Carola Bell, Class of '01
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Honors Alumna Carola Bell graduated in 2001 with a BFA in Art. Initially, “I took a temporary administrative job while I tried to find work related to my degree. In the Arts, it’s tough to get a foot in the door and I was getting frustrated. So the next best thing was to think about going back to school. (I didn’t really want to graduate anyway.)
“I took the GMAT and applied for, and was accepted into, the UK Library Science program, intending to become an Art Librarian. Then I went on two interviews that changed my life. One was for a job as a clerk in the law library at a big firm in downtown Cincinnati. The other was a Registration Assistant job at the Cincinnati Art Museum. At the time, I had no idea what the Registration department at a museum was, but it sounded pretty good and it was at the Museum.
“The minute I stepped into the Registration office and met my future colleagues, everything just ‘clicked.’ I knew at the end of the interview that Registration was the place I wanted to be and those were the people I wanted to work with. The rest, as they say, is history and I’ve been here ever since, except for a short return to the corporate world a couple of years ago.
“Now I’m the Associate Registrar for Loans & Exhibitions. My job is to manage individual loans of artwork to and from the Museum’s permanent collection. I get to talk to people all over the world, travel, and be around great art all the time. It’s probably the most fun I’ve had working for a living – so much so, I’m almost embarrassed to get paid a salary for doing it (never made it to Library Science school either…) .
“In my free time, I also manage to do some printmaking. I fell in love with it at school and now have a studio with my own press. Spending time in the studio is a great retreat from the world at large.”
She relates her undergraduate work in Honors to her current job by saying that
“The Honors Program in particular helped me believe in ‘possibility.’ Things happened there that I never thought were possible for me:
- Going to college and graduating with Honors
- Getting into the Honors Program in the first place, then being awarded the Zalla travel scholarship and participating in the Honors Conference in Washington, D.C.
- Meeting Oliver Sacks (he liked my artwork!)
- Learning to see myself as an artist
- Learning to love the work of Herman Melville. (Moby-Dick influenced me the most because of the great interactions in class, but my favorite Melville works are Typee and Benito Cereno)
- Meeting people who are mentors, as well as friends: Bob Wallace (Honors), Tom Zaniello (Honors), Andrea Knarr (Printmaking), MaryCarol Hopkins (Anthropology). If it were not for MaryCarol’s encouragement I wouldn’t have applied to the Honors Program.
Probably the most important thing is:
- Believing that as an individual, I can make a difference.
All these things impact my work as a museum professional and artist. What I do every day, how I do it, and why I do it matters.”
When asked to relay a fond memory of being in the Honors Program, she says, “tough question. Just one?
“One of my best memories is being in a film and literature class taught by Bob Wallace and Tom Zaniello. They were a great teaching team, each bringing a different kind of energy to the class. Students really got inspired by that. It was also my first exposure to Moby-Dick, which, it seems, will haunt me forever. (Just kidding, Bob!)
“Seriously though, that one class influenced so many other things.”
Recently, Dr. Robert Wallace invited several former students to participate in an art show of work based on Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. As one of the featured artists, Carola describes the experience of participating in the “Chasing the Whale in Northern Kentucky” exhibition this fall in Newport, KY.
“Moby-Dick references seem to crop up in my life at odd moments. Allusions to the whale and Ahab appear in movies or books, when I least expect to find them. For instance, I recently ordered a new poetry book, Strange Movie Full of Death, by Scott Wannberg, a contemporary poet originally from Los Angeles. He writes fairly gritty, urban inspired poems.
“So, the new book arrives, I’m all excited about getting it, open to a random page and start reading. Then, there it is. In the middle of a poem about hatred, prejudice, and lack of understanding, a Moby-Dick reference:
‘is god ahab bent on harpooning all humans that look to
him like moby dick?’
“Happens all the time. Even with my own artwork. For this show, I didn’t have anything particular in mind and I didn’t have any real Moby-Dick inspired work on hand. What I did have were these four small, bothersome skeleton prints. They are unusual because the images were of skeletons viewed from the back. But, they just didn’t really work as individual pieces, I wasn’t even sure I liked them. Then, I started playing around with them as a group putting them together to form one image. As a whole, they appeared to be a large, abstracted vertebra. Relative to Moby-Dick, it made sense to form part of the whale out of human skeletons as a kind of metaphor for the men of the Pequod, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Fortunately for me, the prints were in the right place at the right time.”
Carola sees herself still working at the Cincinnati Art Museum in five years time. “Or, as a future lottery winner, becoming a wealthy philanthropist and traveling the world. (See? Something else l learned in the Honors Program was to think big and think positive.)”