Charting a Classic Career
Jan. 21, 2022
Niles Marthone ’21
Combining her love of the classics and art, Niles Marthone ’21 is on a path to one day be a curator of museum antiquities, bringing her love of the subject to a wider, more diverse audience.
As a teenager, Niles Marthone ’21 fell for a subject not typically embraced by students her age. Marthone, who earned a B.A in English language and literature and a B.A. in classics, was introduced to the world of Roman classical antiquity as a freshman at Brooklyn Latin School, a specialized high school whose curriculum includes four years of Latin and classics instruction. Her interest in the classics was rekindled during her freshman year at Brooklyn College. “I took a Latin class with Professor Philip Thibodeau and thought, ‘This is amazing.’ I fell in love with the way interpreting the language was like putting together a puzzle.” With advice and mentorship from the classics faculty, Marthone was able to see how a classics degree could pave the way to her ultimate career in Greco-Roman art curatorship.
Marthone, who is currently at work in a postbaccalaureate research education program at Yale University, where she is studying the classics and art history, has made deep inroads toward her goal but acknowledges that there was still much work for her to do. Classics can be a difficult field to enter without the advantage of proficiency in both Latin and Greek. Early in 2021, Marthone received one of four Frank M. Snowden scholarships from the Society for Classical Studies. The scholarship, which provides funds for minority students to do summer study in classics or classical archaeology allowed her to enroll in the University of California at Berkeley’s 10-week Greek language workshop, something she says she very much needed if she wanted to continue as a classicist.
With the aim of working at the intersection of classics and art and a goal of working on community-building projects, Marthone joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a Met Collective cohort member in January 2020. As an ambassador for the Met Collective, she helped identify topics, such as social justice and the environment, that Marthone says are important to her generation. She then worked with team members to address those subjects through pieces in the Met’s collection. The result was material for the Met Collective’s social media accounts and peer-led discussions. Marthone also helped create an annual educational event called College Night that included interactive and educational activities and talks. A costume competition connected to College Night was the basis for an article cowritten by Marthone called “Timeless Designs, Timely Interpretations: Celebrating Student Designs.”
“I hope to make ancient art accessible while honoring where it came from by putting it into the context of history,” says Marthone, “but also to not make it seem so foreign. I would love for people my age and younger to walk into an exhibit that I have curated and feel like a kid in a candy shop, an experience I had walking into museums as a child. I hope to stir that feeling in other people.”
