Field Notes: Shifting the Narrative at the Portland Art Museum

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I recently visited the Portland Art Museum following the completion of its major renovation, which connected its two historic buildings with a new central Mark Rothko Pavilion as its main entrance. Among the exhibitions that caught my attention was Shifting the Narrative: 21st Century Acquisitions, which provides an unusually direct look at how a museum is reconsidering the interpretation of Native American art through collecting, exhibitions, and relationships with Native artists and communities. The Portland Art Museum holds more than 3,500 Native American objects representing approximately 200 Indigenous cultural groups throughout the Americas.

Opened in November 2025, Shifting the Narrative is partly an exhibition about art and partly an exhibition about changing museum practice. The temporary exhibition includes both contemporary and historical works in photography, sculpture, fashion, basketry, painting, and printmaking. Organized chronologically by acquisition period, the exhibition begins with its collecting of Native American art in 1918, with major additions of Northwest Coast objects in 1948. It then turns to its efforts to actively expand the collection through contemporary acquisitions since 2000 to better reflect the region and amplify diverse Native voices, including Wendy Red Star, Will Wilson, and Julie Buffalohead.

The second half of the exhibition focuses on the history of the museum itself. It outlines the museum’s relationships with artists, visitors, students, and Native communities. It initially acquired works as opportunities arose, then in 1991 created a dedicated curator of Native American art, which help build relationships with contemporary artists. A diagram shows how the collection grew and changed over time, including through sale and repatriation. This section of the exhibition also invites visitors to discuss their experiences with Native American art and test their knowledge of Native American art.

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Why Strategy Is Not a Long-Range Plan: The Big Idea in “Playing to Win”

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I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking and writing about mission statements, strategic plans, and how museums decide what matters most. One persistent problem is that cultural organizations are very good at identifying worthwhile things to do—and much less comfortable deciding what they won’t do. Reading A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin’s Playing to Win gave me another way to think about this problem. Their basic argument is deceptively simple: strategy is not a plan; it is an integrated set of choices.

That connects closely with something I’ve argued before on EngagingPlaces.net: a mission statement should do more than describe the work of an organization. Ultimately, we need to ask, “To what end?” Lafley and Martin push that question further with what they call a “winning aspiration.” For museums, I don’t think “winning” needs to mean beating another museum. It means being clear about the difference we intend to make—and for whom. A museum can have an admirable mission to preserve, educate, inspire, and serve the public, but those aspirations still don’t tell staff and board members what they should actually do Monday morning.

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Field Notes: Places of Pride at the Architectural Heritage Center

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The main permanent exhibition at the Architectural Heritage Center in Portland, Oregon.

During a summer visit to Portland, Oregon, we stopped at the Architectural Heritage Center to conduct research but also visited their exhibitions, including When Doors Open: Places of Pride, which examined places associated with the city’s LGBTQ+ history. These places are often overlooked in museum exhibitions and historic preservation, which makes this exhibition especially useful as a reference for museums and historic sites thinking about how to interpret communities whose histories may be embedded in buildings, gathering places, businesses, and neighborhoods rather than conventional museum collections.

Opened in July 2025, Places of Pride explores the relationship among identity, place, and memory. The exhibition focuses on homes, gathering places, businesses, and other spaces that served not simply as physical settings but as places of belonging, support, activism, and community formation for LGBTQ+ Portlanders. It also highlights LGBTQ+ preservationists and activists who worked to protect buildings and places important to the city’s history.

The subject has a particularly strong connection to the Architectural Heritage Center itself. Its origins lie with Ben Milligan and Jerry Bosco, a gay couple who began collecting architectural elements salvaged from Portland buildings during the 1960s as professional partners. Together they accumulated stained glass, doors, hardware, tiles, mantels, lighting, and other architectural fragments while also acquiring and preserving historic properties. After both were diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980s, they developed plans for the Bosco-Milligan Foundation so that their collection could continue to support preservation education. The Architectural Heritage Center eventually opened to the public in 2005.

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The Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office: Choosing the Story This Place Can Tell

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Museum entrance at street level with a reproduction of the original Missing Soldiers Office sign.

In 2013, Max and I visited the Washington building where Clara Barton had lived and worked during and immediately after the Civil War. At the time, its third floor was still being restored. The rooms were largely empty, the walls and floors exposed, and worktables and construction equipment reminded us that this nationally significant historic place had come remarkably close to disappearing.

Max wrote about that visit in “Sneak Peek at Clara Barton’s Office and Warehouse,” describing the discovery of the rooms and the materials that had survived in an attic crawl space for more than a century. The building had been slated for demolition when documents and other objects connected to Barton were found above the third floor. Their discovery eventually confirmed that these were the rooms where Barton had lived, stored supplies during the Civil War, and operated the Missing Soldiers Office.

