Despite the varying conventions and other surface-level differences between genres of museum writing, I believe there are core commonalities at the heart of all of them, which we can use as a beacon in aligning the nuances of our work to our institutions’ overall missions. To discover what these commonalities are, I interviewed museum professionals across the country about the values that guide their writing, and presented my research in a poster at this year’s AAM Annual Meeting. These are the core values I found that can make museum writing more effective.

Unity

Because there are so many genres of writing in the field, one of the most important principles for museum writers to embrace is unity. This means producing written information in a way that is cohesive not only for a particular institution but for museological principles in general. For instance, an institution using a style guide produces content that follows the same rules of writing across multiple departments. Writing in this way creates a central institutional voice that the broader public can latch onto. “I have to ‘be’ the institution, no matter how my day is going,” explains Lizabel Stell, the Senior Social Media and Digital Content Manager at the Blanton Museum of Art.

The trust readers put in museums as cultural institutions means that communication that comes from museums must be credible. This can be especially tricky in genres like marketing, where writers must balance this responsibility with conventions that place less emphasis on straightforward factuality. You wouldn’t expect to read a scholarly article in an Instagram caption, for example. No matter the genre, you must be cognizant of audience expectations in a particular context.

Practical examples:

• Using a style guide to unify the texts created by an institution.
• Targeting specific audiences to ensure that your writing is being presented to its intended readers.
• Understanding the purpose of your writing assignment to fit within the conventions of the specific genre in which you’re writing.

Accessibility

An emphasis on accessibility is another core tenet of museum work. Just as museums should design their physical spaces to serve the widest range of guests possible, they should also produce writing that is understandable to a wide range of audiences. This is especially important in the digital age, as access to written information has expanded to many more audiences than before. No group of people should be barred from knowledge because of wording that is confusing or too complex for them.

One factor to consider is age. As the Director of Smithsonian Associates, Fredie Adelman, told me, “Audiences range in age from pre-K to post-retirement.” This means we must keep multiple age ranges in mind and, when possible, tailor our writing to the age of the intended audience. We must also consider the range of abilities, such as the ability to see, hear, or process information, and make use of digital tools like alt text and captions that can improve accessibility. For all audiences, an effective strategy is succinctness, so we are conveying information as efficiently as possible.

Practical examples:

• Using alt text and other written descriptions for visual elements.
• Creating captions for visual or audio experiences.
• Selecting and creating age-appropriate texts to make it easier for your intended audience to come away with new knowledge.
• Making your writing succinct to transfer information in the most efficient way possible.

Human-Centeredness

One important element of museum writing that sometimes goes overlooked is telling the human stories that make our institutions possible. Being human-focused is an important aspect of museum work. For example, this could look like giving proper context to collection pieces. Even when visitors are looking at an artifact from hundreds of years ago, they should still be reminded of the humanity behind the object and how it can connect to their contemporary lives.

Making human connections to diverse groups of people is one of the most powerful functions of cultural institutions. This is the ideal that makes museum writers like John Epp, the Curator of the USS Slater, pursue the “number one goal of bringing a human element” in everything they write. When we tell stories through the lens of the people involved, we make it easier for audiences to connect with and understand them. Ultimately, this helps foster connections between the work of museums and the communities whose stories we steward.

Practical examples:

• Writing donor letters to demonstrate the impact that financial backers have in achieving the mission of your institution.
• Using interviews and other personal anecdotes of people or groups you are writing about to help tell their story in their own words.
• Doing research to ensure that the historical and contemporary stories you tell are authentic to audiences’ real-world experiences.

Conclusion

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with various museum professionals from across the country to learn about the connections between their writing work and the core missions of museology. No matter which of the many genres under the banner “museum writing” we practice, it is important that the work we produce falls in line with these deeper ideals. They are some of the most important aspects of the field itself. Thinking through these deeper connections will make the writing we do more effective and help achieve the goal of communicating information in ways that are far-reaching and value-driven.

Editor’s note: A version of this post previously appeared on the Association of Midwest Museums blog.

