My name is Mia Moore, and I recently graduated from Roosevelt University after majoring in history with minors in social justice studies and sociology. As a student at RU, I was fortunate enough to engage in programming and initiatives organized by the Women’s Leadership Council, one of which (the Joan Deutsch Herczeg Scholarship Program) matched me with my mentor, Dr. Jill Bugajski – the Executive Director of the Research Center at the Art Institute of Chicago. As a result of the generosity of the Women’s Leadership Council, Dr. Bugajski and I were able to travel to New York City for a series of museum and library visits this summer.
Dr. Bugajski and I traveled across Brooklyn and Manhattan to visit several esteemed institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), Ursus Rare Books, the Whitney Museum of American Art (the Whitney), Printed Matter, Inc., the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library (NYPL), the Morgan Library and Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. We were fully engrossed in the rich history of New York and its ravishing architecture and design inside of the spaces we visited and along the streets of the city.
We saw a mix of renowned permanent collections and highly anticipated temporary exhibitions featuring rare documents, innovative sculptures and thought-provoking films — many of which centered creators and subjects of marginalized positionalities whose stories and likenesses are not ubiquitous in museum settings. Some of my favorite objects that we saw were The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago at Brooklyn Museum, Ruins of Empire II and Statue of Freedom (Marsha P. Johnson) by Kiyan Williams at the Whitney, Once Again…(Statues Never Die)by Isaac Julien at the Whitney, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room at the Met and The Triumph of Maximilian by Albrecht Dürer at NYPL. I would once again like to thank the Women’s Leadership Council for all their help in making this experience possible and memorable.