I recently returned to see the completed Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum. Walking through the building brought back memories of that earlier visit, but it also raised a different question: What story should this particular place tell?

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Field Notes: “Experience Oregon” at the Oregon Historical Society

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Most of us see only a small fraction of the exhibitions being produced by museums around the country. Experience Oregon, the permanent exhibition at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, offers one example of how a state history museum can combine collections, media, immersive environments, and interactive experiences to tell a broad and complicated story.

Opened in February 2019, Experience Oregon occupies the museum’s entire third floor and explores Oregon history from human settlement to the present. Rather than relying entirely on a chronological narrative, the exhibition makes connections across time through subjects such as home, movement, and water, while emphasizing the relationships among people, communities, and the land. More than 300 objects and archival materials from the Oregon Historical Society’s collections appear throughout the exhibition.

The exhibition offers many different ways to encounter that history. Visitors begin with a panoramic theater introducing Oregon’s landscapes, people, and major themes. Elsewhere they can walk through a covered wagon, explore maps, listen to personal narratives, encounter historic photographs and artifacts, participate in debates about historical issues, and learn about subjects ranging from Indigenous cultures and treaty-making (or treaty-breaking!) to migration, racism, immigration, civil rights, industry, transportation, politics, and social change. OHS described more than twenty interactive stations when the exhibition opened, including sensory experiences that use smells associated with salmon, hazelnuts, and wheat.

The exhibition was designed by The Design Minds and fabricated by 1220 Exhibits. Digital media is integrated throughout rather than concentrated in a single area. North Shore Productions developed the exhibition’s media, including the panoramic introductory film, archival documentaries, audio narratives, and a film about the revitalization of Chinuk Wawa. Upswell developed several of the interactive experiences, including map-based explorations, stations where visitors consider issues from Oregon’s past, and a digital “Memory Blanket” that allows visitors to assemble a personal record of their experience.

The exhibition received a 2020 Leadership in History Award from the American Association for State and Local History and a 2020 Special Achievement – Informed by Community Voices Award from the American Alliance of Museums.

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Rethinking Historical Significance at Historic Sites: More Than A Person, Event, or Design

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Williams Avenue YWCA Branch building built in 1926. Courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society.

What makes a building important to a community? Sometimes it is place. Sometimes it is architecture. Sometimes it is the famous person who lived there or the event that happened there. But sometimes a building becomes important because people keep using it year after year, generation after generation, to meet the needs of their community. That is what happened at the building now known as the Billy Webb Elks Lodge in Portland, Oregon.

Built in 1926 as the Williams Avenue branch of the YWCA, the building has served Portland’s Black community for a century. During that time, the organizations occupying it and the activities taking place inside have changed repeatedly. But one thing has remained remarkably consistent: Black Portlanders have used the building as a place to gather, organize, advocate, celebrate, and care for one another.

Its story began before the building itself. In 1918, Cynthia A. Jenkins began the effort to establish a YWCA program for Portland’s Black women and girls. A branch finally opened in 1921, at a time when segregation and discrimination limited where Black Portlanders could live, work, socialize, and participate in civic life. Five years later, the YWCA opened a permanent building at Williams Avenue and Tillamook Street in Portland’s Albina neighborhood.

Although operated by the YWCA, the new building was never simply a place for women and girls. It included a gymnasium, auditorium and stage, lounge, and other spaces that allowed it to serve a much broader community. The branch provided programs for men and boys as well as women and girls. Community organizations held meetings. The NAACP gathered there. The building hosted interracial discussions and programs addressing civil rights.

That breadth of activity is important. In a segregated city, having a place to meet was itself significant. Black Portlanders were creating organizations and institutions to serve the needs of their community and the Williams Avenue YWCA became one of those places. Its role continued to evolve as the needs of the community changed.

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Join Me in Providence at AASLH/NCPH 2026

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I’ll be in Providence, Rhode Island, September 16–19 for the 2026 joint annual meeting of the American Association for State and Local History and the National Council on Public History. This year’s theme, The Work of Revolution, seems particularly apt at a moment when museums and public history organizations are reconsidering how we work, whom we serve, and how we sustain public trust.

I’ll be participating in several conversations during the conference, and I hope you’ll join me for one—or find me in the halls and say hello.

Wednesday, September 16, 5:30 p.m. — History Leadership Institute Reception

I’ll start the conference at the History Leadership Institute reception. If you’re curious about HLI, thinking about applying, or are one of its graduates, please join us. The reception is an opportunity to meet alumni, facilitators, current participants, and others interested in leadership in the history field.

