Things I've learned, with Professor Elizabeth Rodini - From the bizarre to the Barnum-and-Bailey-esque, Professor Rodini has visited a number of museums around Baltimore and across the Atlantic

Elizabeth Rodini is the associate director of the Hopkins Museums and Society program.

Under Rodini's guidance, Hopkins students have created and curated their own museum exhibits in Baltimore museums.

Rodini sat down with the News-Letter to discuss the rich variety of museums around Baltimore and her reasons for entering the art history field.

News-Letter (N-L): How long have you been at Hopkins?

Elizabeth Rodini (ER): I have been in my current position at Hopkins for two and a half years. Before that I had a joint position between Hopkins, the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA).

N-L: What is the best museum you have ever been to?

ER: I tend to prefer small museums, because like many people, I find big museums like the Louvre overwhelming.

I don't know where to start, and I don't know where to look, so I tend to like small museums. And I think rather than what is the best museum I have ever visited, there are memories or particularly good visits that you have. I remember very fondly, for example, a visit to the Rodin Museum in Paris.

A small museum is a beautiful setting, and you can really look because you don't feel that drag to go on to the next thing. I love small museums in particular, but I'm also working on being a better visitor to big museums and not feeling that I have to see everything.

N-L: Have you ever been to any wacky museums?

ER: I have been to some of the wacky ones.

One of the wackier ones I went to in Baltimore, which is now closed, was the Dime Museum, which I actually took a group of students to. We were in the Baltimore Sun a couple of years ago because we were pretty much the last group to visit it.

It was an attempt to recreate what was in the late 19th century a dime museum, which was sort of a cross between a Barnum and Bailey-type entertainment venue and a museum.

It was filled with all sorts of oddities and sort of played to people's interest in what's real and what's not - I guess an ancestor to a wax museum or something like that.

I was in Tuscany a few years ago, and there seemed to be a proliferation of museums dedicated to corporal punishment and torture. It's sort of a trend I noticed, capturing on tourist interest and local history.

I enjoy those and you can learn a lot from them about what interests people.

N-L: When and why did you become interested in art history and museums?

ER: I don't know. It may have to do with a childhood experience in a museum.

I lived in Italy when I was a child, and I remember visiting the Uffizi in Florence.

I remember a particular painting that I was really taken with, which was a portrait of a young girl by Il Bronzino, who painted the whole Medici family. This little girl was just about my age, and I had this very personal connection to this one piece of art.

I became increasingly interested in what museums were doing, not just thinking of them as boxes for objects but as entities that actually worked on interesting objects.

N-L: What would you say is the best part of your job?

ER: Well, I love being able to go into the museum and work with the collections. It gives me a sort of freedom that the academic world presents.

I think I have, in a way, the best of both worlds. It doesn't mean I get to do everything I propose, but I can propose projects to museums that allow me to create something, and I don't have to go to all the staff meetings.

I really have a lot of freedom. It's really exciting to be able to introduce students to that environment also.

I like that I can push open the doors to the museum and get people in behind the scenes who normally wouldn't get there.

N-L: In terms of museums, how would you rate Baltimore compared to cities of similar size?

ER: I think Baltimore is a tremendously rich place for museums.

I know the art museums best myself, because that is my background. You take those two art museums I mentioned, the BMA and the Walters, and you put them together and they really encompass world art.

One of the really interesting things about them is that the strength of one balances the strengths of the other, and together they are first rate . . . They're both excellent museums, but together they are really a world museum, a universal museum.

When I say museums I include historic houses. Baltimore has many of those, including two on campus.

Aquariums - we have one of the best aquariums. We have got a fantastic science center. We've got wonderful, kind of unexpected, museums like the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

We have new museums that are really trying new things, like the new Lewis Museum - the Reginald Lewis Museum of African American History.

If you go to that museum you see they are using all sorts of new technology.

We have something like 35 museums in Baltimore, and the range of that is pretty significant.

One thing Baltimore is missing is a natural history museum, but we do have the great one down in D.C. so we're really well positioned in the city and [in terms of] proximity to other places.