Funding the Project

The COVID pandemic challenged us to devise ways to obtain funding for projects that supported rather than competed with our local colleagues. With that in mind, I spearheaded various federal grant applications for the project with partners at the University of Arizona (UA) and with input from community partners with whom I’ve built relationships through past projects. None of this special pandemic funding came through, but the process of applying helped to fine-tune a grant we did receive, from the Institute for Museum and Library Services’ Museums for America program, for $190,953. During the second year of our project, I also wrote a proposal to the UA Library’s Digital Borderlands project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for sixty thousand dollars, and one of our partners, the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center obtained a ten-thousand-dollar grant from Arizona Humanities to support our research. Among other purposes, these grants provided funds for the community partners, our university tech developers, a part-time multimedia specialist, technological needs such as server storage, signage printing and fabrication, and publicity. Because we worked with CDH, this funding covered most of the project; if we had worked with commercial vendors, though, it easily could have cost a million dollars because of the complexity of the AR experiences which we bundled together.

A Cohort of Learners

Over three years (2021-2024), a cohort of learners came together to explore how to use augmented reality (AR) to create a community-dispersed exhibit collectively called Discovering Community in the Borderlands. Representatives from Dunbar Pavilion (DP, an African American community center), Mission Garden (MG, an ethnobotanical garden), Borderlands Theater (BT, a Hispanic theater company that uses community oral history stories to create theatrical works), Pascua Yaqui Tribe Department of Language and Culture (PYT), and the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center (TCCC) worked together with the UA’s Arizona State Museum (whose focus is on Indigenous history and culture), Poetry Center (PC), and Center for Digital Humanities (a research and innovation incubator for undergraduate and graduate students pursuing digital technology projects, CDH). We also worked with the UA Library’s Special Collections staff.

At first, like deer in the headlights, we wondered what we had gotten ourselves into. Our biweekly meetings were peppered with the essential questions “What is AR?” “What can we do with it?” “How does it work?!” As we eventually learned, augmented reality is different from, though often confused for, virtual reality, which takes over a space and creates a new environment, requiring special glasses (and bigger budgets). Rather than creating a totally different place, augmented reality literally augments what is in the space you see. Instead of special glasses, you look through your phone to see the new augmented reality elements overlaid on the scene in front of you.

Once we thought we sort of understood what AR offered us, we brainstormed themes to guide the creation of our linked exhibit stories. We approached each exhibit as a way for users to discover the diverse communities whose histories and cultural traditions have formed this area of the Southwest borderlands we call home. Looking at our community as a place of abundance, we focused on stories about:

• Resilience/adaptation/belonging
• Reconciliation/reparations/race and identity
• Plants and use in the environment/foodways/healing
• Journey/migrations/immigration
• Cultural expression/celebrations/community gathering
• Entrepreneurship/heritage businesses

These themes reflect the diversity of the many partners sites’ missions, activities, and related community history. They helped direct content brainstorming that each partner did with colleagues and volunteers at its own organization. Each site’s exhibit story does not reflect all the themes, but often includes examples of more than one of them.

Throughout the project, everyone was learning. The UA students charged with designing the app and website that would deliver our stories had to find an appropriate platform and learn to do 3D scanning of museum objects, 3D video filming, holographic recording, and editing of all the above, plus how to render graphics, add voiceovers to images, and stitch together related AR elements into mini exhibit experiences. The curators, theater producers, educators, and community leaders were challenged to bring their storytelling and exhibit knowledge to a very different type of presentation than a static exhibit or public program. They delved into oral histories, archives, and collections to discover elements to include in their stories. They sought out community members, tradition-bearers, and actors to take part in presenting the stories by agreeing to be recorded holographically or via 360 or 2D video. Each community partner worked with ASM and CDH to identify objects, images, oral histories, and poetry and to think like a museum curator in designing how these flowed together to deliver a message. Staff from the UA Poetry Center helped us incorporate poetry into the experiences. They also took the lead in creating related writing prompt postcards for those who use the AR exhibits. These writing activities were presented at all AR experience launch programs and are available on the DCB website.

It took most of the first year to figure out the technology, draft exhibit stories, and identify content, and in many cases invite people to serve as the voices and faces in the experiences. We spent the next two years refining which digital platform to use to present the AR; locating exact sites for the AR; researching images, objects, poetry, and participants; digitizing content; recording holograms; designing the website; designing signage; and building and installing it. We also did a lot of adjusting as we tested the AR experiences with community members.

We demanded a lot of the student developers and multimedia specialist. We wanted a seamless experience where users can scan one QR code for multiple AR activities. Ultimately, after trying various platforms, they homed in on Blippar. Blippar allowed us to present diverse AR approaches within one space—holograms, digital photo walls, 360 and 2D videos, 3D objects—and to add “buttons” to press, text for identification, and captions. Users access all of this simply by scanning one QR code located on a sign.

