Ural Federal University students intern at the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum

The second year students of the Department of Art History and Museum Studies of the Ural Federal University visited the laboratories and collections of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. During the museum internship meetings and lectures were organized to familiarize the students with the intricacies of museum institutions. Excursions to permanent and temporary expositions gave the students the opportunity to communicate with prominent scientists, who acquainted the young specialists with the history of art phenomena and the peculiarities of the exhibition business.

In most of the laboratories of the restoration and conservation center “Staraya Derevnya” (Old Village), visited by the students, it is not allowed to take pictures. In addition to the ancient masterpieces of the Altai burial mounds, the future art historians saw the art of the East, in particular, the Sassanid period.

Meetings were held with the Hermitage’s media department, where the students were introduced to the mechanisms of promoting the museum’s activities in social networks. The scientific secretary of the Hermitage, Maryam Dandamaeva, spoke about the complex structure of the Hermitage – a kind of “city within a city”. The students not only saw the results of the restorers’ painstaking work in the open storage area, but also talked to the employees of the workshops for restoring furniture, paintings and photographs.

The first day of the Moscow part of the internship, held at the Pushkin Museum, began with a conversation with the new director, Elizaveta Likhacheva. She talked about what a modern employer expects from graduates, the difference between the professional attitudes of the generation of 20-year-old graduates and 40-year-old managers, the position of an art historian in life, and the role of a modern museum and a modern university in the life of society.

“The museum practice on the basis of the Pushkin Museum was filled with meetings with representatives of the museum departments, thanks to which the idea of the museum institution as a system of various elements was formed. In addition, for students of art were organized meetings with the keepers of storerooms of ancient art and graphics of the XX century. The museum workers told about the sphere of their scientific interests and explained the main points of the keepers’ work with museum exhibits,” the Department of Art History and Museum Studies noted.