For the past year and a half I’ve been an intern at Pink Arrow Arts Gallery located in Montrose, PA, roughly 49 miles north of Marywood’s campus in Scranton. I haven’t really talked about it much here, despite being an Arts Admin blogger. But most of my time there at Pink Arrow Arts was spent on a single project that just wrapped up in October 2025. 

I started at the gallery September/October of 2024, and originally I was painting/patching walls, re-painting podiums we use for sculptures, grabbing lunch for everyone, re-painting the fireplace, the usual intern activities plus painting just about every surface in the place. 

I remember the first day I started, the Art Director at the time, let me hang a few pieces for an upcoming exhibit. I remember the first piece I hung, EW1B, Untitled by Michael Celbar. Words genuinely cannot describe how nervous I was to do this. But I was there to learn and everyone starts somewhere. 

And by now I’ve hung many, many pieces by myself. Plus it doesn’t hurt that if I make one too many holes in the wall I’m the one that has to patch them up anyways. But I never really got into the curation side of the gallery, even now that’s not a job I have much interest in. I much prefer wiring frames than hanging them on walls. 

After a few months of helping out with “front of house” activities like that, I got the opportunity to inventory, catalog, and photograph an artist’s estate. As it turned out, it was an artist I was already somewhat familiar with, seeing as his work was the first piece I ever hung on the gallery’s walls; Michael Celbar. 

I thought I was nervous hanging work on walls, but my nerves upon receiving this project were astronomical. Not only would I be working on this project alone but I would have to learn how to handle many different mediums, most from 1990-2012. 

The first few days of this project weren’t anything too exciting, I was essentially plugging every piece and its info into a spreadsheet. I believe this took me 3 days to complete, and if I’m being honest I absolutely love work like that. 

After cataloging everything into a single spreadsheet with their correct titles, dates, prices, mediums, I got to checking the inventory. All 650+ pieces of his were kept in 15-20 or so boxes in a room in the gallery. What I had been doing prior to checking the contents of those boxes, was taking all the information in a dropbox file and sorting them into a spreadsheet. So I had yet to check and see if the information I had matched what was inside those boxes. 

It was certainly a daunting task, I knew there were literally hundreds of pieces I had to sort through, check for damage, check the sizes were correct, the names, etc. and update the spreadsheet when pieces didn’t match their description. This took a lot of time but was the best part of this project. Sitting in a room with an artist’s life’s work and seeing the years go by as he switched from medium to medium was beautiful. I absolutely fell in love with this type of work. I don’t want to speak too much about Celbar’s work just yet as we are in the process of planning an exhibition for him this year and I plan on writing more when the time comes. 

My next task after taking note of the inventory and state of the works was to photograph everything for a new website. This part was the most challenging for me, many of his pieces are quite large and the room I was photographing in didn’t have the most space. But I made it work! [some pictures of his work below. From left to right: IN16, Untitled. IN231, Untitled. M40, Untitled.]

This whole process took from mid May 2025 to the-end of October 2025. There was one night where I edited photos from noon to midnight straight during midterms. And I loved every single minute of getting the opportunity to work on this project. 

Once the estate was wrapped up on my end I was able to spend more time in the actual gallery space again. And in November of 2025 we started planning for a Christmas show. It was around this time that I also took over doing the social media for the gallery. 

November to December 2025 were pretty hectic months, I got covid during thanksgiving and couldn’t work for a few days, finals were approaching, and December also happens to be one of the busier months at one of my other jobs as well. 

But I made it through everything, we set up a Christmas show that went great, sold a bunch of artwork, and I made some really amazing friends at the gallery throughout all of this. 

And currently my roles at the gallery are handling the social media and event programming. I never could have imagined all the doors this internship has opened for me, or all the opportunities I’d be able to receive as a result. No matter how tough the work was or how long the days were I would go back and do everything the same if I could. 

I have more to write about the Celbar estate project as the year progresses and we hold an exhibit for him, but for now I wanted to keep this more about my entire time spent at the gallery as an intern. 

I hope everyone enjoyed their winter break and time off from school!

— Yours, Ana