How closely can you look at a work of art before it starts looking back?

During a recent visit to the Romare Bearden Foundation in New York, Daniella Statia found herself examining Bearden’s Falling Star at unusually close range. She was helping complete condition reports, the careful records collections used to document an object’s physical state. That meant looking for tiny blemishes, changes, even something as slight as a stray hair.

“I am definitely detail oriented,” Statia says, “but looking for a blemish or something as small as a hair really lets you get familiar with a work.”

The exercise changed the way she saw the artwork. It also changed the way she saw its frame.

For Statia, the 2025–2027 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), that kind of close look is part of a much larger question. What do museums notice? What do they preserve? Who gets included in the story, and who remains outside the frame?

Those questions have followed her from the classroom into the museum. Increasingly, they are shaping the kind of museum professional she hopes to become.

From Frida to the Museum

Statia’s route into art history began somewhere unexpected: the movies.

“It sounds a little cheesy,” she admits, but watching Frida, the 2002 film starring Salma Hayek as Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, helped set her course while she was applying to college.

“I realized that I was super passionate about the arts and wanted to be a part of it in some way,” she recalls, even though she did not see herself becoming an artist.

At the University of Delaware, Statia studied art history and Spanish, with a minor Collections Assessment for Preservation (CAP) as a major area of museum studies. Her early work included experience at the Delaware Historical Society and with the university’s Black Portrait Photography Collection. She later earned her master’s degree at Tulane University, in New Orleans, where her research focused on Blackness and Indigeneity in modern art of the Americas.

Across those experiences, one habit became central to her thinking: look for what is absent.

“I always approach work looking for what’s not there, who is being left out and for what reason,” Statia says.

That deceptively simple question can transform how someone approaches a museum collection. Instead of treating the objects already on view as the whole story, it asks what histories, communities, artists, and perspectives have shaped the collection—and which ones may still be missing.

Statia’s studies of race and Black and Indigenous solidarity sharpened that instinct. She is particularly interested in how museums can bring more voices into their galleries, programs, scholarship, and collections.

For her, that responsibility comes with the public nature of the museum itself.

“Museums and art institutions have the unique duty to serve the public,” she says.

Learning the Whole Museum

A working session during the fellow’s visit to the Romare Bearden Foundation, where conversations extended from artworks to the systems that help preserve and share cultural history.

The Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellowship offered Statia something she had not yet experienced: a chance to understand a major museum from the inside out.

The two-year paid fellowship at the Saint Louis Art Museum provides experience across different areas of museum practice while helping broaden access to museum careers. Bearden’s name caught Statia’s attention immediately. She had encountered his work repeatedly through her studies of Black American art, beginning with her early exposure to the Harlem Renaissance.

“My initial attraction was definitely the Romare Bearden name!” she says.

But the name was only the beginning.

What ultimately drew her to the position was the fellowship’s cross-departmental structure and its commitment to creating professional opportunities for people from communities historically underrepresented in the art world.

Statia arrived particularly eager to develop her curatorial skills. She also wanted something broader: a working understanding of the many “moving parts” behind a museum.

Before the fellowship, most of her institutional experience had been with small teams of between three and nine people. A large museum revealed an entirely different ecosystem.

An exhibition may appear seamless to the visitor. Behind it are months of work across curatorial, conservation, education, registration, installation, communications, visitor services, design, development, and other areas.

At SLAM, Statia began to appreciate just how many people can contribute to a single exhibition, publication, brochure, or public program.

That perspective has become one of the fellowship’s most important lessons. Museum work is collaborative by necessity. The wall label and the gallery lighting may be visible. Much of what makes them possible is not.

The Work Visitors Don’t See

Looking closely at Bearden’s work can reveal not only the artwork itself, but the many decisions involved in caring for, documenting, and interpreting it.

Her visit to the Romare Bearden Foundation brought that invisible work into especially sharp focus.

Condition reporting was a relatively new experience for Statia. It demanded a different kind of attention: slower, more tactile, and almost forensic.

It also prompted her to think about something visitors may easily overlook.