Even once the stories and tangible objects were woven together into a digital story, we still felt AR was baffling. We were still asking, “But how does it work?” “Why can’t I see it on my phone?” “Where did the hologram go?” When it finally worked for each of us, it felt like magic. Then we discovered we needed to caption the experiences, not only for accessibility, but also for practicability: sometimes it is noisy outside and hard to hear elements. That created a new challenge for our app developers and multimedia specialist.

Sharing the AR Exhibits

The problem with AR is that you can’t see it! There is nothing there except a sign with a QR code on it. We knew our signage needed to be enticing, but we discovered we also had to tell people to scan the QR code to begin! Even then, it works better with a nudge and helper: people are more apt to use the experiences if someone is there directing them to scan the code and wait for it to load. How were we going to get people to find our AR exhibit sites and try the experiences? As part of our advertising campaign, we created a teaser to introduce people to the entire Discovering Community in the Borderlands linked exhibits.

In this teaser, you are greeted by Marc Pinate, Director of Borderlands Theater, as a hologram who tells you about the AR exhibits and shows you examples of 3D objects and 2D photographs, and a map of where the sites are while encouraging you to go to the DCB website to get directions and learn more. We used this mini AR experience on postcards that were distributed by each partner and placed at libraries, as well as on Tucson’s trolly car plaques, and on advertisements in local newspapers.

Project Results and Benefits

We did several launch events where we were on-hand to help users. At these we also encouraged people to do the writing prompt activities and to fill out evaluation forms. User comments included:

• “I loved the movement between the historical object, that then turns into an engaging animation to bring the aesthetics into lived space, that then intertwine with the dancers! Wow—what a wonderful demonstration of objects connecting to lived experience on tradition.” [referring to ASM’s AR experience]
• “It gives access to so many more people and places.”
• “It’s a quick, fun way to learn about our communities/community.”
• “I’m a Tucson archivist and have always wanted more ways to share Tucson history with non-historians. This is an engaging way to teach and share this story.”
• “There is so much hidden history in Tucson. This is the perfect strategy to introduce people to important history.”

The geographically dispersed Discovering Community in the Borderlands exhibit is not a passive experience. It invites dialogue, curiosity, and collaboration. Families, students, and tourists engage with the project, sparking conversations about identity, belonging, cultural resilience, and links among the diverse community histories and traditions that make up Tucson.

This project is an example of how museums can share resources, find funding, and help guide projects that give curatorial authority to community partners. It models shared learning of new techniques for telling stories, and is a unique way to further acceptance of community curation and use of new technologies for museum interpretation. DCB resulted in a website, writing activities, public programs, and a dispersed exhibit of ten different AR experience mini exhibits that share the history, culture, built and natural environment, struggles, joys, and lives of some of the diverse communities that make up the greater Tucson area. The DCB project also strengthened relations between all the project partners and has inspired new projects among them.

The AR Experiences

You can take a physical tour of Tucson as you visit the various AR sites, or go beyond physical boundaries and access them from the website. The project’s website has an interactive map connecting the different sites, as well as background information on each partner, photographs, writing activities, and the QR codes for the AR. Discover community in the Borderlands through these AR exhibit experiences:

Arizona State Museum

By ASM’s front entrance, encounter Amy Juan, a Tohono O’odham community organizer, in hologram form, and listen as she welcomes you to the O’odham himdag (land) where ASM is located and invites you to enjoy the Wak: Tab Basket Dancers. See a pot with Indigenous dancers painted on it swirl around as the dancers glide off and morph into a 360 video of actual Tohono O’odham basket dancers. Hear the gourd rattles keeping the beat and O’odham songs being sung while the group’s director explains the meaning of this traditional dance. In a 2D video, meet O’odham basketweaver Terrol Johnson and see favorite pieces of his in the museum’s vault, and then explore some of these baskets in 3D and a digital photo wall of Johnson’s baskets while he talks about his art practice. Hear O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda read her poem about basketry in O’odham and English and see it scroll across the space.

