STANLEY SPOTLIGHTS

Jennifer (Otis) Miller Alice Gisler

Both a ceramic artist and a doctoral student in the University of Iowa College of Education’s Language, Literacy, and Culture program, Jennifer Miller brings broad experience and interests to her work with the Stanley’s Learning and Engagement department. Her pilot video series for the Stanley YouTube channel, Unexpected Insights, highlights a single work from the collection and invites three people from the community with different perspectives to share personal reflections. These responses provide unique viewpoints on art and life in Iowa and beyond.

Miller found producing a purely digital project during a mostly digital work experience a challenge unlike her physical art practice. Happily, she was able to make exciting connections and share the voices of people from the UI Center for the Book, her ceramics community, the food industry, and beyond. Miller hopes her model of community conversations will continue to serve the museum in the future and “make works of art more accessible to wider audiences.” Looking forward, she wants “to facilitate these kinds of conversations with [others]—communicating across differences and inviting people in.” W orking for the museum is a “complete coincidence” says UI School of Library and Information Science graduate student Alice Gisler. “I was just hunting around for scholarships and this one crossed my desk.” She has been pushing herself for the last couple of years to try new things, branch out, and learn new skills. In her work with the Curatorial and Collections Management teams, Gisler is “doing what needs to be done,” which includes grant research, collections database entry, and editing images of inaugural exhibition objects in Adobe Photoshop. She compiled the properly scaled images into a library so curators could easily locate objects by accession number and import them into the 3D modeling software SketchUp. Gisler has become so proficient in SketchUp that she completed a model of a teen/young adult area for a public library as part of her coursework. “I would not have been able to do that without the work I’ve done here at the Stanley. It’s been a wonderful opportunity.”

With an anticipated May 2022 graduation, Gisler hopes to find “straight up public librarian work.” Her passion is focusing her work on LBGTQ+ youth and teens. Gisler wants to create a space where they can “get information, express themselves creatively, and feel like they can have ownership of themselves and their lives, and their place in the world.”

Photo by Veronica Burns Photo by Alice Gisler

Offering paid, pre-professional opportunities to UI students and encouraging diverse points of view are values embedded in the museum’s strategic plan. Not only do student employees gain skills and experiences that will serve them well in any field they pursue, but they also make valuable contributions to museum planning, programming, and thinking.

Riley Hanick

Riley Hanick was born and raised in Iowa City, and as is often the case, has close ties with the University of Iowa. More specifically, Hanick is no stranger to the Stanley Museum of Art, where he is working as an Iowa Digital Intern in the Humanities this summer. “On some level,” Hanick points out, “I have a significant debt to pay to the Stanley.”

Hanick’s first book, Three Kinds of Motion, was published in 2015. The book began as a short essay after Hanick went to see the scroll version of On the Road by Jack Kerouac when it was on display at the museum alongside Jackson Pollock’s Mural. “I was letting myself daydream about writing an essay that was an act of accompaniment,” he says. “I think that being able to walk [into the museum] at no charge and simply check in with this painting was how I made the time to start believing in the book.” The book, according to Hanick, also focuses on the development of the interstate highway system in the United States.

Hanick just completed his first year of doctoral work in the English department, after receiving his MLIS in Library Science with a Graduate Certificate in Book Arts from the UI Center for the Book in 2020. At the Stanley, he continues to pursue the unique ekphrastic tradition he started years ago: “My goal during this summer is to complete a fairly compact piece of writing that makes use of some digital tools to highlight a selection of works from the permanent collection in anticipation of next fall’s inaugural exhibition.” D anielle Hoskins will be entering her final year of her PhD program in the UI’s History department this fall. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Look Like a Girl, Think Like a Man, Act Like a Lady, and Work Like a Dog”: American Women in Politics, 1945–1965 considers how women in the years following WWII became involved in their communities, in women’s clubs, and in political work, and how some of them ran as homemakers for state legislatures. In addition to her scholarly work, Hoskins has taught several undergraduate courses at the UI, an experience that has been revealing for her. “I feel most at home in front of a classroom,” Hoskins says. “I have become convinced that the amount I sweat while teaching is not related to nerves—sometimes, in fact, it is related to the lunges I am doing across the classroom, to show the relative freedom bloomers provided women in the 1850s.”

This same energy and passion for teaching is at the center of Hoskins’s time with the Stanley this summer. As an Iowa Digital Intern in the Humanities, she is looking to make an impact in the classroom through the project she’s working on: “a resource that is a combination of a website tutorial for undergraduate students on how to use the Stanley’s digital collections, and a digital object-based learning instructive element that ties into the Japanese history course I am teaching this fall.”

Photo by Lydia Diemer

Danielle Hoskins

Photo by Elizabeth Wallace