“I now look at frames with a different eye,” she says, “and how much a frame can change your understanding or interpretation of a work.”

Then the conversation widened from physical objects to digital infrastructure.

During her time with the Foundation, Statia joined discussions around organizational strategy and ongoing digital asset management work. On the surface, databases, filenames, documentation systems, and digitization protocols can seem far removed from the experience of encountering art.

They are not.

“This is so, so important,” Statia says.

For her, the work raises fundamental questions about institutional responsibility.

“What we as art professionals do to preserve history is such an important part to play in society,” she explains. “In a way, we dictate what is remembered, who is remembered, and for what.”

Documentation and digitization therefore become more than administrative chores. They are part of the process through which cultural memory is maintained and shared.

A digitized resource can reach someone who cannot travel to a museum. A carefully maintained record can preserve information long after paper or ink begins to deteriorate. An organized collection can make future scholarship possible.

The public may never see the database field or condition report.

They experience its consequences.

Discovering Bearden Beyond the Collage

The fellowship has also expanded Statia’s understanding of the person whose name it carries.

First came at least one surprise.

“I didn’t know Bearden was a baseball player!” she says.

More significantly, her time in the fellowship has deepened her appreciation for Bearden as someone whose influence extended beyond his own studio practice.

Statia had long known Bearden as a major figure in Black American art. Through the fellowship, she has become increasingly interested in his commitment to other artists, cultural organizations, and artistic communities.

“I am understanding how integral Bearden was to the furthering of the arts, specifically Black arts,” she says.

Bearden’s history bears that out. He participated in Spiral, the group of Black artists that began meeting in his Canal Street studio in 1963. He was involved in the development of the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1969, he joined Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow in founding Cinque Gallery, which created opportunities for African-American artists and offered exhibitions and community programming.

For Statia, that dimension of his life may be just as meaningful as his formal experimentation.

“I think Bearden’s philanthropy resonates with me the most,” she says.

At the same time, closer engagement with the Foundation’s holdings has reinforced her appreciation for Bearden as an experimenter. His willingness to push materials and processes helped produce the visual language for which he became known.

Seeing Falling Star during her New York visit brought those two strands together: Bearden the maker and Bearden the cultural builder.

Community Is Part of the Work

Community, conversation, and relationship-building are part of the work of carrying an artist’s legacy forward.

That broader legacy has particular relevance for Statia as she imagines her own future in museums.

She is interested in institutions that engage not only with celebrated names but also with working artists and the communities immediately around them.

“As an art historian working in the museum/art world, I feel it is so important to engage in contemporary art and also to engage with local artists just as much as we engage with nationally known artists,” she says.

Bearden offers one model for how that can work.

His career demonstrates that an artist’s influence need not stop at the edge of the artwork. It can extend into mentorship, advocacy, organizing, education, institution-building, and the creation of opportunities for others.

Statia sees artist foundations as part of that same cultural ecosystem. Such organizations can act as advocates and facilitators while keeping an artist’s work available for new scholarship, interpretation, and public engagement.

The point is not simply to freeze a legacy in time.

It is to keep putting it into conversation.

What Comes Next

As Statia continues through the fellowship, she wants more opportunities to curate. Yet she is equally interested in the places where scholarship meets people.

“I definitely want to continue engaging with the public through programming such as art talks, panels and summits,” she says.

She hopes her future museum career will continue to emphasize community-based work, particularly engagement with BIPOC artists and audiences.

Her visit to New York offered a compact version of that larger ambition.

Over the course of her time with the Foundation, the work moved from the microscopic to the institutional: a tiny mark on an artwork, the effect of a frame, a condition report, a digital file, a strategy conversation, a question about access.

Museums are built from all of it.

Perhaps the same is true of legacy.

A name like Romare Bearden’s remains meaningful not simply because institutions continue to display his work. It remains alive when the values surrounding that work—experimentation, curiosity, advocacy, community, and access—become tools for another generation.

For Daniella Statia, that begins with a question: What isn’t here?

Then comes the harder and more important part: helping bring it into view.