Author Archives: Max van Balgooy

About Max van Balgooy

President of Engaging Places LLC, a design and strategy firm that connects people to historic places.

Clearer Rules, Better Results: An Updated Photography Policy at Bayou Bend

A Terrific Guide for Community Conversations During America’s 250th

From Critique to “Clean House”: Evaluating Mike Gonzalez’s Testimony on the Smithsonian

At a congressional hearing on July 21, Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation accused the Smithsonian’s leadership of subverting its national purpose and called upon Congress to “clean house.” He also urged lawmakers to deauthorize the proposed National Museum of the American Latino and Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum before either institution has opened a permanent building.

His statement is important—not because it provides an independent or particularly rigorous evaluation of the Smithsonian, but because it reveals how quickly the argument has moved from criticizing exhibitions to demanding the removal of museum leaders.

The July 4 White House report, properly titled Saving America’s Story, accused the National Museum of American History of “ideological capture” and concluded that the Smithsonian could not be trusted under its current leadership. Gonzalez largely repeats that report’s assumptions and examples, but goes further by calling explicitly for a purge.

Continue reading →

Models, Mementos, and Maddening Stairs: Final Notes from Swiss Museums

Models and Miniatures

Swiss museums and historic sites make frequent and effective use of models and miniatures. At their best, these are not decorative add-ons or simplified versions for children. They are interpretive tools that help visitors understand things that are otherwise difficult to see.

At Chillon Castle, a miniature showed how a room would have looked in the medieval period because the murals have faded over time. That is exactly the kind of interpretive problem a model can solve. The historic fabric is still present, but time has made it difficult to perceive. A miniature allows visitors to imagine the original visual effect without repainting, over-restoring, or asking visitors to make sense of nearly invisible evidence on their own.

Continue reading →

Beyond Chronology: Interpretation at History Museums in Switzerland

*A period room at the Bern History Museum in Switzerland.*

We recently returned from a two-week visit to Switzerland, where we visited more than fifty museums and historic sites across the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions. In the art museums of German-speaking Switzerland, I noticed a strong tendency to organize galleries around named private collections, or Sammlungen. In the history museums and historic sites, I noticed something different: interpretive practices in transition.

Some sites still rely on familiar approaches: chronological narratives, object identification, and basic descriptions of place. But many museums are clearly rethinking their exhibitions. They are experimenting with new interpretive layers, broader contexts, difficult histories, and more ambitious questions about identity, science, colonialism, and national memory.

The results are uneven, but they are worth attention. Swiss history museums seem to be moving beyond “what happened?” and “what is this object?” toward more complex questions: What systems produced this wealth? How did a person’s life connect to larger social and technological changes? How is national identity constructed? What should be done with inherited installations that no longer speak clearly to visitors?

For museum professionals elsewhere, the Swiss examples offer several useful lessons.

Continue reading →

A Thank-You Note Worth Remembering

Museums spend a lot of time thinking about how to ask people for support. We spend far less time thinking about what happens after someone says yes.

Recently, I made a gift to President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, D.C., in support of Students Opposing Slavery, a project I have long admired. Within a short time, a small box arrived in the mail. Before I even opened it, the package already looked intentional: a Team Lincoln logo with a blue accent on a sturdy thin white box. What could this possibly contain?

Continue reading →

The Collector’s Museum: Art and Interpretation in German-Speaking Switzerland

*Founded in the 1780s,* *Kunsthaus Zürich* *now straddles a busy intersection in two buildings.*

We recently returned from a two-week visit to Switzerland, where we visited more than fifty museums and historic sites across the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions. Among the many differences in museum practice, one pattern was especially noticeable in the art museums of the German-speaking cantons: their organization around named private collections, or Sammlungen.

A wealthy collector may have assembled works of art over a lifetime and later donated or loaned the collection to a museum. Rather than fully integrating those works into a chronological, thematic, or art-historical presentation, the museum often retains the collection as a distinct unit bearing the donor’s name.

There are legitimate reasons for doing this. A named collection preserves its provenance and recognizes the role of private collecting in the formation of public museums. It can reveal an individual collector’s tastes, preferences, ambitions, and blind spots. The collection itself can become a historical document.

This model is not unique to Switzerland. American museums such as the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and the Frick Collection in New York preserve, to varying degrees, the identity and vision of their founders’ private collections. In those institutions, however, the collector’s personality, residence, installation choices, or philosophy of looking is central to the museum’s public identity. Visitors generally understand that they are entering a particular person’s conception of art.

The situation becomes more complicated when several named collections coexist within a larger institution. The visitor is no longer encountering one clearly defined collector’s museum but moving among several private visions whose differences are not always explained.

*The Sammlung Merzbacher at the Kunsthaus in Zürich.*

Continue reading →

Rethinking Learning Outcomes for Historic Sites

For several years, I have been adapting L. Dee Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning for use in museums and historic sites. Fink’s framework is enormously useful in formal education because it pushes teachers beyond simple content delivery (i.e., foundational knowledge) to application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn. That is a helpful corrective in classrooms, where learning unfolds over a semester and where students can be asked to practice, reflect, revise, and demonstrate growth. But I am increasingly convinced that this framework does not translate as easily as I hoped to the interpretation of house museums and historic sites.

