Summer Experiences

Amy Kan ’27

This summer, I interned at Western Exhibitions, a small contemporary art gallery in Chicago, to explore potential professional paths beyond academic or curatorial work. Funded by the CLS, I dabbled in a wide range of responsibilities — social media, inventory, invoicing, art fair prep, digitization, press release writing, archiving, and even completed a $500+ sale of a Paul Nudd sculpture. I also met, if briefly, various gallery owners, artists, patrons, and other Chicago art world actors, all of which amounted to a hands-on understanding of how commercial galleries operate. In addition to my week at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the McMullan Family Summer Intensive, my summer experiences expanded my understanding of the art world and its ongoings and aided immensely in shifting my future goals and plans.
Dorothea Qin ’26

As an art history major interested in how cultural, social, and economic capital shape access to the arts, I spent this past summer as the development intern at the Denver Art Museum. Working with the development team showed me that fundraising directly supports the exhibitions, educational programs, and community partnerships that make art accessible far beyond the gallery walls. My responsibilities included maintaining donor stewardship, such as conducting prospect research, drafting donor reports, and analyzing engagement trends. I also contributed to Delight, a major fundraising event, where I handled event planning tasks and assisted with a live auction. By the end of the internship, I created a streamlined prospect research guide for long-term team use. One of the most memorable parts of the internship was visiting donors’ homes and seeing their personal collections. From an art history standpoint, development shapes the pathways through which art reaches people, and this confirmed my commitment to a career that bridges art history, philanthropy, and public impact.

Princess Alexander ’26

The Anger Fund made it possible for me to travel to Atlanta to see Faith Ringgold: Seeing Children at the High Museum, and that visit directly reshaped my senior thesis. I entered the trip with a broad project on Black women’s representation in modernism, but experiencing Ringgold’s quilts in person clarified the questions I needed to pursue: how museum display, narrative framing, and intended audience shape the meaning of her work.
The exhibition’s design, with quilts hung at a child’s eye level, wall texts written as stories, and galleries organized for accessibility, revealed how central pedagogy and audience-centered curation are to Ringgold’s practice. This was only visible through seeing the show in person.
The trip helped me to rework my thesis into a focused study of Ringgold’s story quilts and their challenge to institutional norms of interpretation and display. It also helped me articulate how my interests in museum accessibility, Black storytelling, and exhibition design converge in her work.
I am grateful for the Anger Fund’s support, which grounded my project in firsthand research and gave my thesis its clear direction!
Aubrie Connell ’26

I received the Anger Prize during my spring 2025 semester abroad in Berlin, Germany, and traveled to both Prague and Vienna with this funding. In my art historical studies, I have always been interested in analyzing depictions of women in art and how they reflect societal developments and beliefs. For this reason, the preliminary topic of my senior thesis research was “representations of women in Art Nouveau pieces.” Prague and Vienna were both keystones of the Art Nouveau movement, bolstering iconic artists such as Alphonse Mucha and Gustav Klimt, and so the Anger Prize was pivotal to the development of my thesis. I was able to view statues, paintings, and architectural structures in person and engage in unique museum resources and exhibitions. My thesis has since evolved into analyzing the art of Frances Macdonald, an Art Nouveau artist, and her depictions of Arthurian women—but this development would not have been possible without the foundational knowledge I gained through my visits to both Prague and Vienna.
Dorothea Qin ’26

This past summer, I traveled to Los Angeles with support from the Don and Noël Anger Award to conduct research for my senior thesis. The trip allowed me to study contemporary East Asian artists I’m interested in, especially Xu Bing and Yayoi Kusama, whose works shaped my thesis argument on contemporary art, Buddhist ideas, viewer participation, and the deferral of meaning. Over the course of a week, I visited LACMA, MOCA, the Hammer Museum, the Getty, the Broad, and Hauser & Wirth, focusing on exhibitions like Line, Form, Qi at LACMA and
Diary of Flowers at MOCA. I also met with museum staff in interpretation, education, and development to learn about their approaches to audience engagement and the presentation of Buddhist-inspired art. These conversations, together with spending time in museums and galleries in person, helped me understand the works more fully. Since it was my first time in Los Angeles, I also took the chance to explore the city, which made this research experience even more memorable! This experience clarified the direction of my thesis and allowed me to shape my ideas through firsthand research. I am grateful to the Anger Award for making this opportunity possible.

Summer Experiences

Internships

Amy Kan ’27

Dorothea Qin ’26

Anger Awards

Princess Alexander ’26

Aubrie Connell ’26

Dorothea Qin ’26