For Liz Griffin '19 and Jessica Shields '19, the hardest part of their internship at Icebox Project Space at Crane Arts in Kensington was the sweat.
“We had to be fully prepared to be dripping in sweat for the entire time that we came in,” Shields said. “Whether we’re moving big wooden panels down to storage, or just on our hands and knees drilling the platform. It’s just a very drippy job.”
The perspiration paid off, as the two Fine Arts majors got to curate their own show featuring works by Philadelphia ceramicist Adam Ledford.
THE PLACE TO BE
Griffin and Shields found out about working at Icebox Project Space at the Locks Career Center Internship Fair at Moore, where they met the co-directors, Tim Belknap and Ryan McCartney. Icebox Project Space is a large exhibition space where visual artists, musicians, film makers and performers can work, think and collaborate.
“I knew that they were fabricators and they were building a lot of stuff for the shows, and just kind of transforming the space for each event that they had and I thought that was really cool,” Shields said. “I really wanted to soak it up for whatever I could get out of them, as they do that all the time.”
“I feel like working with interns helps us to kind of stay current but also to be able to connect to different parts of the community,” McCartney said. “I think, in particular, Moore has a very diverse student body and it has a lot of students that are very self-motivated, that have very strong ideas, strong personal direction, and that helps us a lot.”
From May to August, the interns did a lot of physical work, spackling and drilling, moving items into the space for each show and exhibition, and then hauling everything out. They also set up equipment for video, music and dance performances. They used power tools to install the space’s new Marley dance floor.
Shields said she appreciated learning from professionals.
“It was really cool to see them be faced with a problem and just kind of solve through that,” she said.
THEIR SHOW
The reward for all the grunt work was the opportunity to curate their own exhibition. Griffin did some research to find an artist that would fit the space, and cold-call emailed Ledford, who had traveled to Europe and Dubai for inspiration.
“He took a lot of photos of vessels and then lost his camera,” Griffin said. “He was really bummed and so tried to make a lot of these things from memory. It was sort of a meditation on trying to remember pieces from certain spaces.”
The students hung all of the works in the hallway at Icebox, leading into the main space that housed The Kinematic Workshop that ran August 9 to September 1.
Both women said they learned a great deal, such as being more savvy with tools and having more confidence.
“How to facilitate with artists better, how to accommodate space, how to work as a team, how to work collaboratively,” Griffin said. “It’s a lot of hard work to make shows for artists. You see galleries as glamorous…but it’s really just a lot of hard work and a lot of making sure everything’s ready for the public.”