Borderlands Theater

BT placed its AR exhibit at a park and launched it as part of its theatrical production of Westside Stories. Following a series of QR codes along a pathway, engage with either an actor as hologram sharing stories of the Hispanic and Chinese community whose barrio this was or with historic photographs of the area with voiceovers about related community experiences. You can also watch two animated videos telling the story of the “Gardens of Gethsemane,“ a large sculpture installed at the park. All the experiences in this AR exhibit are offered bilingually in Spanish and English.

Chinese History Downtown

This site is located on a walkway above what was a bustling multicultural community until urban renewal developers in the 1960s tore it down to build the Tucson Convention Center. The AR makes this hidden history visible once again. Watch a 2D video and hear Tina Liao recount the history of this bustling community and learn how cultural objects and documents reflecting that life have been preserved. See historic photographs, letters, and identification cards of members of the Chinese community of that time, and manipulate 3D cultural objects recovered during archaeology of the site. Discover how families maintained connections between their lives in Tucson and China.

Dunbar Pavilion

DP’s AR exhibit is accessible by scanning a QR code posted on the fence surrounding the 1917 Dunbar School (now a community center). Meet a Dunbar board member in hologram form and listen to him read the 1987 Mayoral Proclamation about the desegregation of the Dunbar School. Gaze at a gallery of historic photographs depicting joyous gatherings of Tucson’s twentieth-century African American community, documenting both celebration and resilience. Join the Tucson Slide Societies’ dance class and try a few steps in sync with the dancers.

Mission Garden

At the garden entrance, a hologram of gardener and community liaison Meagan Lopez introduces you to the history of farming in the Tucson area, which spans thousands of years. You can see historic photographs and hear a poem in five languages about the garden while taking a 360 tour of the grounds. Meet Ruben Cu:k Ba’ak and listen to his poem about O’odham foods, colonization, and the power of his culture for health.

Pascua Yaqui Tribe

Visitors to the Tribal Administration Building will find the AR sign near the entrance. Holographic Yaqui tribal members from Mexico and various Yaqui communities in Arizona share poetry, a rap song, and stories about love of their culture and their hopes for a resilient Yaqui community. Historic photographs and a map showing these communities can also be seen.

Tucson Chinese Cultural Center

Engage with the various activities of the TCCC’s Tucson Chinese School through 360 videos. Enjoy a traditional guzheng concert, read a poem about the instrument, and virtually touch the stringed instrument. Sit in on a Chinese language class. Be awed by the skill of young yo-yo students performing tricks while hearing about the history of the Chinese yo-yo.

Tucson Chinese Markets

In the tiny town of Tucson in the 1880s, a few Chinese settlers were selling provisions. By the turn of the twentieth century, the number had grown to forty stores, offering groceries including fresh produce from Chinese-owned farms on the banks of Tucson’s Santa Cruz river. They catered to the Mexican, Black, and Indigenous residents of the neighborhoods where the Chinese settled. The total number of Chinese stores peaked in the 1950s at over 100 and then began to decline in the 1960s. Although few are left, the evidence of them is apparent throughout the city. Visit three Chinese Market sites to see historic photographs and watch video reminiscences about these markets. The three highlighted were home to the historic Lim You Market, established in the 1920s/1930s and now housing Screwbean Brewery; New Empire Market, established originally as Joe Tang’s Market in the 1930s and still in business and Chinese-owned today; and the former Alan’s Market.

Now in the twenty-first century, the Carter is working to reinvigorate this historical legacy of recognizing living artists. Over the past eleven years, staff have reignited our efforts to actively exhibit and commission works by American artists practicing today. Placing these works in dialogues with those in the museum’s historical collection, we are allowing audiences to experience the diverse and changing landscape of American art as it unfolds while providing context to reflect upon how we reached these new junctures. In the process, we are inviting in new and more diverse voices and perspectives, illuminating historical artworks for a wider audience. Highlighting past as precedent, this approach aims to meet the mandate for museums to foster new ideas that contribute to the national conversation and dialogue on the issues of today.

Our recent work with living artists falls under several strategies. The first has been creating a contemporary collecting plan for works on paper, building upon the museum’s initiative to collect such works when few other institutions were buying them in the 1960s and 1970s. Under this plan, we are actively acquiring contemporary drawings and prints, which are in turn inspiring new exhibitions, including a rotating program in the permanent collection galleries called Re/Framed, which draws on our historic and contemporary photographs and works on paper to offer visitors new experiences and fresh ways of looking at our historical collections.