HLI has long been one of the profession’s most distinctive opportunities to step away from day-to-day responsibilities and think more broadly about leadership, organizations, and the future of our field. I’m always glad to talk with people considering whether it might be right for them.

Thursday, September 17, 8:30 a.m. — Love the Mission, Fix the Job: Rethinking Museum Work

Thursday morning I’ll be part of a facilitated discussion about museum workplace culture. Debates about museum work have flourished online and through worker-led movements, while our formal professional literature has often struggled to keep pace.

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Beyond “Learn” and “Appreciate”: Writing Better Visitor Outcomes

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A few months ago, I shared a preliminary framework for rethinking learning outcomes at historic sites. I was trying to solve a problem I had encountered repeatedly: educational taxonomies developed for classrooms do not always translate well to historic sites and house museums. Visitors are not students enrolled in a semester-long course. They arrive with different motivations, prior knowledge, amounts of time, and degrees of interest. I proposed a framework organized around two ideas—Outcome Levels and Outcome Ambitions—that better reflect the visitor journey and the practice of interpreting history.

Since then, I’ve continued testing and refining those ideas. One part of that work has been developing a more practical vocabulary for writing outcomes at each level. The result is a new six-page handout, What You Want Visitors to Know, Feel, or Do: Five Outcome Levels for Historic Sites and House Museums, which I’m sharing with this post (and subject to change!).

Historic sites and house museums often begin planning interpretation by asking what stories they want to tell, which objects they want to display, or what activities visitors should experience. Those are important questions, but they don’t define success.

A stronger starting point is:

  • What do we want visitors to know, feel, or do as a result of this experience?

That shift—from what the museum presents to what happens for the visitor—can make interpretation much more intentional.

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Rethinking How We Find and Interpret Women at Historic Sites

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The parlor in the Frary House at Historic Deerfield in Deerfield, Massachusetts. C. Alice Baker restored the house in the 1890s as her Colonial Revival home.

For years, I have heard the same frustration from people working at historic sites: “It is so hard to find information about the women who lived here.” But finding women is only part of the challenge. Even when information about them exists, interpreting their lives can be difficult. Too often, interpretation emphasizes familiar domestic roles and spaces—the kitchen, nursery, or parlor—without exploring the fuller range of women’s experiences.

Earlier this year, I heard many of these same concerns during an American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) discussion on women’s history. Participants described women appearing only in passing in historical records or being found through records associated with men. Others pointed to museum collections that historically documented women’s domestic lives more readily than other aspects of their experiences. The discussion raised two related questions: How do we find the women, and what do we do with what we find?

These questions lie at the heart of a book I am now writing, Interpreting Women’s Lives at Historic House Museums. The challenge is not simply finding more evidence about women. It is reconsidering the approaches we use to find and understand their lives and then bringing that understanding back to the historic places where their stories are told.

Learning from Women’s History

Traditional methods of historical research were largely developed around the activities through which men exercised public power: politics, government, military service, property ownership, and business. Those approaches have produced an enormous body of historical knowledge.

But historians of women discovered decades ago that those same approaches could not simply be applied to women and expected to produce the same results. If we look for women only where we have traditionally found men, women can appear marginal to the historical story. And if we measure women’s lives against men’s experiences, we risk overlooking the ways women exercised power, earned money, maintained relationships, acquired and transferred property, participated in communities, moved through the landscape, and shaped the world around them.

The problem therefore requires more than adding women’s names to an existing story. It requires drawing on methods developed by historians of women to examine women’s lives on their own terms. Those methods have shaped the practical approach I am developing for historic house museums.

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Swiss Museums in Sixty Seconds: Five Short Tours and a Longer Conversation

After visiting more than fifty museums and historic sites across Switzerland, I returned with far more observations than I could fit into a few blog posts—or a few hundred photographs. My three recent posts examined recurring patterns across Swiss museums: the influence of private collectors on art museums, changing approaches to interpretation at history museums, and the seemingly secondary details—from architectural models to museum stores and accessibility—that profoundly shape the visitor experience.

But words and still photographs can only convey so much. Sometimes you need to see visitors play at a transportation museum, walk through the rooms of a medieval castle, or watch a historic clock come to life. Five short videos offering glimpses of museums and historic sites that particularly interested me. Each YouTube Short lasts less than a minute, but together they illustrate several of the larger questions raised in my earlier posts.

The automotive pavilion at Verkehrshaus is clad in highway signs.

A Museum Designed for Movement

The Verkehrshaus, or Swiss Museum of Transport, in Lucerne is one of Switzerland’s largest and most popular museums. Its campus is divided into separate pavilions devoted to trains, automobiles, planes, ships, and space travel.

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