The Office of Curatorial Affairs (OCA), including the Centers, facilitates the intellectual work of the Museum by collecting artifacts, ensuring collection preservation and stewardship, conducting research and scholarship, and sharing the rich history and culture of African Americans and all people of African descent with a diverse public in accessible, multifaceted ways including exhibition, digitization, and publication.
The museum is planning and developing a major exhibition on the museum and archive collections held by five Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Scheduled to open in 2026, the exhibition will highlight major objects in these collections and explore the value of these institutions in preserving aspects of African American and African diasporic history and art from the nineteenth century to the present day.
The HBCU Exhibition Intern will work with OCA and Project Management staff on our “At the Vanguard: Collections at Historically Black Colleges and Universities” exhibition project by assisting with research and exhibition development tasks related to the ongoing development of the exhibition. The HBCU Intern will learn about the exhibition development experience, inclusive of research, writing, curation/object selection, planning, and working with the museum’s HBCU partners. By the end of the internship, the selected candidate will have gained a fundamental understanding of exhibition processes including how to locate and select objects and images for display and best practices for developing exhibition stories, checklists and text.
This internship will be full-time during the summer ($850/12 weeks) and part-time during the fall ($425/12 weeks). The internship is open to students that are currently enrolled in or alumni of the universities featured in the exhibition that meet the program’s eligibility requirements:
- Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University
- Jackson State University
- Tuskegee University
- Clark Atlanta University
- Texas Southern University
Duties Include (but are not limited to):
- Assist with content research for the exhibition including research on objects, images and archives.
- Conduct research to support the exhibition media and website.
- Tracking exhibition research tasks to ensure progress
- Attend weekly exhibition and curatorial meetings
- Share ideas about content and design of the exhibition