An Exciting New Opportunity

As a St. Lucie County native, I am elated to be working professionally so close to home this semester! For Spring 2024, I will be an intern at the A.E. Backus Museum in Historic Downtown Fort Pierce. The Museum is named after local landscape artist, Albert Ernest “Bean” Backus (1906-1990), who had a prolific career as a painter. In fact, he was inducted posthumously into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 1993. Backus also befriended and mentored, to some extent, Alfred Hair (1941-1970) and Harold Newton (1934-1994) who went on to build their own legacy as Highwaymen artists.*

In the coming weeks, I will have more interesting biographical information about Backus and the Highwaymen, to be sure, but for now I’d like to discuss some of the things I’ve been working on for my internship.

My on-site supervisor, J. Marshall Adams, Executive Director of the Museum, came up with a handful of great assignments for me to work on throughout the course of the semester. They each align perfectly with my interests: digitizing museum records and other archival materials, research-based tasks aimed at building and updating the A.E. Backus artist and museum Wikipedia pages, and, if time permits, some visitor studies in the galleries to examine the behavioral tendencies of guests, which provides useful information for designing exhibitions. 

However, for this week, I was able to help out with the installation of their new exhibition “Fast Forward: The Original Florida Highwaymen on the Way to Fame, 1954-2004.” I haven’t assisted with the installation process of an exhibition since I was an undergrad, so it was nice getting back into the swing of things! Luckily, I did not have to measure walls or hang artworks—I’m not too fond of numbers or hammers—but instead, I prepared art labels and signage for hanging.

On Thursday, I focused much of my time on smoothing out the rough edges of the signage boards. An unfortunate mishap at the printers resulted in (to put it nicely) an aesthetically unpleasing finish on the borders of the signs. They looked as if they were cut haphazardly with safety scissors, so I used a sanding block to make the edges look cleaner and more uniform. After that, I put Velcro strips on the backside for hanging. Today, I worked on assembling the art labels. The information (artist’s image, name, the title of the work and the date it was created, the materials used, and the credit line) is printed on a sticker label which is then lined up to the edges of a plastic backing card, then cut down to size. Then, for the finishing touch, Velcro strips are adhered to the back. I enjoy meticulous, repetitive tasks where I get to use my hands, so this was a fun way to get the semester started.

The exhibition officially opens tomorrow, January 13, and is on display until March 3. It includes paintings from private collections, so many that are on display are quite rarely seen!

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* “A.E. ‘Bean’ Backus,” A.E. Backus Museum & Gallery, accessed January 12, 2024, https://www.backusmuseum.org/a-e-backus.