Nenette Luarca-Shoaf, AM’99, fell in love with visiting museums as a college student in Los Angeles, but it was an internship at the Smart Museum of Art that helped her realize museums could also offer a career.

Today, Luarca-Shoaf is director of education and public engagement at the Huntington, a research library, art museum, and botanical gardens in San Marino, California. She previously held education roles at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago.

When did you realize you wanted to work in museums?

I remember the exact moment. I was doing my master’s, and I had an internship at the Smart Museum of Art in the education department. I was writing curricula for middle schoolers about art and music appreciation, and I had an amazing mentor. I was in Hyde Park, standing on one of those great Chicago balconies, when it hit me that art history could be my life’s work—but what truly excited me was showing how it could matter to more people.

Did you always imagine yourself in learning and volunteer engagement roles?

At the time, museum education felt like it crystallized much of what I loved about art history. It has a social relevance that was important to me, because I didn’t grow up with art or museums, and discovering them opened worlds for me. I continue to be motivated by opening those worlds for young people and adults alike—because that kind of revelation can happen at any time in life.

Then I pursued more graduate study, earned a PhD, and tried many career paths: collection management, curatorial opportunities and fellowships, a postdoc in environmental and public humanities. And it was all of those things that made me come back to museum education in the end—because museums have evolved, and there is now more interest in the ways diverse perspectives can build bridges to art for different publics.

What was the first museum that made a lasting impression on you?

It was through assignments in my art history classes, really, that I started going to museums. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a collection of German expressionist paintings that really resonated with me—so much so that I started going on my own time. At the time, the architecture of LACMA was such that you had to go in and out of different buildings—it felt like you were dipping in and out of various palaces.

I also remember coming to the Huntington for an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art class and seeing the large-scale portraits by Thomas Lawrence and Sir Joshua Reynolds and getting caught up in the drama of it all and the grandeur of the historic home.

Do you have a favorite museum education moment from your career?

Not a moment but a program. With colleagues at the Art Institute of Chicago, I developed a program called Intersections that changed how I saw the interaction between museum expertise and visitor expertise.

We tried to decenter expertise—the educator’s and the museum’s—and create an experience where people could bring their own lived and learned experiences to their engagement with art. It didn’t mean we weren’t sharing information about the artwork, but we layered it in and used that knowledge to structure the experience with art in a different way.  

We started the program with introductions—it wasn’t just the educator introducing themselves but everyone introducing themselves to each other. That simple gesture created a different dynamic. A gallery talk became a space for dialogue and working through questions. Coming together around artwork became something we all had in common at that moment.

What drew you to the University of Chicago for graduate school?

Chicago itself drew me. I had not lived anywhere but Southern California, and I really wanted to live in a big city. I was late to studying art history and didn’t have anyone showing me the way. When I decided to go to graduate school, I applied to the top PhD programs and was rejected from all of them. I tell people this because the door that opened to me after all this rejection was MAPH [the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities], and it worked out really well. The pursuit of a more general course of study in the humanities suited me, and it allowed me to create my own way forward. And that one-year program allowed me to get my foot in the door into museum education sooner than I would have if I had pursued a PhD at that time.

The Huntington is not only a museum—it has a research library and botanical gardens. What opportunities does that create for you?

It’s a really special place and a really complex place to work. We’ve found that information delivery works best here when it’s not so didactic. When people walk through the gardens, they want to know what plants they’re looking at, but they don’t want to be inundated with information. So we’ve been working on audio guides that help people opt in for different experiences.

Another unique thing about the Huntington is that multigenerational groups come—families connecting with each other and with the natural world or art. So we don’t want to get in the way of that, and we want to provide education opportunities that allow visitors to increase that connection with one another.

More and more, we’re looking for opportunities to bring different disciplines together, because people will connect with different aspects of the experience, and we want to allow and enable that.

What’s the best part of working in museum education?

For me, it comes down to the people—and that’s both the museum staff and the visitors. I just came from a lecture about an upcoming exhibition called Radical Histories: Chicano Prints from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and when I think about how many people it takes to make an exhibition happen, it’s incredibly inspiring. Having a front-row seat to that kind of collaboration gives me a lot of hope. Being able to share these cultural resources with many different kinds of people is at the heart of museum education, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

What advice would you give a young person starting out in museums?

Go to lots of different kinds of museums and make note of what excites you. Museums can be so different, because they serve so many constituencies and are so dependent on their contexts—their founding, their locations, their collections. Getting a sense of the landscape will empower you to take the path that’s right for you.

I would also urge people to remember that there are many different careers in museums—you can go into finance or software development or digital media and have a lifelong career in museums. I work with folks in those areas every day. It takes all of us to make a place like this run.