The Menil Collection invites undergraduate juniors, seniors, and graduate students from diverse backgrounds to apply for an intensive six-month internship with the Menil Collection.  The internship, designed to broaden opportunities for those underrepresented in the museum field, is in connection with and support of the Menil’s upcoming exhibition, Experiments with Truth:  Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence, which explores for the first time Mohandas K. Gandhi’s (1869-1948) ethics of nonviolence  through both works of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and masterpieces of classical religious art of the past. 

The exhibition will be open at the Menil from October 2, 2014 to January 11, 2015 before traveling to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva. An internet component, The Gandhi Website, is currently under development at the Menil Collection. Amar Kanwar’s film installation and multi-layered community archive The Sovereign Forest in Orissa, India is a vital satellite location and an additional inspiration for the exhibitions in Houston and Geneva.

The successful candidate will partner with various departments within the museum to develop a strategic plan around how to accomplish broader visibility, engagement, and support of the exhibition amongst the Greater Houston Area’s Asian communities.  This internship offers one student, the opportunity for creativity, entrepreneurism, and community engagement and mobilization.

Considered one of the most important privately assembled collections of the twentieth century, The Menil Collection houses approximately seventeen thousand paintings, sculptures, and prints, drawings, photographs, and rare books. Masterpieces from antiquity, Byzantium and the medieval period, the cultures of Africa, Oceania, and the American Pacific Northwest, and the twentieth century, including significant surrealist holdings, are particularly well represented.

This internship is intended to encourage participation by students from diverse backgrounds who have not had previous experience working in a museum but are interested in pursuing a career in the museum field, and who would otherwise not be able to participate in an unpaid internship experience. 

The successful candidate will be compensated $15 for each hour worked and must be able to work a minimum of 10 hours/week during the school year and up to 20 hours/week during the summer.  The internship will extend through September 2014.  Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae and 500-word statement of interest, by April 1, 2014, to Suzanne Maloch, Director of Human Resources, The Menil Collection, 1511 Branard Street, Houston, TX 77006.  Alternatively, applications materials may be submitted by email to: smmaloch@menil.org.