Display Case: Someone Else's Shoes

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What’s it really like to be on the outside looking in?

If you want to understand what it means for someone to be uncomfortable in a museum, you have to find a place where you yourself feel uncomfortable. It could be a house of worship for a faith with which you are unfamiliar. It could be a bar. It could be a flea market.

For me, it was a tattoo studio. Walking into one for the first time in 2008, I immediately felt off-kilter and unsure of myself. It had taken years of dreaming and months of planning to get me in the door, but I did not walk in confident about the experience. I knew I wanted to get a tattoo. But I didn’t know how the tattoo studio worked, what the rules were, what would happen and how it would go.

The studio was a confusing place that seemed full of contradictions. The artists were friendly and knowledgeable. They also told offensive jokes and cursed. The music was loud and angry, yet the space was clean and well-lit. Some customers pored intently over books of designs and talked earnestly with the artists about their vision; others made haphazard selections of reductive, faddish icons. It was both high- and low-brow. Regardless, everyone was engaged with the art and each other.

Tattoo studios and art museums both invite people to foster deep relationships with art. And yet the people who work in these places are very different and, thus, the way they define a comfortable, art-friendly environment is comparably different. I have no doubt that the tattoo studio was doing everything it could to be a welcoming, positive environment. After all, the studio makes money not when people walk in the door (as museums do) but when they walk out with new ink—a process that often requires several visits. Despite their efforts to make me feel at ease, I was uncomfortable there. It took several visits before I felt good about the experience.

I strongly doubt that people who have never visited a museum fantasize for months or years about doing so, as I did with my tattoo. If I didn’t have that personal drive (and the social support of my husband, who was also getting a tattoo), I doubt I would have followed through with the experience.

Imagine feeling that kind of uncertainty when entering a museum. Imagine feeling unsure of what the experience will be, how it works and whether it will unpleasant. Imagine entering a space where the sounds, the lighting, the language and the objects are unfamiliar to you, where there are secret rules that you don’t figure out until you violate them.

When we museum employees visit and support museums, we tend to imagine that we are like other visitors, walking in their shoes. And while we may be able to spot several problems with the eyes of the visitor—an obtuse label here, a dirty bathroom there—there’s a lot we miss. The internalized expectations and understanding that professionals carry into museums reflect a privileged position as people in the know.

Getting uncomfortable changes that. Once you can acknowledge and empathize with that feeling of discomfort and disconnect that some visitors experience, you can move on to the more interesting challenge of figuring out what to do about it. This often involves working directly with representatives of those audiences to reimagine the museum experience from their perspective.

In 2009, the Wallace Collection in London decided to do just that. Staff at the museum of decorative arts and paintings from the 17th and 18th century wanted to find a way to create more family-friendly exhibitions. At first, they planned to do so themselves, and they discussed producing an exhibit on monsters or some other topic considered “kid friendly.” They ultimately decided they would be more successful if they worked directly with children instead of guessing what they might like. Over the course of the school year, a group of a dozen kids ages 9 through 11 from a nearby school produced an exhibit featuring intriguing objects from the museum collection related to the theme of “secrets.” The exhibition featured cabinets with secret doors, daggers with hidden blades and paintings with surprising stories, all enhanced with labels and interactives designed by the children.

The exhibition (opened in the spring of 2010) was incredibly successful with family audiences, and staff across the Wallace Collection were surprised by how much they learned from the young curators. As Learning Director Emma Bryant commented, "The exhibition is much more subtle than I think we would have done if we had done it by ourselves for children."

When a partner allows you to see your institution from their perspective, it can open up opportunities for connections with audiences who have been historically challenging or impossible to reach. Two years ago at the St. Louis Science Center, a group of low-income, urban teenagers involved in the Youth Exploring Science program (YES) came up with an innovative approach to welcoming poor families to local museums. The teens told their program director, Diane Miller, that they thought more people from these communities would enjoy the Science Center and the other museums in St. Louis’s Forest Park if they felt welcome and confident in them. As the teens put it, “If there’s one thing poor families are looking for, it’s free things to do on the weekends.” The teens worked with Miller to put together a grant proposal in which they would partner with families at St. Louis homeless shelters to introduce them to the local museums.

The proposal was funded, and YES teens partnered with individual homeless families on monthly outings to museums in Forest Park. The teens knew how it felt to be a new museum visitor and they crafted the program carefully based on that knowledge. The teens paired up one-on-one with families so that they could blend in easily and look like individual families instead of like a conspicuous tour group. They helped the families understand what’s in the museums, how to approach exhibits, how to figure out when you can use an interactive element—all the cultural secrets that are easy for frequent museum-goers (and professionals) to forget. The YES teens were able to make a connection and design a program in a way that was more culturally appropriate and likely to succeed than traditional museum staff members likely could.

These two stories illustrate what advocates like Elaine Heumann Gurian have been saying for years: Museums need to go to unfamiliar lengths to truly welcome and serve new audiences. You have to be open to listening, open to change, open to confronting unspoken biases about the “right” way to experience or engage with your institution. Community partners like the Wallace Collection schoolchildren and the YES teens have unique backgrounds, knowledge, expectations and needs that positively enhance all staff members’ ability to serve wider audiences.

To some extent, museums will always be like tattoo studios, both overtly and subtly promoting particular kinds of experiences and visitors. The challenge is to not become generic but to understand those biases and cues so we can celebrate the ones that serve our goals and reconstruct the ones that do not.