Another strategy involves a series of rotating commissions for the museum’s atrium, including works by Sedrick Huckaby (2013-14), Esther Pearl Watson (2015-16), and Gabriel Dawe (2016-present).

Dawe’s currently running installation highlights the impact of this strategy. An element of Dawe’s work is making sure voices long neglected in the museum sphere, including the LGBTQ and Mexican American communities of which he is a part, take up metaphorical and literal space. Dawe uses sewing thread to forge connections, elicit joy, and enliven often stark spaces like the walls of a gallery or museum. His installation Plexus no. 34 (2016) brings light and color and domesticity into one of the most prominent spaces in the museum. Its kinetic qualities and the fact that it shifts with the changing conditions of the day, the weather, or the seasons, encourages somatic engagement and causes people to marvel, to dance, and to engage in disarming conversation, creating a communal experience of joy.

This atrium series has transitioned into an annual commission for living artists to activate the museum’s first-floor sloping gallery, which connects the Carter’s two buildings, including work by Justin Favela (2020), Natasha Bowdoin (2020-21), Stephanie Syjuco (2022-23), Leonardo Drew (2023-24), and Jean Shin (2024-25). For these site-specific commissions, we are intentional about connecting the past and present, asking artists to respond to our historical collection, focusing on what inspires or moves them. Through their deep connection to the museum’s collection, the commissioned artists create work that likely could not materialize in another setting, and often begin historical research that extends beyond the confines of their installations at the Carter, thereby shaping their oeuvres in exciting ways.

Justin Favela, for example, was captivated by nineteenth-century Mexican lithographs by Casimiro Castro. Castro’s juxtaposition of nature and industry became the impetus for Favela’s giant piñata abstract murals, and we were able to show the historical works alongside the installation it inspired. Because Favela’s work is highly collaborative in its execution, many people came to help in his creative process and found themselves feeling welcome at the Carter for the first time. In so doing, they not only met and came to love Favela, but also gained a new appreciation for works that had not been displayed in many years.

Artist Natasha Bowdoin similarly took inspiration from the Carter’s rarely seen collection of nineteenth-century floral dictionaries to create a night garden constructed from paper. Like Favela, Bowdoin emphasized a theme of inclusivity by creating a garden where eclectic representations of nature function as symbols of humanity to inspire a message of a more peaceful, interconnected world.

A dynamic synergy occurred between historic and contemporary sculpture when Leonardo Drew completed his sloping gallery installation alongside a riveting new look at the work of Louise Nevelson. Creating an immersive experience through topographies at once looming in size and stunning in their intricacies, Drew not only connected his hands-on techniques and wooden materials with Nevelson’s assemblages, but also those by collection artists Arthur Dove and George Morrison, establishing an unprecedented dialogue across materials and time. Reactivating sculptural histories while addressing contemporary issues related to climate change, Drew’s commission reified the museum’s mission to readdress the past while looking at the present and future directions of America and its art. This July, the sloping gallery has been transformed once again with Jean Shin’s installation The Museum Body (2024), which takes the museum and its varied, often unrecognized, workforce as its subject.

Beyond building these dedicated spaces for contemporary works, we have also worked to connect our permanent collection’s historical works more to the lived experience of our visitors. For example, one of the most utilized and evocative works in the Carter’s collection is one of eight known casts of John Quincy Adams Ward’s bronze sculpture The Freedman (1863). The sculpture is one of the first renditions of a Black man cast in bronze in the US and one of the only depictions of emancipation where the figure is the agent of his own freedom, rather than subjugated to a white emancipator. While this rendition of the topic was highly aspirational for the nineteenth century, particularly as the outcome of the Civil War was still unknown when it was created, many members of today’s public see it differently, finding the image of a Black man holding shackles a continuing reminder of societal inequities. To live up to our goal to engage more with the present, we decided the time had come to square these two realities, critically interrogating the impact of sculpture in public life and centering the voices of living intellectuals and creative professionals addressing agency and emancipation (or the lack thereof) in historical and contemporary expression.

