Features
(Photo: Shannon Taggart)Mara Gladstone is keeping her options open. The contemporary art lover—who participated in experimental theater productions after college and has supplemented her longtime interest in painting with multimedia projects—hopes one day to serve as a curator at a museum or a small arts organization.
“I just really like working with artists and helping them develop their projects,” says Gladstone, a PhD candidate in the Program in Visual & Cultural Studies from Merrick, N.Y. “But I also love teaching and writing and I can definitely see that being part of my future.”
Awarded two grants from the Getty Foundation, Gladstone heads later this summer to Los Angeles. In support of her dissertation research, which investigates contemporary art and sensory experiences in museums, she will examine the history of Manhattan’s New Museum through the personal and professional archives of its founder. Shortly afterward she starts a fellowship as a graduate intern with the Public Programs Department of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Gladstone appreciates the interdisciplinary nature of her graduate study at Rochester.
“I chose this specific program because it’s unique,” she says. “My advisor is in the art and art history department but I have also worked with professors in anthropology, English, and political science. And because my peers focus on different subjects, it’s amazingly productive to get all these varied perspectives on my own work.”
