Rachel Regalado is a Getty Marrow Emerging Professionals participant, and is pictured here in the Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s exhibition that was on view in spring 2024 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
A postcard layered with vibrant oil pastels catches Rachel Regalado’s eye when she opens her mailbox.
Drawings of trinkets collected from LA and abroad dot its front: a delicate crystal, a pair of beaded earrings, a small doll dressed in traditional Mexican clothing. But when she flips the card over, the writing reveals that it is not from a correspondent in a far-off locale, but from herself.
The card is a memento from an Art Lab workshop Regalado helped plan at the Hammer Museum. This ongoing program invites visitors of all ages to partake in hands-on activities inspired by artworks on view in the galleries. In honor of the Made in LA biennial exhibition last year, the workshop encouraged visitors to use a blank postcard as a canvas to express what community meant to them. For Regalado, this entailed memorializing cherished objects given to her by family and friends as a reminder of their shared culture and history. Participants could send the cards to relatives or comrades (or themselves) as a tangible reminder of their time at the museum.
As an assistant educator at the Hammer Museum—a position funded by the Getty Foundation through its Getty Marrow Emerging Professionals pilot program—Regalado plays a pivotal role in developing initiatives like Art Lab that help visitors make personal connections to art in unexpected ways. “It’s been so rewarding to have conversations about artworks and really rethink what museum education is and what the future of it could be,” she says.
Regalado isn’t new to working in a museum; she previously interned at the Museum of Latin American Art through the Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship program. Every summer since 1993, Getty has funded paid internships at arts organizations across LA for students from backgrounds typically underrepresented in museums and visual arts professions. This summer alone there are 118 interns, part of a growing number of over 3,500 students who have gone through the experience.
Today, Regalado is one of 10 participants in the Getty Marrow Emerging Professionals pilot program, an extension of the undergraduate internship that provides alumni with meaningful entry-level employment and mentoring. The program launched in 2022. “We’re seeing great success with inspiring summer interns to continue working in the arts,” says Melissa Lo, a program officer at the Getty Foundation who oversees the pilot initiative. “But landing that first, substantive, full-time job—which is critical to building a lasting career in museums—can be incredibly challenging, even for the most accomplished internship alums.”
Two years into the pilot program, we spoke with a few of the emerging professionals to learn about their experiences so far and how the project is shaping their plans for the future.
Rachel Regalado develops arts education programs inspired by exhibitions such as Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s that was on view in spring 2024 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Making Art Available to Everyone
Getty Marrow Emerging Professionals is the first program in the country devoted exclusively to coordinated early career positions at numerous institutions within the same region. The candidates apply to work at participating organizations of varying scales across LA, gaining hands-on experience in full-time curatorial, education, and collections-focused roles for up to three years. The program also offers mentoring both within and outside the institutions’ walls, providing much-needed support at a pivotal career stage.
In her role on the Hammer Museum’s academic programs team, Regalado designs activities like Art Lab or Classroom-in-Residence (a five-day immersive museum experience for students) with accessibility in mind. The goal of every initiative, from zine-making workshops to community outreach, is to ensure visitors feel welcome, comfortable, and like they have an important role at the museum. Through this lens, Regalado is spearheading the integration of fully bilingual programs and tours across the museum to ensure the space is more accessible to LA’s large Spanish-speaking population.
Regalado is quick to point out the value in offering signage, gallery tours, and workshops in both English and Spanish, recounting the time she facilitated a gallery conversation for a student who was the only Spanish speaker in her class. “The conversation moved from simply translating to helping her actively engage in the larger dialogue with her classmates,” Regalado remembers. “I’m passionate about creating equitable and meaningful experiences for visitors. Rather than having a side conversation, all classmates benefited from each other’s generative thoughts and questions.”
Regalado plans to continue a career in arts education when her position concludes. The Hammer’s visitor-centered pedagogy and the perspectives she’s gained from time spent with her mentors inspire her to foster stronger connections with community members, whether she works for a large institution or a smaller-scale organization. “I’ve learned a lot about what it means to build an authentic and trusting relationship with communities and how to work with communities of color, not inflict further harm, and think about what their needs are,” she says.