The resulting show began with context—an introduction of Civil War-era works contextualizing the Carter’s version of The Freedman—but really Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation (2023) was an opportunity to feature seven contemporary Black artists whose respective practices engage the medium of sculpture and installation connected to themes of freedom or imprisonment, the long legacy of the Civil War in the United States, and body and personhood. The artists—Sadie Barnette, Maya Freelon, Hugh Hayden, Letitia Huckaby, Jeffrey Meris, Sable Elyse Smith, and Alfred Conteh—not only had the opportunity to create a new work of their choosing that engaged with history, but also shaped our audience’s perceptions of the contemporary relevance of historical art. The exhibition toured to three academically affiliated museums, and we are seeing the ripple effects of an exhibition that not only engaged a general audience, but also served as a provocation for the next generation of scholars.

One of the great challenges of working with historical collections is how to connect with a multitude of audiences and relate the endeavors of the past to lived experience today. After all, if the context of an object is firmly anchored in the past, how might the people of today find meaning in it, or see themselves reflected in it? Placing contemporary works in historical galleries is simple enough on its face—the challenge is to look beyond aesthetic or historical convergence and make meaning of this integration. At the Carter, we have worked hard to connect past to present in robust and purposeful ways that ring loud and clear, rather than echo.

The profound impact of making infants visible in our museum led us to reflect back on AAM’s Excellence and Equity report (first published in 1992 and then 2008), particularly its second key idea: “Museums must become more inclusive places that welcome diverse audiences, but first they should reflect our society’s pluralism in every aspect of their operations and programs.” As the next step in our efforts to make this true for young audiences, we decided, based on conversations with early childhood educators and caregivers, to develop CSM’s first infant education program, Art Crawl. Here, we’ll share our experience with this program and our successes with infant inclusion. While this post focuses on our own experiences in art museums, we welcome conversation about infant programming and initiatives in other types of museums.

Art Crawl: Engaging Our Youngest Audience

CSM started offering Art Crawl in March 2022 as a program for families with infants between birth and fourteen months to engage with art, build relationships, and learn together. Surrounded by Clyfford Still’s expansive body of work, infants and caregivers who participate are invited to engage with a variety of multisensory materials that support discussion about the artworks around them. Art Crawl directly addresses the historical exclusion of children by creating an inclusive environment where our youngest visitors can feel a sense of belonging.

Drawing pedagogical inspiration from the Reggio Emilia approach, Art Crawl values the people involved, recognizing that infants, caregivers, and museum educators are all lifelong learners who contribute rich assets to the program and each other. We see the children as current citizens of the world with individual preferences and interests, who can engage in and determine their own learning experiences as well as contribute to the continuous development of our programming. We see the caregivers as the children’s first and best educators in every environment, encouraging them to build relationships between ideas, thoughts, things, and settings as they pursue their natural curiosity. We respect caregivers’ differences in values, beliefs, and social practices as they show up in program interactions. Finally, we value the collaboration and intentionality of our museum educators, viewing them as researchers, always observing and listening to children to understand their curiosities, and responding to their needs. Our museum educators do not seek to control nor to wield power; instead, they collaborate with the children as they discover the world and engage in inquiry. These program and institutional values allow Art Crawl to be a place of learning for all people.

When we first started Art Crawl, we offered it twice each month, but with the support of the PNC Grow Up Great grant, we later expanded the program to three times per month, with themes changing monthly. The program begins in The Making Space, our hands-on creation studio adjacent to our galleries. We gather in this space for introductions, community-building, and exploration of open-ended materials related to monthly themes. Then, our educators lead participants into the galleries to explore the artwork and engage with intentional provocations based on the theme. Examples of program themes include:

• ABC’s of Curating, written in collaboration with Bailey Placzek, our Curator of Collections, Catalogue Raisonné Research and Project Manager, focuses on close-looking practices and infant aesthetic preferences.
• Guardians of the Galleries: Conservation Practices, developed in collaboration with James Squires, our Chief Conservator, invites infants to explore cause and effect and the concept of color theory.
• Into the Archives, written alongside our Archives team, focuses on the exploration of our archives and the components of storytelling.

“You Can’t Start Early Enough”

CSM is fortunate to be a part of a growing movement in museums and cultural organizations committed to serving our youngest audiences. Last year, Routledge published Kathy Danko-McGhee’s Viewing Art With Babies: First Encounters, the first book to provide practical strategies for fostering experiences of looking at art with infants. Earlier this year, a recent article in the New York Times, “Children and Museums: You Can’t Start Early Enough,” proclaimed that programming for young children in traditional museums is “on the rise, now more than ever.” A museum consultant interviewed for the article attributed the current growth to two factors: museums’ future financial stability and alignment with their educational missions.

