Staff Highlight: Anna Clair Miller, Visitor Services
Anna Clair has been BRAHM’s Visitor Services Coordinator since 2017. Stationed at the front desk, she is the first person one sees upon entry to the museum and the person graciously bidding adieu when leaving (Tuesday - Friday). While Anna Clair is very sweet and friendly, her introduction goes well beyond an amiable welcome. She thoughtfully sets the visitor up to have the most impactful museum experience. She can answer just about any BRAHM-related question and frequently gives general area information to newcomers. Anna Clair also maintains the Museum’s Gift Shop (and has recommended some of the most popular items). BRAHM’s wonderful volunteers -- a group relied upon to carry out events, large mailings, and daily operations in the busy season -- are also managed under her purview.
Having lived in Blowing Rock since 2007, Anna Clair became acquainted with BRAHM through her neighbors and longtime museum supporters LaRose and Bill Spooner. After studying at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota (where her focus was archaeology), Anna Clair returned to Blowing Rock in 2012. That year she became an intern at BRAHM in both visitor services and education. She loved working with children in the education center: “When a Kindergartener successfully learns about Pointillism, then asks you to be their best friend, it’s a wonderful feeling!”
After her internship, Anna Clair took local jobs in fine culinary retail. When the visitor services position at BRAHM opened in 2017, she applied immediately and was hired shortly thereafter. She loves the museum atmosphere and working in close proximity to art, regional history, and educational programs. “BRAHM conveys the history and uniqueness of the region and its people in profound ways. I wish every town had a BRAHM. Every place is interesting, but not every place has a dedicated institution that educates people as to how and why.”
Being the Museum’s gatekeeper carries a lot of responsibility. Anna Clair must communicate the value of BRAHM and its many offerings to visitors in a succinct, easy to swallow fashion- no simple task. She answers hoards of questions daily, in-person and over the phone. In addition to the general museum questions, she says that one of the most common is, “‘Have you seen my husband?’ The husband is generally immersed in work or an exhibit in another part of the building.”
To know Anna Clair personally is to know her love of nature and her passion to protect it (she has helped bring in conservation partners for educational programming at BRAHM). Her childhood home overlooked the marshland near Boston Harbor. Unknown to her parents, Anna Clair would frequently explore this nature preserve and befriend the wetland fauna. Homeschooled in the early part of her childhood, her teaching was supplemented by Boston’s local museums and their educational programs for children. This included the New England Aquarium, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “I have been a first-hand beneficiary of public museums and their educational programming. It has truly shaped the person I am today and I do not take that for granted.”
In her personal life, Anna Clair has two great passions: animals of all kinds, but particularly her cats -- Rebecca, Toad, and Agatha -- and her plants, which fill every nook and cranny both in and outside of her home. “It is an ongoing battle keeping the cats off the plants!” Inside alone, Anna Clair cares for about thirty plants: ten orchids, five jungle cacti, several ferns, in addition to more exotic plants like her Brasiliopuntia brasiliensis (a prickly pear that grows into a tree!) and Dorstenia foetida (the chubby little stump-looking plant pictured in this article). “When I am sitting at home, I typically have a two-foot stack of seed catalogs sitting on the floor next to me. It is an obsession.”
Anna Clair is also a talented artist and calligrapher. She illustrated the recipe book for BRAHM’s 2018 exhibit Farm. Forage. Feast: High Country Foodways. She is an example of the diverse and talented staff members that are attracted to work here and how the Museum’s contributions are a reflection of its staff and community.
