Professional Statement

The range of my professional experiences within museums allows me to uniquely understand the needs of various departments while finding new and innovative ways to work with the communities.

From the beginning of my museum career, I have had a genuine commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion. I started in museum education at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens working closely with the Weaver Family Foundation Fund’s “Cummer in the Classroom” program which specially brings art education to elementary schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families in North Florida. I also served as a tour guide and art instructor for several programs for visitors with low vision, including “Touch Tours” and “Women of Vison.” For the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, I was an art camp instructor for the Rainbow Artists, an art education initiative for children with autism spectrum. As the Director of the Weeden House Museum, we incorporated more stories about the enslaved people featured in Maria Howard Weeden’s artist and poetry and started an ongoing relationship with Alabama A&M, a public historically black, land-grant university in North Alabama. While working on my PhD in Atlantic History, I taught at Florida International University, one of the second largest Hispanic-Serving Institutions in the United States and worked intimately with two museums in historically black neighborhoods recording oral histories and preserving/digitalizing photographs, objects, and archival materials for public access.

I have worked closely with numerous institutions and private clients developing and managing digitalization projects and training interns and staff to assist with various stages of the process. While at the Huntsville Museum of Art and the Peabody Essex Museum, I was responsible for the migration of data between old and new databases.  As the curator and collections manager of the Weeden House; Black Police Prescient & Courthouse Museum; the Historic Hampton House; and Florida Keys History & Discovery Center, I researched affordable database options, presented those to the board of directors, and then created collection databases with varying degrees of public access. Each project involved transferring object related documentation to the databases; photographing, editing and uploading images; and properly rehousing the collections.

As a curator and researcher, my work addresses artwork and stories typically underrepresented communities to highlight the relevance of diverse perspectives as well as for my audience to reflect on their own lives. Over the years, I have worked on over 55 permanent collection exhibitions, traveling shows from other intuitions, and created exhibits featuring artwork from living artists. The most successful of these are thought-provoking, innovative, and educational; they challenge how we interact with the past in the present and preserve those stories for future generations.

From giving tours and teaching art classes to those with low vision, on the Autism spectrum, and from lower income neighborhoods to incorporating stories of women, racial minorities, and immigrants into educational programming and exhibitions to discovering funding opportunities and writing grants to fund programs to training and mentoring interns and staff with diverse needs, I am incredibly enthusiastic to bring these skills to a new communities, private individuals and institutions.

For more information, please email me at megrene@gmail.com.