"Tina Smith" Archive

July 2016 staff milestones

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Sara Cromwell gets curious with latest MOA exhibit

Sara Cromwell, right, the assistant director of the Wake Forest Museum of Anthropology, works on the exhibit Cabinet of Curiosities, with sophomore Lindsay Gilliland ('18), one of the students who curated the exhibit, in the museum on Monday, June 15, 2015.

Sara Cromwell, interim assistant director of the Museum of Anthropology, spearheaded an effort to give her student employees a chance to run an exhibit on their own while also giving the Museum a display unlike any it has had before. What resulted is the newest exhibit for the summer: MOA’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

The exhibit features nearly 80 exotic items hand-picked by the four student employees (and a Salem College student) and Cromwell. Other than that, Cromwell’s work with the project was deliberately limited, letting the students take control. “We looked at Cabinet of Curiosities as a way to reward the invaluable work of our student employees while simultaneously allowing them to improve upon their curatorial skills,” Cromwell explains. Her role was to answer any questions the students might have and help initially with the research of the objects. She also had help from museum educator Tina Smith throughout the process.

Cromwell came up with the theme of a cabinet of curiosities to create a space for objects from the Museum’s vast collection that haven’t been displayed before. Cabinets of curiosities, or wunderkammem (wonder rooms), originated as private collections of exotic and extraordinary objects in mid-sixteenth century Europe. Looking for a way to verify their wealth, individuals displayed as many foreign objects as they could in a jam-packed room of their home. The items represent a diverse group of disciplines such as fine art, natural history and anthropology. These displays served as precursors to modern museums.

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Categories: EventsStaff News

Smith's work with middle school featured in article

Tina SmithTina Smith, the museum educator at Wake Forest’s Museum of Anthropology, was recently featured in an article in the Mt. Airy News. The article highlighted the curriculum for eight-graders at Central Middle School in Pilot Mountain, N.C. Smith helped judge projects by students who worked to design portable exhibits that explained the Holocaust to 4- and 5-year-olds.

Read more about Smith and the program »

Categories: Staff News

Wake Foresters present at conference

Steve Whittington

Steve Whittington

Museum of Anthropology educator Tina Smith, Education chair Mary Lynn Redmond and MOA director Stephen Whittington presented “Linking Cultures and Languages through Visual Learning” at the Visual Learning: Transforming the Liberal Arts conference held at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.

The presentation focused on the value of the MOA’s databases for teaching a variety of subjects, from K-12 social studies to undergraduate foreign languages.

Visual Learning: Transforming the Liberal Arts offered visionary lectures and speculative conversations, as well as hands-on sessions highlighting successful assignments, faculty-staff partnerships, exhibitions, and performances. Stretching over two days, the conference — held in the Weitz Center for Creativity, Carleton’s new center for interdisciplinary arts collaboration — addressed topics ranging from the theoretical to the practical.

Categories: Faculty NewsStaff News

Smith moderates panel at conference

Tina Smith, museum educator at the Museum of Anthropology, moderated and participated in several panels and presentations at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Museums Conference in Baton Rouge, La., in October, including “Cheap but Good Museum Education Programs.”

Categories: Staff News

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