Emma Balda works with the Autry Museum of the American West’s collection of Native American objects. All works selected for the exhibition pictured are from the Autry’s historic textile collection.
Connecting with Communities
Emma Balda, the repatriation assistant at the Autry Museum of the American West, spends much of her day working with the country’s second-largest collection of Native American objects. She navigates ever-evolving Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) policies, conducts tribal outreach, and inventories archaeological objects such as lithics, beads, and shells—all with the goal of acting as a steward, not an expert, of the collections.
The highlight of her experience has been creating strong individual connections by building on the museum’s existing relationships with tribal community members. In her role, Balda works directly with tribes to return cultural objects from the museum’s collections. For example, the museum was able to reunite a tribe member with their grandmother’s basket. “When you possess these objects, you have the ability to possess the narrative that they’re telling,” Balda says. “By giving them back, you’re giving authority back to the community that it rightly belongs to.”
Balda is collaborating with a Master Navajo weaver on the next rotation of an ongoing textiles installation at the Autry.
For Balda, the Emerging Professionals program offers another avenue for community building: a peer network. She has made lasting professional friendships within the cohort, often reaching out for advice, networking opportunities, or simply to check in. “We’re all at the same point in our careers. We all come from marginalized backgrounds. It’s really special to have a tight-knit group that knows what I’m going through and knows this field intimately,” she says. “I’ll have these connections well beyond the program and probably into the rest of my career.”
The program also pairs each participant with a mentor outside the workplace, paving the way for a lasting relationship. Mentors like Balda’s, who works with the NAGPRA program at California State University, Long Beach, lead shadow days, organize site visits, and share behind-the-scenes looks at the inner workings of cultural institutions to deliver a deeper understanding of the field.
Balda’s experience at the Autry has inspired her to keep pursuing repatriation with the goal of becoming a curator. She is currently working on the next rotation of an ongoing textiles installation at the museum in collaboration with a master Navajo weaver, and she also plans to obtain a PhD and incorporate research on international repatriation into her dissertation. “I’ve really gotten to see the ways that repatriation and curation can work hand in hand,” she says. “Being a good curator means working with the community in a way that is not extractive but is genuinely built on a trusting relationship, giving authority to the tribe to tell its own story.”
Gaby Padilla pins a flyer for Recuerdos y Raíces, an exhibition curated by Self Help Graphics’s Youth Committee.
Empowering the Next Generation in the Arts
Thursdays are the highlight of Gaby Padilla’s week as the education and public programs coordinator at Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG). It’s the day she sits down with the organization’s Youth Committee—a cohort of students from East LA, Boyle Heights, and the greater LA region—to unwind, create, and connect with each other through the arts.
Chatting with local teens as a co-facilitator of the Youth Committee program, Padilla helps bring to life ideas like an annual Summer Youth Night, youth-curated exhibitions and marketplaces, and art installations. A resident and native of East LA herself, Padilla was familiar with SHG from a young age and knew she wanted to be a part of its mission of empowering creativity within its community. She did so through the Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship program in 2021, when she joined SHG as an education intern. Now, she sees her current position as another opportunity to give back to her community.
“It was really through my community’s music, food, and art that I discovered my passion for the arts,” Padilla says. Her world changed after she enrolled in a class led by an educator of color whose teaching style was influenced by art. “Art was a chance to express my creativity in a fun, active way that was neither right nor wrong,” she says. “My role as an arts administrator is to share this accessibility in underserved communities and to mentor the next generation of artists and leaders.”
Padilla says her experience supporting a broad range of public programs, including community favorites like SHG’s Día de los Muertos celebration, annual print fair, and biennial printmaking summit, has been both fulfilling and enlightening. “I’ve been able to merge my passion for both art and education, actively cultivating an inclusive environment that encourages multigenerational audiences from diverse backgrounds to foster communication and collaboration,” she says.
Like her peers in the Emerging Professionals program, Padilla says her vision for her future is becoming much clearer. She credits the program with giving her the knowledge needed to navigate an arts nonprofit and orchestrate effective public engagement and education strategies—all skills that will support her in achieving her goal of one day earning the title of director of education for a nonprofit organization.
“Something I kind of already knew, but now know for sure, is that I really don’t see myself doing anything else,” Padilla says. “I really love the work that I do.”
