This interview is part of a series of interviews with Alumni from Art History, Art Curating, or Museum & Heritage Studies. Dr Mark de Vitis talks to recent Honours graduate Callum Gallagher about his studies in art history, his work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and a forthcoming internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Callum Gallagher in Venice with fellow intern during his internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
You spent your 4th and final year of your undergraduate degree in the Art History Honours program, where students work on an independent research project of their own choosing. Having completed the program, what do you think it offers students and how has it helped you grow?
The Honours year is a great testing ground for figuring out what comes next after doing an undergraduate degree. It offers you the chance to take on a level of self-direction in your study, with the support of one-to-one supervision, and it is very satisfying seeing your own project come to fruition. Honours didn’t just push my research skills and writing, which grew a huge amount in a single year, but also gave me a sense of self-confidence in general through taking on and managing a long-term project. By the end of Honours, the questions I had about what it feels like to do academic research on a daily basis were answered, and with that I now know how to determine both if and when postgraduate study is right for me. Getting to the end of the Honours year you have a lot of options: a master’s degree, a PhD, and casual/part-time or full-time work. After a year of research and independent study, it’s a lot easier to make those sorts of decisions. I can now confidently say that taking a year or two to work in the GLAM sector before starting postgrad. study is the right call for me.
During your undergraduate degree, you worked at the Powerhouse Museum and have recently landed a new role at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Based on your experience of studying art history and working in museums simultaneously, how do you think these two spheres connect? How should they inform each other?
I feel very fortunate to have been able to simultaneously work in a museum and study art history. On a more obvious level art history is the undergraduate discipline that feeds most directly into the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) Sector. They also both revolve around the same object of study: art. But side-by-side the differences become more apparent. Art history really allows you to investigate the art on its own terms, to prioritise research and to develop deep visual analysis skills. These are skills that will never leave you even if they can appear less essential in some jobs within the GLAM sector. Working in a museum however, (especially in Australia where the largest museums and galleries are public institutions), is about bridging the gap between the artworks, the abundance of research on them, and the visitors. Between studying art history and working in a museum, you quickly realise that each should balance the other. Whilst art history as a discipline seeks to continue to build the wealth of information surrounding visual culture, the museum or gallery as a space seeks to keep that information accessible to a variety of audiences (and not just art history professors and students as great as they are). At the end of the day, they come from two sides with the same goal of communicating ideas about an artwork to its audiences.
The Art Gallery of NSW
You have just been awarded a place in the very prestigious Guggenheim internship program in Venice. Congratulations! What does the program offer and what do you hope to learn during your time in Venice?
Thank you! I’m grateful for the timing of it – having just finished my Honours year. Committing to full time study so soon after Honours felt like too much of an ask, but the internship is only a few months, which feels like the right length for me at this stage. It’s really an opportunity to peak into the daily operations of a world-class museum and to start to get amongst it all. The interns act across the museum, working as visitor hosts on the front desk, but also getting to assist and learn from the other departments of the museum such as the curatorial, archival, and research teams. We also have to complete a small independent research project ourselves, which will be fun. I’m hoping it helps fill in my image of what a career based on art history in the GLAM sector looks like, and where I can really see myself fitting in in a museum. I think it’s also very interesting with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection to see how the museum continues to draw out new or engaging ideas from such an established collection. Improving my Italian will be good too!
Callum Gallagher in Venice with fellow interns during his internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. All Rights Reserved.
What advice do you have for those coming to art history who are trying to figure out where they might fit and what roles within the cultural sector might be of interest to them?
There’s no substitute for experience. Taking opportunities within study and outside of it, whether paid or volunteer, in public or private galleries, will tell you what’s out there, what interests you, and help expand your sense of your own capabilities. I think it’s important to see art history applied differently than in just a formal academic mode, and taking the chance to be in a room with other people, communicating about art is one of them. That said, in my case, taking those opportunities actually helped reaffirm that, at the moment, research is really what I want to keep focusing on for the next few years. However, there are so many more roles and opportunities than I first thought (until I started working at a museum, I had no clue what a registrar did, for instance). Museums are large, and the cultural sector is even larger and there’s a lot of room to play with. I think arts festivals are really exciting at the moment and the events and programs teams of galleries and museums seem to be growing a lot in recent years. Basically, if you’re looking hard enough, you’ll find something that works for you.
Over the course of your undergraduate degree, how did you build to where you are now? Is there anything you would do differently?
Not to sound cliché, but it was a bit like a snowball. It started with choosing art history as a major and trusting my passion for it. Then, after first year, I started looking outside of uni for opportunities, first as a volunteer invigilator at Carriageworks, and then at the MCA as a young guide. There are many opportunities out there – whether temporary exhibitions and festivals, or youth committees at the major galleries in Sydney – to start to see what these places are like to work in. In terms of doing things differently, my only regret is not writing about art outside of class sooner! The Power Institute put on some great arts writing workshops in 2022, which were great and finally got me to write for Honi Soit. I think that kind of thing can really feed back into your academic work, giving you the freedom to experiment and grow your own critical voice.
Callum Gallagher is an art historian, writer and casual academic living and working on unceded, stolen Gadigal land. He received a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in Art History in 2023 for his thesis focusing on the representation of European mythical creatures within the Australian landscape by settler artists. Earlier this year upon receiving the Anita Belgiorno-Nettis scholarship Callum completed a three month internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. He is currently curating an exhibition on Australian artist Ida Rentoul Outhwaite at the University of Sydney.
Dr Mark de Vitis specialises in the study of cultures of dress and dressing, both past and present, and the visual and material culture of the early modern world.
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