Originally published on vabamu.ee
Between June and August 2026, Vabamu welcomed Stanford University student Bridget Deirdre Phillips as a summer intern through the Stanford Global Studies Program.
In collaboration with Stanford University Libraries, Vabamu coordinates internship opportunities for Stanford students in the Baltics. Alongside supporting students before and during their stay, we curate a programme of cultural and educational experiences that help them engage more deeply with Estonia, its history, and its society.
In the reflection below, Bridget shares how her summer in Estonia reshaped the way she thinks about art, history, and cultural memory as well as why she is leaving with much more than she expected.
Seeing & Being in Tallinn, Estonia
An Intern’s Reflection
Two girls sit in an opera box. Beneath them is a play; they watch with varying degrees of interest. The girl to the right blushes mildly; her frock is a dreamy pastel. She fingers a playbill, enraptured. To the left is her companion—silvery, knowing. A halo lights her scalp. She looks as though she is concocting a story in her head: a drama, far removed from the wall-papered theatre.
I worried that building content would draw me away from the art… Yet the sheer number of museums I visited exposed me to a different way of seeing, one marginalized from the art world.
The painting is Comédie Française, by Estonian modernist Karin Luts. It is funny, severe—unlike any I’ve seen. I turn to my friend and fellow art enthusiast, Morgan: This, I breathe, is my new favorite artist.
I hastily email a former professor. I tell them about the painting; quickly scope out a copy on Google Images. There is not a single high-resolution image online.
This June, I was tasked with building marketing content for Vabamu, an actively aptly named “Museum Fridays.” Each week, I ventured out of the office to explore the city’s many museums, documenting my adventures. I worried that building content would draw me away from the art, confine me to the simple factoids and exclamations indicative of Instagram captions. Yet the sheer number of museums I visited exposed me to a different way of seeing, one marginalized from the art world.
I encountered Luts’ retrospective—and Comédie Française—at Kumu Art Museum. I wanted to share my discovery with mentors, friends and family, yet the sole marker of Luts’ corpus was the exhibition itself, and a few poor-quality thumbnails.
It is no secret that “Eastern art” (East of what, I ask?) has been ostracized from the art historical canon. At university, we are told to read Edward Said’s Orientalism; to lament the failures of Western education and our inability to conceive of the East as anything but Other. Yet reading is different than experiencing, and until I entered Kumu there was a quiet and insidious part of me wholly ignorant of Baltic art.
As a student of images, I strive to think critically about what I see. I often forget that what is different from how, and that it is just as important to think about how one looks as it is to think about what, exactly, one is looking at. At Vabamu, I have had the privilege of exploring that “how,” immersing myself in the ways that images are understood and continually reproduced by the Estonian people.
With Liisi Ploom, Head of Collections, I study deportee photographs from the Gulag. Most are serene: a bookbinder dons a coat of mink; a foreman rests his elbow on a table. Yet context says otherwise. The mink is polyester; the foreman cannot rest. To be sent to a prison camp was to live and die in brown snow. I am okay, the pictures repeat. They were sent to relatives by the thousands.
What does it cost us to ignore these images? To sidestep a history, a way of being?
To the west, Estonian images remain invisible. A post cannot resolve that, nor can a single museum. I venture that travelers must commit—to being uncommon tourists; to seeing rather than sightseeing; to ignoring the phone; to embracing strangeness and sharing it with others.
Towards the start of my internship, I had a call with my mother. You’ll leave quite the ambassador, she said. I didn’t realize what she meant then, though now I do. In my mind, there is a shelf. It is cluttered with pictures. I wrap them in tissue, fold them into cashmere, place them in my luggage. Wherever I go, Estonia follows.
Bridget attends Stanford University. She studies Art History and Comparative Literature with specializations in modern and contemporary art. She chairs the Student Advisory Committee at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford’s on-campus museum. She thanks Kadri Paju, Ede Schank Tamkivi, Liisi Ploom, Ivo Lille, Agnes Kaasik, and Maja Soomägi for her extraordinary summer abroad.
Photo gallery
Photos used with permission from Vabamu
