Meet the Museum of Cycladic Art Summer 2025 Intern

Guest post by James McCurley

Interning this past summer at the Cycladic Museum was an unforgettable experience. Despite years of studying the ancient world and having a particular fondness for art history, I had had absolutely no experience with museum work prior to this internship. Working at the Cycladic Museum introduced me to this wonderful area, as well as the fantastic world of the ancient Cyclades. I am so grateful for the wonderful summer I had!

The main focus of my work at the Cycladic Museum was on a new project by the museum, creating a database of Early Cycladic objects stored in museums around the world. This effort had already borne fruit with a hefty list of American artifacts, so the focus of our present work was on the collections of various European museums. The task assigned to me and to the other intern working at the Museum was to find all the Early Cycladic artifacts we could in the online catalogs of European museums and then to record information on the artifacts into a central spreadsheet. If I were lucky and the museum was well-organized and labeled, then the process would be relatively easy for me. I would simply use a relevant tag or keyword search to find the objects, then record data such as type, material, dimensions, conservation, and method of acquisition. For some of the larger museums, such as the British Museum and the Louvre, all this data proved readily available. However, my task was often complicated by the incomplete or even incorrect data provided by some museums on their website. Often, my job would feel closer to a scavenger hunt or puzzle, scouring relevant publications that may hold additional information lacking from an object’s website entry or using my knowledge of Cycladic Art, as well as the Museum’s substantial library and the generous assistance of my more experienced coworkers, to identify the type and approximate manufacture date of objects. The final list came to include more than 500 objects from a dozen different museums.

Although this was the main focus of my work at the museum, there were also two other projects on which I spent my time. The first was assisting in the museum’s summer camp, aimed at children aged 6-11. Much of my work would be familiar to camp counselors anywhere, largely centering on corralling small children into activities they may not feel like doing as well as preventing them from getting up to too much mischief in the meantime. However, the summer camp had a definite Cycladic twist, with many of the activities being based on the museum’s holdings. The focus of the summer camp was on encouraging the children to make art, culminating in a Friday exhibition of their collected work. The kids were encouraged to take as their inspiration the museum’s art, with a particular focus on the temporary exhibition by contemporary artist Marlene Dumas.

My other project was researching and designing a tour that I would eventually give to the students of Harvard’s Summer School in Greece. I spent many hours combing through the museum’s catalogs as well as exploring the galleries in order to become as familiar as possible with the collections. The museum felt unimaginably vast when I attempted to compress it into an hour and a half tour, and at first I was unsure what to say. After a humorously oversized first draft of about 15,000 words, I managed to pare down my tour into a much more manageable format, focusing on the historical elements I found most interesting. Giving the tour, in the week before I would leave Greece, was a perfect capstone to my time at the Cycladic Museum. Using all the knowledge I had gained in my time there, I had the chance to give a group of my peers an introduction both to the museum I had come to love and the vibrant world of antiquity its artifacts stemmed from.

James McCurley

James McCurley is an undergraduate student (class of 2027) at Harvard College studying Classics and Physics. He also works on sound design for the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club and is the treasurer of Harvard College Bowl. He hopes to pursue a career in academia.

Museum of Cycladic Art Summer Internship

This 5-week program for Harvard students is meant to familiarize interns with the activities performed in a museum environment and to provide high-quality professional training. The interns work in collaboration with curators, museum educators, and communication experts. Learn more about the Museum of Cycladic Art Summer Internship.