Pursuing Your Passions to Figure Out Your Dreams

Madi Shenk ’19 spent her years at Washington pursuing as many of her interests as possible. Through each of these trials, she developed a better sense of herself and her career goals—even, and sometimes especially, when it meant learning what she didn’t like. After graduating, she had a few jobs before getting her master’s in history of art and architecture from The Institute of Fine Arts, New York City. Ultimately, these opportunities lead Shenk to her current role: assistant to the directors and art liaison at P·P·O·W, a contemporary art gallery in Manhattan, New York.

 

Shenk arrived on Washington’s campus with intentions of being an English and studio art major, but her first semester she took a philosophy class that “changed her worldview.” Her second semester, she fell in love with art history.

“I essentially asked if it was possible to do all three and they said yes,” Shenk said. That’s what lead her to a humanities major with English, philosophy, and art history disciplines.  

With the humanities major, Shenk had the freedom to take a myriad of classes that interested her. She took courses in history, English, Black studies, and gender studies, among others, because they were interesting to her.

“I think that undergrad is a really great time to explore all of the different things that you suspect you have an interest in, and then there’s always jobs and internships and grad school to really go back and hone a specific career you want,” Shenk said.

And Shenk did try a lot of things. One summer, she secured an Explore America internship at the National Portrait Gallery. Another, she spent selling prints of her art at the local bookstore, The Book Plate, and online, which lead her to the decision not to sell her artwork for a living.

The one thing that remained consistent throughout her time at Washington was the Kohl Gallery, where she interned for several years.

“The biggest thing that I am so thankful for and I really do think is what led me down the path that I ended up on is the Kohl Gallery. At the time, when I got the job at the gallery, I didn’t really know about the professional art world, and the position exposed me to museum and gallery practices that gave me a sense of the different avenues I could choose to go down. It showed me what I liked and disliked, where my strengths were, and that working in the arts was a real possibility for me,” Shenk said.

While Shenk ultimately decided against working in museums (she said she “became disinterested in the bureaucracy associated with working at a massive institution”), the gallery allowed her to have a hand in every aspect of developing an exhibition from start to finish and learn how to initiate dialogues using an artist’s work.

She recalled when a former Kohl Gallery director asked her to take a van to Baltimore City to pick up artwork from an artist’s studio that would be installed in the gallery.

“The fact that she was like, here you go, this is something you can do. You can talk to this artist, you can handle their artwork, you can talk about it to the public, that’s all stuff you can do. It gave me the confidence to assert myself and become a leader in my field,” Shenk said. “The Kohl Gallery has played a really vital role in my confidence in my current role.”

The experiences Shenk had at Kohl Gallery—and inside the classrooms of Washington College—have helped her with various aspects of her job now. From writing press releases and artwork descriptions to understanding artist’s practices and discussing their work to being knowledgeable about the art world and making clients feel confident adding pieces to their collections.

“The fact that I do have a personal artistic practice is really important toward my job, especially when interacting with artists: I often talk to them about their practice and what they’re working on,” Shenk said. “Everything I learned—even the philosophy—is so helpful when I’m talking to people at work. So many artists’ works are very theoretical and conceptual, or rooted in art history, so it really helps to have the vocabulary and to have read those fundamental texts.”

While Shenk has changed career goals a few times throughout the years (wanting to be an artist, then work in museums, then be an art history professor), her current role has cemented her most recent goal of becoming a gallery director, working at a contemporary gallery selling artwork and supporting artists early in their careers.

“I’m really glad that I had time to make mistakes and try a lot of different things. It set me up to actually go out into the world and figure out what I was happiest doing,” Shenk said.

— MacKenzie Brady '21