PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM 87 PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF: SFO MUSEUM For another exhibition, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammet lent the museum his collection of classic monster memorabilia. His fiendish frenzy of monster magazines, mummy paint-bynumbers, Dracula lunch boxes, Frankenstein figurines and the prop head of the Creature from the Black Lagoon certainly made a splash in Terminal 2. Occasionally, Nicole has to get creative to win over a more hesitant collector—on one memorable occasion doing so through his penchant for pastries. “I baked him pumpkin bread,” she smiles. “After that we were fast friends.” THE CURATOR HERSELF As Nicole and I set off in the direction of Harvey Milk Terminal 1, she tells me how she ended up here. All around us, travelers pace by with pillows or headphones wrapped around their necks. A girl’s volleyball team, all in bouncy ponytails and leggings, move as one. And a coterie of Emirates flight attendants glide past in immaculate uniforms of crimson and cream. “Museums are in my blood,” Nicole tells me. “It was something that I kind of lived and breathed.” In Plymouth, Massachusetts, Nicole’s mother worked as a site supervisor on the Mayflower II, a ship gifted to the United States by the English in the 1950s. At seven, little Nicole helped her out as a historic interpreter. “To spend more time with me, she took me to work with her on weekends,” Nicole explains. “I dressed in period attire as a 17th-century English immigrant.” Her role included talking about life aboard the Mayflower in 1620 and playing cat’s cradle with young visitors. By 14, she’d graduated to a paid position in visitor service. Later, Nicole admits to rebelling against the business she’d known all her life. “When I went to college, I kind of wanted to get away from museums,” she confesses. It didn’t last. After a year and a half in jobs she didn’t enjoy, Nicole accepted her fate. Museums were where she was meant to be. “I met so many interesting museum people from such an early age and have always been around them,” she explains. “Armed with an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology, I applied for a job at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley as the education specialist—and the rest is history!” Nicole landed a position at SFO Museum 15 years ago—and more than 75 curated shows later, she’s going strong.
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