JJ Bauer first came to UNC-Chapel Hill in 1995 as a PhD student in art history. As the visual resources curator for the UNC System, she maintains analog and digital collections of slides, photographs, and art for graduate students and faculty to use in their classes. She is also a teaching assistant professor in the UNC Department of Art and Art History.

What brought you to Carolina?

I arrived in the summer of 1995 to pursue my PhD in art history. I studied modern European and American architecture and design history and minored in film studies.

How has your role here changed over the years?

As a graduate student, I realized I did not want to pursue the traditional academic path of postdoctoral positions and visiting professorships while waiting for the rare tenure-track opening in my field. I wanted to be rooted in a place, and I fell in love with North Carolina.

While finishing my dissertation, I worked various jobs to explore other interests. At UNC Student Stores, I helped adopt and customize a new inventory and cataloging system, which led to a role in the now-closed Systems & Procedures unit doing similar work for other departments — and learning a lot about databases and how people cope with technological change. I later worked for a small advertising agency, where everyone did a bit of everything, and I learned to use image processing software.

In 2002, the Department of Art and Art History asked me to interview for the visual resources curator position. I had worked in the slide library, had broad training across art history, and had gained digitization and database skills — all of which positioned me to guide the department’s transition from analog slides to digital image collections now accessible across campus via JSTOR.

That work has expanded into teaching classes and workshops on digital tools for humanities research and serving on multiple NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant review panels. With Pat Thompson, the emeritus Sloane Art Librarian, I helped create a dual master’s degree program with the School of Information and Library Science and co-designed a course to grow the number of future art librarians and visual resources practitioners. Only three other similar programs exist in the U.S.

In art history, I teach a global architecture survey course that sends students across campus to study buildings firsthand. As a result, I was asked to write a new chapter on recent architectural developments at UNC-Chapel Hill for the expanded second edition of John Allcott’s “The Campus at Chapel Hill: 225 Years of Architecture.” Since then, I’ve regularly given architectural tours for various groups. My knowledge of campus spaces also led to my role on the Campus Arts Advisory Committee, which evaluates outdoor public art for the university.

What’s kept you at Carolina?

At Carolina, I’ve been able to mold my job to match my strengths and interests — and have been rewarded tenfold through mentoring students, supporting colleagues’ research, and sharing my own work with communities at UNC-Chapel Hill, across North Carolina, and in academia and librarianship.

What contribution are you most proud of?

I was a primary investigator on the Artists’ Archives Project, which provided graduate training in managing artists’ archives and held workshops across the state for artists who needed help organizing their personal archives. Although the project ended, I maintain the publicly accessible resources we created, consult with artists’ archives on best practices, and hold mini-workshops for the UNC-Chapel Hill arts community.

Whether housed in major institutions, artist foundations, or local libraries, artists’ archives are increasingly preserved for their future significance to art history and to global, national, and regional art worlds. I’m proud of training students to work with these unique materials — and even prouder of helping artists recognize the value of their “stuff,” which often feels burdensome or unimportant to them because they don’t think of themselves as “major” artists deserving of a public legacy.

What is a uniquely Carolina experience you’ve had?

Every graduating Carolina student can participate in the lottery for UNC-Duke basketball tickets, but I don’t think most graduate students get lucky. In 2003, I won and went to my first game in the Dean Dome with a handful of graduating friends. Another JJ was playing for the Blue Devils that night, and UNC lost, but we had a great time anyway.