Category Archives: Engagement

What Makes a Museum Label Worth Reading?

1 Reply
A framed painting depicting the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and Saint Catherine, showcasing rich colors and detailed expressions. The scene includes a book at the bottom and is set against a dark wall.

Recently, I visited two art museums in Baltimore and encountered strikingly different approaches to exhibition labels. Both museums displayed remarkable works of art, accompanied by labels that were historically informed, professionally written, and reasonably accessible. Yet I found myself eagerly reading the labels in one museum and losing interest in those at the other.

Why? The problem wasn’t simply length, vocabulary, or the amount of information provided. Some of the labels I enjoyed most were quite long. Rather, the difference was how the writers connected the information to the artwork and to my experience as a visitor.

The experience prompted me to think more carefully about what makes an effective exhibition label.

The text describes Bernardino Luini's painting 'The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine,' featuring a spiked wheel, a book, and a wedding ring. It recounts the story of Saint Catherine, her mystical marriage with Christ, and her defiance against Roman persecution.

Begin with What Visitors Can See

One museum consistently began its labels with something visible in the artwork. A Renaissance painting of Saint Catherine opened with a reference to a spiked wheel, a book, and a wedding ring. These seemingly ordinary objects became clues to understanding the painting’s religious story.

Continue reading →

Beyond Economic Impact: Are We Building Sustainable Museums?

Leave a reply
Infographic displaying the total annual economic impact of Maryland's museums, highlighting $702.8M economic contribution, 4,495 jobs supported, $504.6M visitor-driven economic output, and $6.35 returned for every $1 spent.

Maryland’s new museum economic impact study raises important questions about workforce compensation, organizational sustainability, and public value.

The Maryland Museums Association recently released its Economic Impact Study of Maryland Museums, prepared by Parker Strategy Group using data from fiscal year 2025. It’s an impressive report that provides museum advocates with valuable evidence of the contributions museums make to Maryland’s economy. The report also includes case studies of four museums and recommendations for strengthening the field.

But what caught my attention wasn’t the economic impact figures. It was the report’s discussion of three issues that deserve greater attention from museum boards, staff, funders, and policymakers: the challenges of building and retaining a professional workforce, the financial vulnerability of museums, and the importance of demonstrating public value beyond economic activity.

These issues are closely connected. Museums cannot fulfill their missions without capable people, sustainable organizations, and meaningful relationships with the communities they serve.

Are We Investing in the People Who Make Museums Work?

One of the report’s most troubling findings concerns compensation and career advancement. Drawing on national workforce studies and interviews with museum professionals, it describes a field struggling to retain experienced employees and develop its next generation of leaders.

Continue reading →

Taking the 19th-Century Cast Hall Into the 21st Century?

I recently organized a field trip for the Museum Studies Program at George Washington University to take students back into the history of museums and its potential future. We visited the temporary studio of George Morton, an artist in residence at the the National Gallery of Art and Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, who is exploring the use of 3D printing to “activate the collections” and “look at collections anew.”

Cast court at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC ca 1920. The frieze from the Parthenon survives.

Morton is an accomplished painter who has been investigating the history of cast halls, once a familiar feature of art museums and art schools. During the nineteenth century, institutions purchased plaster casts of important sculptures so that students could study works they might never have an opportunity to see in person. The casts were used to teach drawing, painting, and art history, allowing students to learn by closely observing works by recognized masters.

The Corcoran itself once had an extensive cast collection. Like many such collections, however, it largely disappeared in the early twentieth century as museums and schools increasingly favored original works of art over reproductions. A few major cast collections survive. In the United States, one of the most extensive can be found at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, while the Victoria and Albert Museum in London preserves two monumental Cast Courts.

Morton is now asking whether 3D scanning and printing might offer a contemporary version of the cast hall.

Continue reading →

Field Notes: Shifting the Narrative at the Portland Art Museum

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.

Continue reading →

Field Notes: Places of Pride at the Architectural Heritage Center

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.

Continue reading →

Join Me in Providence at AASLH/NCPH 2026

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.

Continue reading →

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

Note: I revised this post on October 2, 2026 to clarify the terminology: Outcome Levels changed to Outcome Types. Outcome Types describe the kind of change an experience is intended to encourage. Ambition Levels describe the degree of change it is reasonable to expect.

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 Ambition Levels—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 Types for Historic Sites and House Museums, which I’m sharing with this post (and subject to change!). I also realized that using “levels” for both is confusing and that Outcome Levels may suggest that a higher level is better than a lower one, thus I changed to Outcome Types (I’ll restate this again later to reinforce the distinction).

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

The Frary House at Historic Deerfield: The Women Who Preserved the Places We Visit

The Frary House (left), part of the building that also includes the Bernard Tavern, Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts.

When we visit a historic house museum, we usually come to learn about the people who once lived there. But how often do we learn about the people who saved the house? The Frary House in Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts, tells the overlooked story of the women who preserved the places we visit.

Built about 1750, the Frary House could easily have been interpreted as another colonial home. Instead, Historic Deerfield tells a different story. The house is furnished as the Colonial Revival home of C. Alice Baker after she restored it in the 1890s, shifting visitors’ attention to a later chapter in the building’s history. That interpretive choice immediately caught my attention because it suggests that a historic house’s most significant story is not always its earliest one.

Baker purchased the Frary House in 1890 after learning that it was in danger of collapse. She later explained that she bought it “to rescue the home and to make a home for her mother.” At a time when Old Deerfield was struggling economically, her decision preserved more than a single building. It became part of a much larger effort that would help shape the future of the village.

The guide described Baker as one of America’s earliest female preservationists—a woman who owned property independently, invested in railroads, taught school, researched local history, collected antiques, and published books at a time when women are seldom remembered for participating so fully in public and economic life. Whether every claim of being “the first” can withstand historical scrutiny almost becomes beside the point. What matters is that Baker represents a much larger story that historic sites rarely tell.

Continue reading →

Were You Expecting to Smell Tito Puente’s Timbales?

One of the pleasures of visiting museums is discovering something you didn’t expect.

When I visited ¡Puro Ritmo!, the exhibition produced by the National Museum of the American Latino in Washington, DC, I expected energetic music, dance, and interactive experiences. Those were certainly there, but one exhibit offered a completely different kind of surprise.

Standing before Tito Puente’s timbales, I assumed the museum might invite visitors to explore rhythm, play cowbells, or watch archival footage of the legendary bandleader. Instead, a small label read: “Places and scents are connected. Push the lever to smell the scent and imagine a night of dancing. What do these smells remind you of?”

Beside it was a small black cylinder. I pressed the lever, and a complex blend of gardenias, leather, and a hint of tobacco drifted upward. For a brief moment, it felt less like standing in a museum and more like walking into a crowded ballroom on a warm evening as Tito Puente’s orchestra prepared to play.

Continue reading →