ISABELLE LUST
Class of 1954 Intern, Registration
Hood Quarterly, fall 2025
At the beginning of my Dartmouth career, I had no idea what field I wanted to go into. After becoming interested in museum work through classes and gallery walks at the Hood Museum, I decided to apply for a senior internship there. During the interview process, I learned more about the registrar position and felt that the variety of projects and the opportunity to work closely with the collection would be a perfect fit for my interests.
In fall 2024, my supervisor, Associate Registrar Kristie Couser, introduced me to the breadth of the duties in the registrar's areas. Early on, I learned how to create records in The Museum System (TMS), the Hood's collections database, and I catalogued object mounts, custom supports fabricated for displaying exhibition objects. I also dabbled in the world of copyright permissions, learning how to draft non-exclusive licensing agreements for collection images used in the museum's publications. My favorite exploratory project was cleaning artworks on campus, including Hoarfrost with Rabbit by Kiki Smith and Robert Frost by George Lundeen. I brushed debris off these sculptures, hosed them down with water and cleansing agents, and buffed the bronzes with clear paste wax. This process gave me a renewed appreciation for the public art on campus and the work that goes into maintaining the museum's varied holdings.
In winter 2025, I dipped my toe into curatorial work with a special project based on my interest in pigments and dyes. In collaboration with Elizabeth Rice Mattison, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programming and curator of European art, I researched European drawings specifically on blue paper in preparation for the exhibition Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Making Colors in Europe, 1400–1800. I chose six drawings for display, wrote object labels, and arranged a layout for the gallery display case. I also accompanied a 15th-century panel painting to Dartmouth's chemistry lab for light-based material testing to ascertain its pigment composition. The process of transporting and testing the work was a glimpse into the Hood Museum's partnerships across campus as well as a cutting-edge conservationscience procedure.
My overarching internship project involved cataloguing the John Kobal Foundation Collection, an archive of over 6,000 early Hollywood photographs at the Hood Museum. My typical workday involved opening a box of photographs depicting performers and film sets, assigning an accession number to each work, measuring their dimensions, and recording inscriptions into an upload template for TMS. Finally, I added subject tags to the images to enhance the accessibility of the collection for its use in teaching and exhibitions. Over the course of this project I learned a great deal about film, Hollywood culture, studio photography, and stars like Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Anna May Wong, and Ramon Novarro.
My internship enriched my senior year academically and personally through my immersion in the Hood Museum's collection and collaboration with other interns. Cataloguing almost one thousand photographs improved my collections-care skills and helped me secure a graduate school admissions offer. I started this year with trepidation toward an internship in an unfamiliar field and ended it with a career orientation, an increased appreciation for exhibitions and museum maintenance, and a long movie watch list!