Thinking ahead: Getting to Know the Gallery

What did you study? How did you get into this field? Do you think museums will exist in the future? The Gallery’s first-ever Career Day allowed students considering a career in the arts to find out more about working in National Gallery Singapore. We invited five speakers from a range of departments in the Gallery – Kevin Lim, Deputy Director of Co: Lab X, the innovation arm of the Gallery; Jean Hair, Senior Manager of Programmes, Shabana Iqball from the Visitor Experience Team, curator Charmaine Toh and Ong Zhen Min, Deputy Director of Artwork Exhibition and Management. Each speaker was given 7 minutes to speak, after which was a question-and-answer session. Held over the interactive website PigeonHole, questions were kept anonymous to let students ask Gallery staff anything.

For Jean, visual art was a foreign concept before her career in the Gallery. She studied Sociology in the National University of Singapore, but rather than being stuck in lectures, she preferred jamming in music studios. Her passion for music led to a job as a music programmer in Esplanade, where she brought in performers like Jason Mraz before moving on to programming films. When she joined the Gallery nine years ago, she knew nothing about art. She recommends the book Art For Dummies, her own beginner’s cheat sheet. More recently, she graduated after two years in Australia completing her Master’s degree in Arts and Cultural Management. For her, doing her Master’s after work experience under her belt helped her as a student and in her job. To paraphrase Jean, there’s no linear way to a career in the arts.

Despite there being a network of museum-related careers, curators are typically the most public representatives of the museum ecosystem. Jamie Ng from the Community & Access team did not know of the diversity of career options available before she joined the Gallery as an intern. As a student at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), she believes Career Day was a great opportunity for students thinking of their futures to meet with Gallery staff to learn from their experiences first-hand. Lydia Wong, teacher at the School of the Arts (SOTA), agreed that this unique opportunity was a good way for youth to engage with the museum and think about art from various perspectives.

Students then broke out into groups according to their interests in the various available vocations. Curator Charmaine Toh took students on a curatorial tour, where she introduced narratives pertinent to the DBS Singapore Galleries. Selecting the works for display is but part of a curator’s responsibility – to do so requires lots of research and writing, as well as planning of the physical space.

Another group of students attended Unseen, Unheard, a Back-of-House tour of the Former Supreme Court. The tour is run by the Community & Access team, part of which oversees docent-led tours like Unseen, Unheard. In this session however, students were led by Ong Zhen Min (Deputy Director, Artwork and Exhibition Management). She and her team are well acquainted with the space as the fundamental elements of an exhibition like frames, paintings and mounts are kept out of public view. Tang-Lim Guek Im, Senior Director of Student Life at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, attended the Back-of-House tour, and caught a glimpse of the complicated logistics of putting up an exhibition. To her, the unseen and unheard intricacies of art handling and conservation were eye-opening, as were the functions of the various jobs behind-the-scenes of the Gallery.

Some students also attended a Youth Collective Workshop, where they had to come up with new ideas for festival and community programmes. The Youth Collective is a new initiative by the Gallery to increase youth engagement, and for young people to get involved with creating programmes they would want to attend at the Gallery.

The final workshop was prototyping with Co: Lab X, where students were tasked with designing a new user journey and experience within the Gallery to improve the visitor’s engagement with and appreciation of art. Through their “body-storming”, students got insight into the experimental nature of Co: Lab X, which facilitates partnerships between different departments in the Gallery to ease work processes with visitor experience enhancement in mind.

As organiser of Career Day, I was gratified by students' satisfaction with the programme. I hope it has helped them gain an understanding of what goes on behind the scenes at the Gallery, and contributes to their understanding and appreciation of art.