This past summer, Beatrice Geissinger Cutchins ’27 worked at the Davis Museum as a collections management intern, leading a weeklong inventory of the museum’s works on paper. “We inventoried 10,000 works in a single week,” she says. “We got to see over half of the Davis’s collection!”
Geissinger Cutchins and her fellow interns worked on the inventory project in preparation for Better on Paper, a new special exhibition at the Davis that celebrates a selection of the thousands of works of art on paper—prints, drawings, books, and photographs—acquired by the Davis and the Wellesley College Library Special Collections in the past decade. The interns examined artworks that most members of the Wellesley community have never seen, and were even able to recommend works to include in the show. LJ Goins ’26 found and advocated for the inclusion of Artemis Duff from Being in History by Camila Falquez, for example, which is featured in the exhibition.
Better on Paper is one of three new exhibitions opening February 7. Sovereign Memory: Photography, Remembrance, and Displaced Histories explores the ways photography can heal “the colonial wound,” while Nevers in the World presents French ceramics bequeathed to the College by former Wellesley trustee Sidney R. Knafel, whose world-renowned collection began with an object he and his first wife, Susan Rappaport Knafel ’52, bought on their honeymoon.
All three exhibitions exclusively feature works owned by the College. To ensure that the Wellesley community and the general public get to enjoy these pieces, a dedicated team of Davis operations staff as well as the student interns and assistants pulled hundreds of works from the impressive collection and prepared them for viewing.
Mark Beeman, manager of exhibitions and collections preparation at the Davis, began working to prepare objects for Better on Paper in the fall. “I mean, the safest thing for that print,” he says, gesturing toward Deluvium by Hawai‘ian artist Miho Morinoue, “is for it to stay in a folder in the closet forever.” But he laughs as he says it, because he knows that is not the point. As art handlers, he and assistant preparator Nell Gould figure out how to let museum visitors appreciate the works on display while keeping both the art and the people safe. That involves everything from matting and framing, to crating and cushioning, to building pedestals, painting, cleaning, and installing.
Because Better on Paper features only works on paper, in some ways the installation was pretty straightforward compared with others they’ve managed at the Davis: no giant paintings framed with steel I-beams, for example, or delicate sculptures covered in shards of glass. But as most of the pieces hadn’t been displayed before, they needed to be matted and framed, which can be a challenge. That was the case for Deluvium—the largest work in the exhibition, it is made up of three delicate tissue paper panels, each 37 inches tall and approximately 25 inches wide, that must be lined up precisely.
The handlers centered each framed work on the wall at 60 inches high, with 23 inches between the objects, in addition to posting the required museum labels and gallery text. Better on Paper also features some unusual artist books and paper objects that required Beeman and Gould to create specific mounts for displaying them.
Well before Beeman and Gould started that process, other members of the Davis operations team laid the groundwork for the exhibitions, led by Mary Beth Timm, interim co-director of the Davis and associate director for operations and collections management. Exhibitions are planned years in advance by the curatorial staff in collaboration with the operations team members, who handle and prepare the artwork, manage copyrights and licensing agreements, prepare gallery text, update the database and the website, and physically get the art on the walls.
Helen Connor, assistant registrar for exhibitions and digital resources, and Bo Mompho, collections manager and head registrar, manage the Davis’s database, which is crucial to make sure the museum’s extensive collection can be used and accessed by all, as well as the museum’s loan paperwork, budgets, and schedules. Connor and Mompho also work with couriers who accompany artwork loaned to the Davis, or sometimes act as couriers themselves for the Davis’s collection. (In the museum world, when a particularly precious item goes out on loan, a staff member may supervise the artwork’s travel to its destination. Mompho has escorted artwork from Wellesley’s collection on a cargo plane ride to Australia and a trucking journey to the north coast of Spain.)
The spring 2025 exhibitions are unusual in that every piece is owned by the Davis, celebrating Wellesley’s 150 years of championing art, so Connor and Mompho are serving primarily as “stewards of the collection,” as Mompho puts it, protecting the art from environmental damage and mishandling. The artworks in Better on Paper are particularly vulnerable. “Works on paper are especially sensitive to light,” Beeman says. “The objects in Better on Paper will not be on display again for at least two years.” The works on paper featured in the museum’s permanent collection are rotated out every semester to help preserve them.
Other members of the Davis operations team have ongoing work that varies depending on the exhibitions. When the video installation In Pursuit of Venus [infected] was on view in 2022, media specialist Sarina Khan Reddy had to learn how to adjust the highly technical installation and make sure it ran flawlessly through the semester. The three new exhibits don’t feature any video, so Khan Reddy says her role for these exhibitions is to continue to “increase visibility, access, and understanding” of the Davis’s collection by managing the ways Davis Museum visitors interact with and experience the collection through their phones, computers, and the Davis website.
This fall and winter Gessinger Cutchins has continued to help with the new exhibitions as a registration assistant. She reports to Mompho and assists with maintaining the database, though sometimes she also supports Beeman and Gould. For the Better on Paper show, Geissinger Cutchins helped them hang the 100-plus object labels, which must be placed exactly 4 inches away from each work.
“I love art, and I’m very organized, and those are two key components you need for collections management,” says Geissinger Cutchins, a classics major who spends eight to 10 hours a week in the museum’s storage areas, pulling and putting away pieces needed for class visits or exhibitions and helping Mompho assign accession numbers to newly acquired works. The first project she worked on at the Davis was assigning accession numbers to each piece in the Knafel ceramics gift. Seeing those items in the Nevers in the World exhibition gives her a special thrill, she says. She also helps monitor the humidity levels throughout the Davis to make sure the new HVAC system is working properly, which she enjoys because she gets to walk through the entire museum each time. Some of her favorite objects currently on view at the Davis include two “sea sculptures” featuring porcelain vessels that fused together when a Chinese trading ship caught fire and sank in circa 1725. One is on view in the permanent galleries, and a second is part of the Nevers show.
Better on Paper, Sovereign Memory, and Nevers in the World serve as excellent reminders of the breadth of Wellesley’s art collection: The Davis has around 15,500 objects, fewer than 4% of which are currently on display. The goal of the museum’s staff is to make as much of the collection accessible as possible. Anyone in the Wellesley community is allowed to request artworks to view—for a class, for research, or just for pleasure.
“Every time I have a shift, so three times a week right now, I open a box and I find something new that I would have never seen if I didn’t have this job,” says Geissinger Cutchins. “The access that I get to art and to portfolios and things that I never would have seen otherwise—it’s really cool.”
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The Davis Museum reopens for the semester on February 7, and all three new special exhibitions will be on display until June 1. An opening night reception for the spring special exhibitions will be held on February 6, from 5 to 8 p.m., and is open to all members of the Wellesley College community and the public.
The Davis Museum is free and open to the public Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, please call 781-283-2051 or visit https://www1.wellesley.edu/davismuseum/visit/directions.