Nathan Bloom

As the tenth Eleanor Linder Winter ’43 Endowed Intern, I centered my work around community engagement. I believe that developing a strong community helps nurture personal growth and creates trust. I have been able to realize my goals to engage broad audiences through events, and learning opportunities by creating the weekly student-run Tang Live, organizing the fourth annual Winter/Miller Lecture, and curating the exhibition Look After Each Other: Intimacy and Community.

While I became involved in the Tang’s Student Advisory Council as a sophomore, my first formal job at the Tang was in my junior year as a design intern working with Head of Design Jean Tschanz-Egger. In that position, I continued the Tang Zine, a free publication originated by Evelyn Wang ‘19 for Skidmore students about upcoming museum events that also featured original student art and writing. When COVID upended the spring 2020 semester, Maria Staack ’22, Fiona McLaughlin ’20, and I created Tang Live, a weekly program focused on student art, activism, and museum engagement hosted live on the Tang’s Instagram account.

Tang Live became a central part of the museum’s programming that spring, and I was pleased to see it continue through summer 2020 and 2020-2021 academic year. It was quite a learning experience, as I want to pursue a career in media and film. I became the producer and helped organize weekly interviews and events under the supervision of Jean, Assistant Director for Engagement Tom Yoshikami, and Online Content Coordinator Annelise Kelly. With their insightful guidance, I was able to, in turn, help other students run episodes of Tang Live, teaching them how to curate an episodic program, interview guests, discuss art publicly, and film live events. Tours with student curators of their exhibitions and exhibition-centered musical performances became fixtures. Other programs featured conversations on activism, workshops on mask making, and interviews with student artists. By working with a team, sharing knowledge, and teaching other students how to produce episodes, I was able to turn Tang Live into a sustainable program. In summer 2020, Jane Cole ’21 and Allie Cottingham ’23 joined the team, and in the 2020-2021 academic year, various students ran Tang Live, continuing the work of producing live online events.

A vital part of my Tang Live experience was learning about interviewing. As the Winter Intern, I developed this skill further through the Winter/Miller Lecture with artist Nick Cave. I selected Nick Cave to be our honored guest that year because he is an artist with a civic mission that emphasizes the importance of community, often through interactive art-making experiences and performances. I feel connected to artists who recognize the ability of art to foster social change. Preparing for the interview was daunting. Associate Curator Rebecca McNamara and other members of the Tang staff helped me draft an introduction and develop and narrow down my questions for him. This was the largest event I have ever presented and learning how to control details like word emphasis helped me create a fruitful conversation.

Though the interview was over Zoom, I was able to have a fruitful conversation with Cave, discussing his process and the social implications of civic art. In talking about his projects, he taught me about evaluating the needs of a community and responding with provocative work. Learning about his desires to connect communities through art was inspiring. It has pushed me to develop my own projects with similar intentions.

The capstone project of my year-long Winter Internship is the online exhibition Look After Each Other: Intimacy and Community. One of my goals was to continue to focus on community endeavors. As a gay man, I have been studying about HIV and AIDS on my own, as I had little access to AIDS education until I sought it out for myself. 2021 is the fortieth anniversary of the first official reports of the illness that would later be called AIDS. A lot of what I was discovering about HIV and AIDS were statistics on death and about the grieving processes following diagnosis or death of a loved one. This narrative felt incomplete. It didn’t help me understand contemporary life with HIV. How did people advocate for their existence? What is life like now for people who live with the virus?

The Tang’s curatorial department helped me turn these questions into a cohesive online exhibition featuring work from the collection and on loan that respects the lives and work of artists and advocates. Through the work of people and organizations such as Reverend Joyce McDonald, Donald Moffett, and POZ magazine, I saw the strength of the communities’ advocacy. By focusing on these advocates, I was able to tell a story of strength in adversity and to discuss the warmth that’s part of working together. I also had the opportunity to reach out directly and talk with some of the artists in the exhibition, such as River Huston, Alexander Hernandez, and Clifford Prince King. My heart buzzed whenever I could discuss their work with them.

My experiences with the Tang—learning about community through working with fellow students, interviewing an artistic hero, and exploring art and advocacy related to HIV and AIDS—have cemented many of my ideas about civics: the necessity of working together and the need to find innovative ways to do so. While one of the stated goals of the Winter Internship is for students to experience professional museum work, I received a tremendous gift: I learned what matters to me most in a new way. When I think about the community of students who will come through the Tang, I want to encourage them to find a topic that interests them because this Museum can help them realize their values, honing what they care about and furthering their learning and personal growth through working with others.