Connecting the Visible and the Invisible
When visitors step into a museum, they typically marvel at the art on the walls and the architecture of the galleries or enjoy a program inspired by the museum’s collections. Rarely do they think about the hidden scaffolding that makes all of that possible: the research, cataloging, and information work that gives each object its voice—and the host of people who make this work happen. At the Princeton University Art Museum, I was one of those people. As the art information fellow from fall 2023 to fall 2025, I went from being only a curious art-history fiend to being part of this invisible world, piecing together the stories that make collections legible to scholars, students, and the public.
The work was both meticulous and expansive. I spent hours cataloging new acquisitions, ensuring that works entering the collections carried with them accurate records: titles, dates, artist biographies, and provenance histories. At first glance, cataloging might seem like purely administrative work, but I have come to see it as a form of storytelling. Each field in the Museum’s database—every date, location, or exhibition note—is a thread that gets woven into an artwork’s larger narrative. The details shape not only how a painting is described on a gallery label but also how it will be studied, cited, and remembered in years to come.
Beyond organizing and streamlining information for the Museum’s internal records, a crucial part of my work was outward facing. When the Museum acquired the Emmet Gowin Archive, I helped build an image bank to utilize across different Museum communications—like marketing, publications, and programming. Building this type of image bank meant working on rights and reproductions, which entailed corresponding with artists’ estates and rights holders and securing permissions so that images could appear in print and across various digital platforms. Seeing some of Gowin’s photographs printed in the Museum’s Spring 2024 magazine, knowing the behind-the-scenes care it took to bring them there, was incredibly rewarding.
Other projects I was involved with during my fellowship were sweeping in scope, multiyear efforts to refine records across the Museum’s collections. For instance, I worked on standardizing how BCE and CE dates were listed to give visitors and researchers a clearer sense of art historical timelines. I joined the so-called Day One label initiative, in which every artwork that was going into the new building needed ready-to-go information for public display. I contributed to cataloging South Asian works from the collections, helping expand records for an important area of the Museum’s holdings. Each task underscored how museums are never static; they are living systems, always in the process of being updated, corrected, and retold.
My fellowship also coincided with a transformative period for the Museum as it prepared to open its new building. To be part of that moment felt electric. Every corrected record, every edited provenance statement, every catalog entry mattered more because they shaped how objects appear in the galleries today. I worked primarily with spreadsheets, databases, and editorial notes, but these venues were not static records; they were dynamic and future-oriented, laying the groundwork for the next chapter of the Museum’s history.
Spending two years in this role gave me something precious: time. Time to conquer a steep learning curve in year one and to then work with more confidence and contribute at a deeper level over the course of year two. Time to build relationships with curators, registrars, and colleagues across departments, learning how collaboration sustains institutions. And time to explore my own research interests within the collections, particularly those dealing with African and diasporic art histories, asking not only what we know about objects but also whose voices are amplified and whose are missing.
Looking back, I see the fellowship as a bridge. It connected my scholarly interests to the practical side of working at a museum. It taught me to value accuracy as a form of care, to see every corrected detail as part of a larger act of stewardship. It showed me that behind every label in a gallery and image credit in a publication lies an invisible infrastructure of research, editing, and collaboration.
To serve as the Museum’s art information fellow was to stand at that intersection of the visible and the invisible, working quietly behind the scenes but always in service of the visitor who pauses in front of an artwork and wonders about its story. For two years, I had the privilege of helping make sure those stories were told with clarity, care, and truth.
