Category Archives: Exhibitions

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

Leave a reply

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.

Continue reading →

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

Leave a reply

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 →

Unfurling Patriotism at Yale

Leave a reply

Small exhibitions often have the freedom to tackle big ideas, and Unfurling the Flag: Reflections on American Patriotism at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library does exactly that.

Drawn entirely from the library’s extraordinary collections, the exhibition presents rare books, photographs, manuscripts, posters, and other historical documents in two long display cases. Rather than telling a chronological story, it explores patriotism through a series of themes, including absolutism, inclusion and exclusion, American exceptionalism, and patriotism as ideology. The introductory label reads:

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 →

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

Model of a Bronze Age village at the Bern History Museum.

After writing about art museums and history museums in Switzerland, I still had a set of smaller observations that did not quite fit into either post. They are not really small, however. They shaped the visitor experience again and again.

After visiting more than fifty museums and historic sites across Switzerland, I found that some of the most revealing differences appeared not in the major exhibitions, but in the supporting details: models and miniatures, museum stores, souvenirs, and stairs.

These features affect how visitors understand buildings, remember their visits, and physically move through museum spaces. They also reveal how museums think about access, retail, interpretation, and audience needs.

An exhibition at Chillon Castle shows how the unrestored murals would appear in the medieval period.

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 →

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 →

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 →

Can I Take a Picture?

Sign at the entrance to the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico.

What Museum Photography Policies Reveal About Visitor Experiences

While examining visitor codes of conduct, I started noticing another kind of museum policy that is becoming more visible: photography policies. They appear on websites, ticketing pages, “Know Before You Go” guides, and signs in galleries, historic houses, gardens, and exhibitions. Like codes of conduct, photography policies have always existed in some form, but they now seem more detailed, more prominent, and more complicated.

At first glance, the question seems simple: can visitors take pictures? But museum photography policies reveal that this is no longer a yes-or-no issue. The better question is: what kind of photography, by whom, for what purpose, in what space, and with what effect on collections, staff, visitors, and the experience?

To explore this question, I reviewed photography rules embedded in dozens of visitor codes of conduct and visitor policy pages from museums and historic sites. This was not a scientific or comprehensive study. It was an initial scan of current practice to identify common patterns and management issues. I am not offering legal advice here; museums should consult an attorney on copyright, releases, privacy, and commercial use. My interest is in how these policies shape visitor experience and staff decision-making.

The broad trend is clear: casual, personal photography is increasingly welcomed, but excessive equipment and disruptive, staged, or commercial photography is increasingly controlled.

Continue reading →

What Happens When You Apply Museum Standards to a State Capitol?

The Virginia State Capitol offers guided and self-guided tours to visitors.

When I agreed to conduct a Museum Assessment Program (MAP) review for the Virginia State Capitol, I knew it would be an unusual assignment. MAP is designed for museums—institutions with clear missions centered on collections, exhibitions, and interpretation. The Capitol, however, is not a museum. It is the active seat of the General Assembly of Virginia. That distinction matters.

At the Capitol, the “museum function” is secondary—sometimes tertiary—to the work of governance. I’ve completed several MAP assessments but only choose those that relate to my expertise and interests—and the unusual environment engaged me immediately and made me wonder what would happen. Tours, exhibitions, and school programs operate within an environment defined by legislative sessions, security protocols, and shifting public access. I suspected that some museum standards wouldn’t apply. Others—especially those related to education and interpretation—would, but required adaptation. What I discovered is that the most useful part of my visit wasn’t evaluating against museum standards—it was a workshop.

As part of MAP, I facilitated a session to develop guiding principles for the visitor experience (called Education and Interpretation in MAP). Think of them as a set of best practices—but ones developed by the staff themselves, grounded in real situations rather than imposed from outside. Rather than start with abstract values (e.g., diversity, education, creativity) or a series of broad questions (e.g., why does the museum exist? what is the museum’s educational vision?), I used scenarios—real situations staff face every day.

Continue reading →

When Contemporary Art Actually Works: Lessons from the Gamble House

Japanese baskets from 20 years ago feel at home in a house that’s a century older.

A growing number of historic house museums are experimenting with contemporary art exhibitions to attract new—and especially younger—audiences. The logic is understandable: align with what feels current and visible, generate social media buzz, and compensate for the decline of traditional media coverage. But too often, these exhibitions feel short-lived and disconnected. The site becomes little more than a stage set, and the art—however compelling on its own—lands like what urban planners used to call “plop art.” It could be placed anywhere, anytime, with little meaningful connection to the place.

That’s why a recent visit to the Gamble House in California was so refreshing.

I had the chance to see From Strand to Sculpture, a temporary exhibition of contemporary Japanese bamboo basketry (February 5–April 12, 2026). The Gamble House, of course, is a textbook example—arguably a masterpiece—of the Arts and Crafts movement by Greene and Greene. Completed in 1908 as the winter home of the Gamble family of Cincinnati, the house is defined by its extraordinary attention to materials, craftsmanship, and the integration of architecture and decorative arts.

Continue reading →