Palmetto High School senior Amy Lindholm is passionate about History Miami, Miami’s historical museum. She has been interning at the museum and working on the Teen Miami display, which includes a variety of exhibits including Teen Fun Day – Music Scenes: Records and Teens; 1960s Garage Band of South Florida; Teen Miami Memoirs Film Screen and Discussion (Dec. 15) and Teen Fun Day – Design Through Time (Jan. 12).
The exhibition has been a three-year effort of 20 Miami-Dade high school students. They have all been part of an internship program that started in 2010.
“We go to the museum eight hours a month during the school year,” Lindholm says. “The first summer we weren’t paid. We went five weeks there during the first summer.”
That summer was like attending a Museum 101 class. The students learned how the museum works, how the departments work together and how to build exhibits.
“There was an application process and interviews,” Lindholm says. “I only heard about it when my neighbor told me about it. I sent in my application. You had to have a creative project, an interview and an essay. The interview came after you submitted your project and essay.”
For her project, Lindholm created a popup scrapbook with photos. “I basically had all the different aspects of my life,” she says.
“I’m named after Amelia Earhart, indirectly. I included all my interests in my book.”
Those interests include aviation. Her father is an air traffic controller and her brother is going to become one.
Being a part of the Teen Miami project meant prioritizing her activities. “I actually had to decide between the yearbook and the museum,” she says.
“I had the opportunity to join the yearbook staff, but I made the decision to leave before homecoming last year. I found my second home at the museum.”
For this exhibition, the teens conducted 50 oral histories with people who had grown up in Miami. That group included people who lived in Miami from the 1930s to the 1990s.
“We did object collection for different things we wanted to include in the exhibition,” Lindholm says.
The exhibition itself features teens at war, consumerism and fashion, diversity, music and the future today.
“It reflects on how teen life is different and similar,” she says.
At Palmetto, Lindholm is president of the Shape club, which raises money for other school clubs.
“We get a grant of $500 to donate to other non-profits,” she says. “They send us applications. As a club, we decide what areas we want to focus on.”
When the club decides to donate funds, it also commits itself to volunteer in that area.
“We were talking about doing a story time with kids and reading to them,” she says.“We want to focus on education. We want to impact it in a big way other than just learning.”
Lindholm is also involved in student government as student council historian. Her other interests include creative writing, so she has joined the creative writing club. Club members have been working on launching a literary magazine.
Plans for college include majoring in graphic design.
“My reach school is Pratt in Brooklyn,” she says “My number one school in Florida is FSU.”
She is also interested in SCAD – in Savannah.
“I want to do a lot of really different things — advertising and communications, photography, sports photography, graphic design, general communications, communications design. I just have to figure out how to get a degree that will let me do all those things.”
By Linda Rodriguez Bernstein