The problem is not Fink’s taxonomy itself. The problem is that historic site visitors are usually not students in a course. They are often there by choice, joined by family or friends, have uneven prior knowledge, and motivated by many different reasons: curiosity, leisure, family activity, travel, identity, or a search for meaning. They may spend 45 minutes in a guided tour, 20 minutes in an exhibition, or an afternoon in the gardens. We need a framework that recognizes these distinct conditions.

My earlier handout, “Verbs for Significant Learning Outcomes,” tried to help museums define what they wanted visitors to know, feel, or do and to create relevant, meaningful experiences. That part still feels right. The challenge is that the categories remained too close to classroom learning. Some verbs—apply, execute, operate, practice, monitor—make sense for students or professional training but are less useful for visitors at a historic house. Because house museums and historic sites interpret history, the framework should also reflect the discipline’s core practices: using evidence, recognizing perspective, acknowledging uncertainty, connecting local stories to broader patterns, and inviting public dialogue about the past. More importantly, the framework did not clearly align with the visitor journey from first encounter to deeper meaning.

That’s a lot to juggle and I may be dropping a few balls, so here’s my preliminary draft work-in-progress revised framework organized around two related ideas: Outcome Level and Outcome Ambition.

Outcome Levels

The Outcome Level describes the kind of visitor change an interpretive experience is designed to support. In plain terms, it asks: What kind of change are we trying to create in visitors? Imagine levels as a journey on a nature trail: getting oriented at the trailhead; noticing plants, insects, animals, and geology; seeing how parts of the ecosystem connect; pausing at an overlook to understand the larger landscape; and leaving with a clearer sense of what you learned, what matters to you, and what you might do next.

Continue reading →

Photography, Permission, and Fair Use: Where Museum Policies Get Complicated

*Do I need permission to take photos of a guided tour in a museum?*

In the previous posts in this series, I looked at visitor codes of conduct, visitor photography policies, and commercial or media photography policies. Those policies are becoming more visible because photography is no longer a simple matter of “Can I take a picture?” A single image can be a personal memory, a social media post, a teaching tool, a scholarly document, a news illustration, a commercial asset, or evidence in a public debate.

This final post turns to the more complicated issues: fair use, copyright, photo releases, privacy, and ethics. As a reminder, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Museums should consult an attorney when writing policies involving copyright, image permissions, privacy, publicity rights, releases, commercial use, or contracts. My purpose here is to identify common points of confusion that arise when museums, visitors, writers, teachers, scholars, and photographers try to understand what permission is needed and from whom.

I encounter these questions in my own work. As someone who photographs museums and historic sites for this blog, teaching, consulting, and research, I occasionally wonder: should I ask permission from the museum before publishing a photograph of an exhibition? Do I need a model release if visitors appear in the background? Is it appropriate to photograph a historic house where people still live nearby? Does it matter if I am writing criticism, promoting the museum, or using the image in a paid presentation?

These questions are often confused with a different issue: what museums need to do when they use images of visitors for their own promotional purposes. A visitor taking a photograph in a gallery, a museum using a child’s image in a fundraising campaign, and a company filming a commercial in a sculpture garden are not the same thing. They raise different legal, ethical, and managerial questions. Policies should be clear enough that frontline staff can explain them without being expected to interpret copyright law, privacy law, or fair use on the spot.

Four Issues That Often Get Confused

Photography policies often blend several distinct issues:

Copyright: who owns the rights to the artwork, photograph, exhibition label, design, film, or other creative work that appears in the image?
Access: what conditions did the museum place on photography as part of admission, ticketing, visitor conduct, or use of its property?
Privacy and publicity: are identifiable people shown in the image, and is their likeness being used in a way that requires permission?
Ethics: even if a photograph is legally permissible, is it respectful, accurate, safe, and consistent with the museum’s values and the dignity of the people, places, and stories involved?

Continue reading →

When Museums Become Backdrops: Managing Commercial and Media Photography

*Wedding photo taken at the Cincinnati Museum of Art. Credit: Sherri Barber Photography.*

In the previous post in this series, I looked at visitor photography policies: whether visitors can take pictures, where they can take them, what equipment they can use, and how museums distinguish casual personal photography from behavior that disrupts the visitor experience. But there is another side to museum photography policies.

When photography moves beyond ordinary visitor memory-making, the questions become more complicated. A museum gallery, historic house, a picturesque barn, sculpture garden, or historic landscape can quickly become a backdrop for someone else’s project: a wedding shoot, fashion session, graduation portrait, influencer campaign, documentary film, news segment, advertisement, stock photography shoot, or corporate video. That shift changes the issue. The question is no longer simply, “Can I take a picture?” It becomes: who benefits from the image, what resources are being used, what risks are created, and how is the museum’s name, space, collection, or reputation being presented?

As with the earlier posts, this is not a scientific or comprehensive study. I reviewed a selection of commercial, media, and photography policies from museums and historic sites to identify patterns in current practice. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Museums should consult an attorney when developing policies involving copyright, releases, insurance, contracts, filming agreements, or commercial use. My interest here is in how these policies reflect museum management, visitor experience, institutional risk, and revenue. Just a warning: this is a loooong post because of the complexity of this topic—and I’ll only be touching the surface.

From Visitor Photography to Site Use

The most useful distinction is between photographing a museum and using a museum as a setting. A visitor photographing a child in a gallery, a favorite object, a historic room, or a garden path is usually documenting a visit. A photographer staging an engagement session, fashion shoot, commercial, product video, or sponsored social media post is using the museum as a resource. Those are different activities. They require different policies.

Continue reading →