Meet the Board:
Jackie Killian
Jackie is the Grants Manager at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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What is your favorite place on the Winterthur grounds?
It's hard to pick only one, but next to the path to the staff parking lot is a dwarf Koran lilac that stuns you into tranquility with its fragrance when it's blooming. It was the loveliest experience to have at the end of the day. But I'm also happy anywhere on the property where I can stare up at a tulip poplar tree. What words of advice do you have for current Fellows? This isn't really advice so much as it is an admonishment for culture fellows: if you aren't spending an hour with Winterthur's objects or library collections every single day that you have that privilege, you are really missing out. Go there, now! What Winterthur class taught you the most and why? Ritchie Garrison's Intro to Material Life course--and my work with him as my thesis adviser--showed me that there are an infinite number of perspectives you can bring to study objects and a similarly infinite number of variables that can affect how an object has 'lived', so we can't really know all of its experience--and we should be leaving more room in object histories for what we don't know. Quoting Ritchie, "it's complicated." Realizing that there is so much that is beyond our capacity to know keeps my skepticism healthy and my sense of inquiry active. If you think about objects differently, you'll begin to think about and see everything differently. It has more bearing on my life than just on my career. I think there's a lot we learn while we are Fellows that improves who we are that we carry with us irrespective of the occupations we pursue. It's my biggest takeaway about the program experience. |
Stop and smell the lilacs!
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