(2020) A Day In My Internship

By: Griffin Wilson (Artists Working in Education) 

My internship involves many different projects and assignments. It involves getting the art vans ready, giving my employers suggestions about events, researching information so that I can be more useful, and any other tasks I am needed for. I am going to go in depth about getting the AWE art trucks ready. I got to the work site at 8:00 Am. We started by going over some documents that are related to the artists that drive the vans. After that, we went outside to look at the vans and see how much work needed to be done. We had a checklist of things that we thought might need to be done. I cleaned out the front of the van, throwing away trash and cleaning the windows. Then we moved on to the cargo area. We had just started to move out the bins of supplies, when we noticed wasps flying around the vans. Since the vans had not been driven in awhile, the wasps had made nest in many of the doors. We were able to get the supplies out of the vans, but had to wait to do the rest until the exterminator came. We moved the supplies that are specific to the trucks to one of the trucks that had no wasps. Then we took the other supplies down to the basement for another intern to sort. For the rest of my work time I made sure we had all of the van keys, and figured out who had the missing ones last by looking at the keyt logs. Only three were missing and it was easily enough to figure out who had them. We did all that and then I went home at 11:00, three hours later.  A few days later, once the wasps were gone, I came back and swept out the cargo area of one of the vans. The battery died so I had to jump it. Then we put all of the supplies back into the van. For the rest of my work time that day, I organised some of the art supplies in the basement. There were many things to go through, and I did not finish it all. I really enjoyed doing those tasks. I like to organize and clean things so i was perfect for the job. I hope to have more work like that in the future.

Something else I have worked on is a demo for an art project. I need to create an art sculpture out of my preferred medium, origami. What i gathered from the information i was given, it will be an example for a project that AWE is doing. I need to do three different levels of difficulty.

I have also been assigned some articles to read as part of my internship. After reading them I need to research parts that I am interested in. The information will help me understand better the views of the artists of my organisation, and also the kids doing the art.

Below are before and after pictures of the van, and pictures of the wasps.