Brown University and Providence are just a short drive – in some cases, a short walk – away from some of the best museums in the world, and the Joukowsky Institute has built relationships with many of these institutions.
The RISD Museum of Art, two blocks away from the Institute, houses collections of Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, Mesoamerican, Asian and African art, artifacts, and coins. Georgina Borromeo, the Curator of Ancient Art
, who received her Ph.D. from Brown in classical archaeology and art history, regularly teaches courses on art history and the curatorial process for Brown’s archaeology concentrators. Several undergraduate and graduate students at the Joukowsky Institute have arranged internships working closely with the RISD collections – cataloguing objects, assisting with tours, giving lectures, planning gallery exhibitions, and preparing artifacts for display.
The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University’s museum of cultural history, is located in Bristol, Rhode Island, as well as having a satellite location in Manning Hall on Brown’s Main Green – very close to the Joukowsky Institute.
The Haffrenreffer mounts new exhibits regularly, and often involves undergraduate and graduate student interns or volunteers in their planning and installation. Believing Africa, the current installation in Manning Hall, was designed by the participants in a two-semester course offered in Brown’s Anthropology Department in the 2005-6 academic year – a course in which students worked to conceptualize and mount an exhibition on campus.
Boston is just 45 minutes away by car or commuter train, and is home to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to name just a few of the many museums in and around the city. The MFA has recently offered the opportunity for students of the Joukowsky Institute to intern in their Art of the Ancient World Department. Working closely with curators, conservators and photographers, students are exposed to all aspects of museum work. While the internship at the MFA focuses mostly on the study of specific objects, researching the art and writing labels, it also offers a chance to give tours to groups of college students, to study the collection in depth, to examine the process of conservation and to learn about the planning, layout and construction of new galleries.
The Mashantucket Pequot Museum is also just under an hour away from Brown, and is a new complex that presents the histories and cultures of the Mashantucket Pequot and other Native American tribes, as well as the natural history of the New England area through a series of innovative presentations.
The Worcester Art Museum, under an hour away, is home, among many other things, to the largest and finest group of mosaics from ancient Antioch in America. Its collections also boast sculpture and decorative arts from ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece, an Asian collection that includes works in many media representing the major periods of Persian, Chinese, Indian and Japanese art, and a twelfth-century Romanesque Chapter House.
New York City and all its museums are slightly farther away – about 3 hours by car, bus, or train – but still easily accessible. Several Institute faculty members are affiliated with New York museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art where graduate students have held internships and other curatorial positions.