Noah Caspar’s Internship at The Met
Stamps student Noah Caspar (BFA ‘21) is one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first group of fully paid interns, with compensation made possible by a lead gift from the philanthropist Adrienne Arsht and other museum supporters. According to Heidi Holder, chair of education at the Met, the number of applicants for Met internships more than tripled from a year earlier, when just 36% of the positions included salaries. The interns are paid $15 an hour and work 14 hours per week.
Writer Nancy Kenney interviewed Caspar about their experiences as a current Met intern for a recent article in The Art Newspaper.
Noah Caspar, 21, an art student senior at the University of Michigan who is working from home in Chappaqua, New York, has dived into educational workshops for the museum, which are all currently being conducted online because of Covid-19 restrictions. The intern describes an upbringing in which art was a continual inspiration, from the Met’s “Learning to Look” programme, which they experienced as a child, to their grandmother’s influence as a museum docent at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Jewish Museum. Caspar also tutored throughout high school, which bolstered an interest in motivating others.
As part of the internship, Caspar has already taken part in a Met Teen Studio session in which middle and high school students had the opportunity to weave and draw and a Saturday Sketching exercise on Instagram Live in which students shared their renderings of a zodiac figure. (Among Caspar’s artistic talents are sculpture, fiber art and installation art.)
“I would really love to be a fine artist and work in a museum space” someday, Caspar says, “because museums are not for profit and it’s very different from the gallery model.”