Caylee Post presents interdisciplinary project at art and art history conference

Caylee Post ’20, an art history major and biology minor, presented at the College Art Association’s (CAA) annual conference in February alongside Dr. Anthony Mangieri, associate professor and chair of the Department of Art and Art History, and Ernest Jolicoeur, assistant professor of art. She is the first Salve Regina student to collaborate with both professors on such a venture.

For more than 100 years, the conference has been the largest gathering of visual arts professionals in the world. Each year, the conference celebrates the accomplishments of its members and provides opportunities to share cutting-edge research and creative work. There are a number of workshops, meetings, receptions and more during the four-day event.

More than 900 members submit proposals each year for presentation and workshop topics, but only a handful are chosen. Students rarely have the opportunity to present, but Post was able to do so during a session titled “Research, Collect, Curate and Digitize: How Undergraduates Created a Natural History Collection.”

“I’ve never spoken to anything at that level before, so I really wanted to make it professional,” Post said. “It was a humbling experience, and I was able to attend other sessions and observe what other professionals are doing in the field.”

Post’s journey to speaking at the CAA conference began her junior year when she completed an internship to categorize and organize items found in the University’s newly created Nature Cabinet. In a joint collaboration between Mangieri and Jolicoeur, art students were collecting natural artifacts for the Nature Cabinet, and both professors thought that Post’s biology minor made her the ideal candidate to assist with the accessioning of each physical specimen and the development of all metadata for a website. The collection currently consists of about 125 natural objects.

“Having the internship was awesome,” Post said. “It was going in, creating an accessioning system for all of the objects in the collection, physically tagging them, doing descriptors, kind of figuring out what each of the specimen were. My biology background helped.”

The Nature Cabinet is housed in the Antone Academic Center. Post helped to categorize every item both in the physical space and in an online database.

During her senior year, Post was given the opportunity for a research apprenticeship course, where she took her categorization project online to create a digital version of the Nature Cabinet. Post worked closely with Mangieri and Nicole Marino, digital scholarship and instruction librarian at the McKillop Library. The library offered Post a way to create an online database, and Marino coached Post on best practices for building a digital collection.

“[This included] uploading all the photography of every object, fitting in more descriptors for each of the objects, just making sure it was nice and clean-cut to put online,” Post said. “I definitely learned a lot.”

The two-year project culminated in the presentation at the CAA conference, where Mangieri and Jolicoeur discussed the educational aspects of undertaking such a project and how Post had been vital to the success of the Nature Cabinet. Post spoke and presented a paper of her experience during the session.

“We really want to make transformative learning experiences for our students,” Mangieri said. “Art history is a not field that is solely abstract or theoretical, but it also has these so-called ‘practical’ applications. We were thrilled that we were able to involve Caylee in this project and have her present with us.”

Mangieri, Jolicoeur and Marino also presented a professional development workshop, “Creating Digital Humanities Projects in Art and Art History,” to help fellow teaching professionals learn how to create digital projects and learning experiences like Post’s for their own students. The workshop was packed, leaving only standing room for attendees, and all three presenters agree that it was clear Salve Regina is an innovative leader in the field of visual studies, interdisciplinary collaborations and student-centered educational experiences.

Post has been accepted to the University of Denver to begin a master’s degree in arts and culture management in fall 2020. She hopes to someday work in marketing for a museum or art company, but she is also glad for the experience of handling a physical collection while at Salve Regina, which will help her stand out in her profession.

“It was nice that everything kind of came full circle,” Post said. “Working with both the biology and an art aspect was a perfect way to end my experience here. These are new skills that I can apply going into grad school or going into a job. I feel really beneficial that I was fortunate enough to have that as an undergraduate student.”