from FSU Art BA ’20 Naira Diptee:
Throughout this semester I have been interning with FSU’s Sustainable Campus in conjunction with Strozier’s Special Collections on an exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary of Earth Month. This internship has been an amazing experience, and the team I’ve gotten to work with has been so supportive. My responsibilities included organizing the research for the exhibit, helping choose which materials would go into the exhibit, deciding in which exhibition case each piece would go and where the cases would be placed in the room. I was also in charge of coming up with the visual direction of the exhibit, and creating all graphic design materials, such as the title design on the show, captions and posters with interpretive text. I gained a lot of skills such as working with the program Sketchup, which was helpful when designing the layout of the exhibition room.
I also learned so much about the environmental activism movement throughout the last fifty years and how much art, design, and performance played a role in it. A big challenge was the fact that I had never worked on an exhibit before, so when doing the graphic design I didn’t know which fonts, font sizes, and design elements would be appropriate. However, the team at Special Collections was very helpful and sent over many resources that I learned from. I enjoyed working with everyone and looking at archived documents and primary resources. There are so many interesting things at Special Collections– I could spend hours! I also loved coming up with the visual direction for the exhibit and being able to pitch my ideas. It gave me a lot of experience and I would like to work on exhibits again in the future. I really enjoyed the combination of historical research with artistic direction. It was so much fun imagining how to arrange everything to tell a narrative celebrating the last five decades of environmental activism.
This internship combined my experience with graphic design with my passion for sustainability and interest in working in a museum setting. I would recommend other students to look into niche opportunities like this! The exhibit unfortunately will not be going up in a physical space any more, but there will be a digital version of the exhibit released soon. Please look out for it through Sustainable Campus’ website, Strozier Library, and Special Collections.