One of the museums that has joined this movement is the Vero Beach Museum of Art (VBMA), whose infant and toddler programming now includes a monthly Museum Babies & Toddlers program and a weekly Museum Stories program. In a recent conversation with the museum’s Director of Education, Sara Klein, we learned that the impetus for these programs came from a 2018 commitment to make the museum more family-friendly. At that time, the museum lacked any formal programming with an explicit invitation for families with young children, which Klein believes is the best “way in” for the audience. Fortunately, VBMA had staff at the time with more than fifteen years of experience in early childhood education, giving it the in-house expertise to develop and support this new programming. In the years since, the programs’ success has extended to financial impact. As Klein shared, “For last year’s annual fund letter, we invited a mom who went through the sequence of our programming offerings, starting with infant programming, to write a letter to our potential funders. Her letter and photos netted us nearly double our annual fund goal.”

CSM’s infant programs have followed a similar trajectory, drawing on in-house expertise to attract families who may not otherwise visit. As one caregiver participant shared, “Because now I know that Clyfford Still is a good place, I’m going to focus on [returning there].” Art Crawl consistently sells out each month. CSM Director Joyce Tsai notes, “Our infant program has garnered the attention of the field and has attracted funders who want to invest in this research-based, high-impact program at our museum. Its financial impact has been a net positive because of the new audiences and funding it can attract.”

Continuous Shared Learning

Creating and implementing a program for infants and their caregivers shapes an institution’s perspectives on including young children as members of an art museum’s community. It empowers staff to understand that because art can sustain dynamic, interactive engagement, it can support infant experiences and development, which become an essential and additive aspect of the museum community. As Art Crawl began in 2022, the staff at CSM embraced this shift. For example, CSM’s Manager of Visitor Experience, Andy Cushen, shared, “We are certainly more deliberate with how we approach children, and we are likely to ask them more questions and take their observations of art more seriously than we may have before. Children affirm for us just how unnecessary a prior background in art or the history of Abstract Expressionism is to see the work of Clyfford Still.”

Staff perspectives continue to shift and adapt as we deepen our understanding of this program and our relationships with the community members who have become a consistent part of the museum experience. We see this as ongoing work rather than something to arrive at, making our shared learning an essential part of continuing this work.

This drive for continuous learning led us to partner with Trainer Evaluation to better understand the perspective of adult participants in the program. Five caregivers participated in the first year of this longitudinal study. Trainer Evaluation interviewed each caregiver multiple times about their experiences at Art Crawl and the impacts on their interactions and relationships with their infants. We heard a wide range of emotions and experiences in their responses. For example, some caregivers expressed a sense of anxiety because this was one of their first experiences with their infant in public. In response to this insight, we created a “Know Before You Go” video for caregivers to illustrate what happens before and during the program, which we share on our website and in the program reminder email.

More than anything, we heard that Art Crawl brings a sense of joy to its participants and cultivates a sense of belonging at CSM. One Art Crawl participant shared, “Overall, it made me think that Clyfford Still is one of those places that is for everyone … I’ve been to places before where it’s like, oh, I’m too loud; my kid is too annoying; this is too delicate. Even if I worry a little bit about keeping the art safe, the fact that the program exists makes me more likely to feel comfortable bringing my family there.”

CSM continues demonstrating its commitment to deepening children’s early experiences with art. We see the value in learning alongside others in our field and consistently inviting new perspectives to challenge and deepen our own understanding of our programming and approaches to education.

The Future of Art Crawl

Now, in Art Crawl’s third year, we’ve started expanding the program beyond the walls of the Clyfford Still Museum. Following a demonstration of the program during the 2023 AAM Annual Meeting in Denver, Emily Thomas, Head of Learning + Programs at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), approached us about licensing the model with funding from the Art Bridges Foundation. Grant funds will cover the cost of training and ensure that Art Crawl is free and open to the public over the next two years. Thomas shared that, “pre-pandemic, MMFA offered a monthly infant program called Baby and Me, and [the community] have expressed the need to bring programming back for caregivers and developing young learners.” The process of licensing the program for MMFA (which was new to CSM staff) led to the development of the Art Crawl Handbook, a professional development series, and a marketing toolkit, but most importantly, a new community of museums facilitating and learning from this program and the families who participate in it. We are grateful to have new partners in shared learning. If you are interested in licensing the program from the Clyfford Still Museum to bring the joy of Art Crawl to your museum, learn more at clyffordstillmuseum.org/artcrawl or email learning@clyffordstillmuseum.org.

