Framing the Future

A popular summer program immerses Williams students in the museum world—and opens doors to new areas of study and careers.

David Ordonez ’26 came to college with a plan: Major in history as a path to law school. But an art history course his first year inspired him to broaden his horizons. He applied for a spot that summer in the Williams Summer Arts and Museums Immersion Program, an opportunity to spend eight weeks living and learning alongside like-minded students as they work in area museums and arts organizations.

Ordonez served as a public programs intern at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., helping the organization align its policies with best practices in contemporary museum pedagogy and assisting visitors in the galleries. The connections he made led to an internship the following summer with the curatorial department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he focused on 19th-century French drawings and prints. He spent his junior year in Paris. Now, the art and history double major is pursuing career opportunities in education and development work in the arts.

“My internships through Williams helped me narrow my focus,” Ordonez says. “Having the chance to explore careers in the museum field that I had never even considered—I’m just very grateful for that.”

Ordonez is one of dozens of students who have participated in the summer immersion program, now in its fourth year and more popular than ever. A record 58 students applied for 14 paid internships this summer at MASS MoCA, The Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), which oversees the program under the guidance of Rachel Heisler, associate curator of campus and community engagement.

“We see this program as an opportunity to expand and diversify the pipeline of who gets to work in art museums and how they are able to,” Heisler says.

For their internships, students might prepare exhibition spaces alongside artists and curators, analyze artwork using digital learning tools or help with publicity. Each student works 24 hours per week with an on-site supervisor, learning, doing and making connections, Heisler says.

The students all live together in a residence hall at Williams, where they can talk about their experiences over shared meals. On Mondays they take part in career development, including conversations with visiting arts professionals—usually Williams alumni—who discuss their jobs and career paths. Heisler says she seeks out guest speakers who have graduated within the previous five years who can have “very logistical and transparent conversations” about what life is like right out of college as they try to make a living in the arts world. Speakers cover everything from networking etiquette to how to interview for internships and jobs.

WCMA also arranges field trips—some for educational purposes and some just for fun—to Berkshires-area museums and attractions like Tanglewood, Hancock Shaker Village, Chesterwood and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. For some students, it’s their first time experiencing summer in the Berkshires, Heisler says. They also go farther afield to sites where Williams alumni work, including the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, N.Y., and The School: Jack Shainman Gallery in Kinderhook, N.Y.

Another highlight is a two- to three-day visit to an arts hub like New York City or Boston. The students meet with curators and other staff—usually Williams alumni—working at museums, galleries, auction houses and arts foundations. They then gather for dinner at the home of an alum.

Williams covers the entire cost of the program, including interns’ salaries, meals and transportation, thanks to alumni gifts to the endowment. “It is wonderful to have the opportunity to open up the vibrant summer season of the northern Berkshires museum ecosystem to students and to have the resources to offer what have proven to be life-changing experiences,” says Pamela Franks, WCMA’s Class of ’56 Director. “Not just the ability to offer paid internships, housing, meals and trips for the summer but also great connections with Williams alumni who are excited to offer students an insider’s look at the many facets of the art world.

“The summer immersion program,” Franks adds, “is just one example of how the museum is an academic and experiential crossroads for members of the Williams community from all disciplines and backgrounds, all year round.”

The program was an immediate draw for Jess Hu ’25, who learned about it during their communications internship at WCMA in the fall of 2022. A computer science and studio art double major with a concentration in cognitive science—“I am getting the [computer science] major, but I’m totally going the art route,” they say—Hu was able to dive deeper into museum communications over the summer. The experience led to an internship the next summer at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.

The much larger Whitney provided invaluable insight into arts education, Hu says. Meanwhile, WCMA’s small size and collegial staff were a model for collaboration. Hu says if they were working on a short video or social media campaign for WCMA, their colleagues pitched in to help animate props and find the materials to carry out the vision. “It felt like what I was doing at the museum actually mattered,” they say.

Inspired by their experiences and their Williams professors, Hu says they plan to work in museums before pursuing a master of fine arts with the goal of becoming an art professor.

Another computer science and art major, Maddy Andersen ’25, also found WCMA to be an ideal place to blend her distinct passions. During the spring of her junior year, she worked in digital learning and research at the museum, using highly specialized imaging technology to take digital photographs of artwork. She continued on for the summer immersion program and, applying her skills in data analysis, created a system for logging and analyzing visitor comments so museum staff could respond quickly. She also laid the foundation for a digitized, searchable inventory of decades’ worth of documents contained in manila folders about the items in WCMA’s more than 15,000-piece collection.

Before building the database, Andersen says she worked with staff to answer questions such as, “What is important and what do we write down about these things and how? What is the process for going through every folder?” She then created a digital catalog listing the items associated with 150 artworks and helped put a system in place for museum staff and future interns to continue the project.

Andersen says she plans to use her computer science background “within an art space, maybe helping a museum envision [connections to computer programming], exploring questions such as “how do you do digital storytelling and how do you make the data easy to read?”

Art major Rebecca Gross ’25 envisioned a career working in a museum, and the summer immersion program helped her fine-tune that vision. The summer before her senior year, she interned at MASS MoCA doing hands-on projects—including making mounts and boxes for art displays—that contributed to her deeper understanding of curatorial work.

Gross says she was surprised by “how much gets fabricated” at MASS MoCA, “because that’s a very different process than borrowing works or displaying a collection. It was a different mode of operation that also gives a unique amount of freedom and collaboration.

“These design elements that go into displaying and maintaining a collection—it’s something I was not aware of until I did the summer program,” she adds. Now, “Curatorial work is the dream.”

For Julia Clark ’25, the dream is working for an auction house—a path inspired by a visit to New York City during the summer 2023 program. Spending time at an auction house during the trip helped her realize “you could have this extremely fast-paced life in the arts that still involves research and really direct interaction with works of art,” she says.

After graduation, Clark, an art history major, plans to participate in an 18-month associate program in Sotheby’s contemporary art department and then pursue graduate studies. WCMA is preparing for its next crop of interns this summer with its new building in mind. Currently under construction and due to open in 2027, the 76,800-square-foot museum is designed to reflect the goal of “engaging the entire campus around art while bringing the Williams College experience into dynamic interaction with the wider world,” Franks says. “Every part of WCMA’s building aspires to be an educational opportunity.”

This year’s summer interns will take part in preparations for the new building, helping to determine which works will go on display, developing educational initiatives or focusing on the logistics of moving pieces of art—and their records—when the time comes, Heisler says. WCMA also plans to share one intern with the Zilkha Center for the Environment in a hybrid art and sustainability position. The student will conduct a life-cycle analysis of the packaging materials used by the museum and make recommendations to staff.

Involving students in so many aspects of the new art space allows them to “put their touch and their mark on the future place and the future installation,” Heisler says.

The museum’s strategic plan for the summer immersion program “is about building future arts leaders, and leaders being plural is important,” she adds. “They’re learning from each other and will hopefully stay connected into the future.”

The Williams Summer Arts and Museums Immersion Program is funded through proceeds from the Fulkerson Fund for Arts Leadership. Additional funding comes from Allan Fulkerson ’54, Boston Foundation; Andrew Harris ’88, Harris Family Foundation; Rachel Mayer Judlowe ’99; and Robin Sanders ’98 and Brendan Burns ’98.