Ural Federal University: Art Students Practice at the Pushkin Museum
This year, the annual internship for second-year History of Arts and Cultural Studies students took place for the first time at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow). It became possible due to the long-term Agreement between the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and Ural Federal University, which was signed in January of this year.
A special program was prepared for the students by the museum’s Education and Outreach Projects Department. The students talked to Marina Loshak, Director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and Ilya Doronchenkov, Deputy Director for Research. The lecturers talked about the specifics of the museum, its collections and features of scientific and exhibition activities of the modern State Museum of Fine Arts.
A special part of the program was a tour around the current exhibition projects of the museum. Students attended the tour around the renovated permanent exhibition of Western European art, saw the author’s concept of presenting works of old masters by Patrick Hourcade, stenographer and curator. There was also a unique opportunity to visit the recently opened exhibition “Brother Ivan. Collections of Mikhail and Ivan Morozov” with the curator of the exhibition project.
The internship program also included meetings with leading employees and heads of the museum’s structural divisions. Students talked to the Head of the Department of Exhibition Organization, representatives of the Regional Directorate of Museum Branches, learned all about lecturing and excursion work, about PR activity and marketing of a modern museum, as well as about the specifics of organizing events. A significant part of the internship was a visit to the storerooms of various departments of the State Museum of Fine Arts.
“On the last day, the students had a very unusual and unexpected event. They had a unique opportunity to see the process of building the museum quarter, a large-scale project designed to more than double the area of the museum,” said Evgeny Alekseyev and Andrey Merezhnikov, the internship supervisors.
The students and supervisors were first given a detailed description of the entire project, and then, equipped with safety helmets. They were shown through several floors of one of the future museum buildings and the initial stages of construction of the spaces that will be used for the permanent exhibition, temporary exhibitions, lecture halls, public areas, stores, and cafes.
“The involvement of unique experts, work on the expositions, in the collections, scientific library of the museum made it possible to give the practice the highest professional level with the necessary competencies of research, museum-exposition and expert activities,” summed up the Vera Avdeeva, the Head of the Department of Art History and Museum Studies.