Elise Armani has come full circle. During her undergraduate years at the University of Minnesota, she worked at the Weisman Art Museum; now a PhD candidate in art history at Stony Brook University, she has her sights set on a future career in museum curation.
“There was a time that I was considering doing academia,” she said. “But my goal is still that I want to do curatorial work in a museum.”
It all began during her freshman year at the U when her advisor in gender studies, Judith Katz, introduced her to Howard Oransky, the director of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery. At the time, Howard was working on an exhibition featuring the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta.
“That was what led me on this whole path of being interested in museum work,” she said.
The Ana Mendieta exhibit combined Elise’s love for art with her interest in gender studies. Her original plan was to major in studio art as a painter, but a gender studies class her freshman year altered her trajectory. She graduated with a BA in Gender, Women, and Sexuality studies, a BFA in studio art, and a minor in art history.
“I quickly realized I didn’t want to pursue being an artist as my career, but I was interested in working in the arts,” she said. “When I met Howard and worked on that show, it opened me up to another side of art history.”
As she was wrapping up her undergraduate degree, she decided that the best way to pursue jobs in the curatorial field was to do graduate studies. She was able to go straight into a PhD program, allowing her the opportunity to skip the (often expensive) terminal master’s degree.
Now she’s working on a dissertation on immigrant artists living in New York after the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965. She examines how their migration and move to New York coincided with the changing landscape of downtown, specifically a group of trans-national immigrant artists on the lower east side.
Her studio art background provides insight on how artists think, the technical approach to their work, and the best ways to communicate with them.
“It’s not something I draw on all the time,” she said. “But it’s part of the constellation that informs my perspective.”
She credits the hands-on advising she got as an Honors student with her ability to pursue graduate studies. During her senior year, she worked closely with her advisor Tim Jones on completing a Fulbright application. Though she didn’t ultimately receive the fellowship, the practice helped her prepare for graduate school applications.
“It really opened my eyes to what pursuing further degrees would look like,” she said.
Elise Armani will be presenting some of her dissertation research during the Research Out Loud - Power and Place in Global Contemporary Art panel on Friday, May 10 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she’s currently working in their pre-doctoral fellowship program.