Think of Julia Dailey ’18 as an art lover and Francophile who didn’t want to be locked into an exclusive relationship. She’s kept her options open, which resulted in two majors – art history and French – and a possible accidental history minor. It all fits.
“There’s definitely an implicit relationship with art and French,” she says. “There’s such a history there. I feel my interest in art overlaps with my interest in culture in general and French culture.”
It’s early but Dailey already is pondering ways to weave French skills into her art history senior thesis. “If there’s old text or documents in French that I can study, that would be cool,” she says. She plans to spend a semester in Hamilton’s study-abroad program in Paris, where she hopes to get a first-hand look at some of the art she’s studied.
Creating art has always been part of Dailey’s life, but she didn’t want to go to an art school. Nor did she want to major in art. Still, she wanted to be around art and attend a college with an art museum. Hamilton’s Wellin Museum of Art was one of the reasons she landed here.
Dailey is a Wellin docent, and she worked at the Wellin over a summer, getting a first-hand look at how a small art museum operates. During her summer stint she wrote text labels for the display cases in Archive Hall and created a children’s activity guide to using the objects displayed there, among other projects. She’s a member of the Wellin Museum Initiative for Student Engagement.
