at the Portland Museum of Art, as a 2018 Homer Fellow. I was surprised to get into the program, given how many people from all across Maine were interviewed, and considering that seven would be picked. In the end, it was me, Ella, Sam, Sarah, Jayda, Pethuel, and Alice. We were set free in the museum seven hours a day, to roam the marble halls, hear the tapping of high heels on the floor and get acquainted with the sculpture garden and the secret staircase and the possibly-real Mona Lisa.

Our job was really to plan a Teen Night at the Museum in late August, and I badly wanted to bring a wooden boat for the Teen Night art recreation that I came up with at the same time as two of my coworkers. The wooden boat seemed perfect for “Diana Of The Sea”, a painting on the third floor, next to maroon walls, showing a woman in a boat surrounded by starfish and lobsters and the ocean.

Over the summer, I worked at the Portland Museum of Art, as a 2018 Homer Fellow. I was surprised to get into the program, given how many people from all across Maine were interviewed, and considering that seven would be picked. In the end, it was me, Ella, Sam, Sarah, Jayda, Pethuel, and Alice. We were set free in the museum seven hours a day, to roam the marble halls, hear the tapping of high heels on the floor and get acquainted with the sculpture garden and the secret staircase and the possibly-real Mona Lisa.

Our job was really to plan a Teen Night at the Museum in late August, and I badly wanted to bring a wooden boat for the Teen Night art recreation that I came up with at the same time as two of my coworkers. The wooden boat seemed perfect for “Diana Of The Sea”, a painting on the third floor, next to maroon walls, showing a woman in a boat surrounded by starfish and lobsters and the ocean.

We got to see the ocean two times, once when the weather was murky and stormy, unintentionally matching the tempestuous nature of the famous Winslow Homer painting “Weatherbeaten” that hung in our communal workspace, where we could sit and type up our work and eat gummy candy and pretzels and rate our days in terms of colors and numbers and say what kind of weather we liked the best. The Homer Studio was dream-like that day, even being up on the balcony with glassy beads of water dropping onto our sketchbooks. I went into the room where Winslow Homer would paint, and there were grooves in the antique wood where two hundred years of artistic feet would walk. Rain was falling on the roof, and I drew the unsteady lines of the slats in the floor.

The second time we saw the ocean was after all the weeks of knowing each other, when it was close to the last time we saw each other, sitting and eating lunch under a tree, talking to the curator and seeing the bright sun over the water. 

In between, there were many hot days when we were glad for the constant sixty degrees of the galleries and basement, to keep the art cool, and glad that we could wear our accidentally- coordinating sweaters while showing groups of kids from the Boys and Girls Club or a local youth collective around the museum, which we also did at Teen Night. Other days we would walk out into the middle of Portland (where I went maybe forty times this summer, having taken the bus to the stop across from the Portland Public Library in the morning, and sometimes walking around later with Sam or Sarah) on a hot day, going up several floors to see a small gallery or an artist’s workspace, all these hidden spaces in Portland.

I met so many people that it made my brain foggy, and I felt so very important and special and glad to be young in order to have this job, since the director was talking about how the museum needs a new audience to keep doing its job of keeping people educated and also appreciative of artistic endeavors. The museum workers would take time to sit down and tell us about their jobs, and my boss also said that they were always “excited” for when the yearly Homer Fellows arrived. 

And I was one of them! It makes my head spin to think that all this actually happened to me, spending my days at the Portland Museum of Art-- living my “From The Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler” dreams!-- and I feel like a better artist and a better person for having done it.