In addition to expanding to other states, CSM has begun expanding Art Crawl into other community sites around Denver, after hearing from various community partners about increased requests for infant programming. In fall 2023, we received a three-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for this purpose. Denver Public Libraries and Catholic Charities Mariposa became committed partners with CSM on this grant, offering the community’s cultural context and collaboration on program development. We are designing a mobile version of the Art Crawl program tailored to implementation at community venues. Our partners have been essential to this expansion, offering their depth of insight from the communities they serve as we consider how to bring an infant program to a variety of different locations throughout the city.

In closing, given our understanding of the historical context, community needs, and the inclusion imperative in our field and individual museum missions, we ask how museums can effectively foster growth in infant offerings in meaningful and sustainable ways.

One small step we can take toward being more trauma-responsive is flagging content that is of a sensitive nature with content warnings. But currently museums are doing this inconsistently if at all, and this seems to be partly a matter of hesitancy or uncertainty about the practice. This phenomenon is not unique to museums—content warnings are a debated point of conversation in many different settings, including education, film, and theater.

To get to the bottom of these debates, and advocate that we take a proactive approach, I want to explain what content warnings are, dispel some of the misconceptions I hear about them, and share some best practices and helpful resources I’ve come across for implementing them.

What Are Content Warnings?

Content warnings are clear written or verbal statements made prior to someone experiencing potentially disturbing content, whether an exhibition, a film, a stage production, or anything else. They are also known as advance warnings, and are sometimes used interchangeably with trigger warnings, but there are nuances between the terms. A trigger warning is a specific type of content warning, often with more precise language than a content warning, that recognizes that some content may cause intense psychological and/or physiological symptoms for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), complex PTSD, and other experiences of trauma, anxiety, or sensory sensitivities. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on the wider umbrella term of content warnings.

Content warnings are a way of welcoming people in and ensuring that they feel a sense of safety. When a person feels unsafe—when they are triggered, retraumatized, or shocked in some way beyond their capacity—their prefrontal cortex goes offline. They can’t learn, question, think, create, or connect if their nervous system is overwhelmed or if they are experiencing trauma responses like fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop. When museums provide content warnings, are thoughtful about where objects are installed, and provide appropriate framing and resources, we enable visitors to engage within their window of presence so that they can experience what the museum has to offer.

Letting people know what to expect from content of a sensitive nature gives them information so they can make a choice. When someone is given advance notice, they can decide if a particular experience is for them or not. In some cases they might even decide not to opt out entirely, but to participate on a different day or with the right support and preparation. Think about your own life experiences and times when maybe you needed to watch or read something lighter, or had to take a break from the news for your mental health, or perhaps experienced the loss of a loved one and didn’t have the capacity to take in emotionally charged content.

There are several subject areas that warrant giving people advance notice, such as gun violence, racial violence, self-harm, domestic abuse, graphic sexual imagery, loud noises, strobe lighting, and more. (Please refer to the list at the end of this article for a more robust set of topics and sensory inputs.) Someone dealing with substance abuse might be further harmed by seeing content depicting drug use, someone with an eating disorder could be triggered by seeing emaciated bodies or behaviors like purging, and someone who has experienced suicidal ideation or the suicide of a loved one could be overwhelmed by content related to suicide. Content warnings can also help caregivers make decisions around what is age-appropriate for the children they are visiting with.

Arguments Against Content Warnings

In discussing content warnings with colleagues, I’ve found that some people very clearly understand the need for them, while others are dismissive of them. I’ve tried my best to unpack the arguments and rationale people use in the latter cases, so I can understand where the objections are coming from and better convey why they’re a crucial responsibility. Here are some of the common arguments I hear and the holes I see in them:

1. “Content warnings are too expansive.”

One of the reasons people often give for not wanting to include a content warning has to do with the breadth of potential triggers. For example, a person may say “triggers can be anything, so it’s pointless to provide a content warning.” While it’s true that triggers can be anything (e.g., smells, textures, tastes, imagery, sounds, emotional states, sensations, phrases or tones, certain interpersonal interactions, and more), there is some material that is more widely sensitive in nature and likely to trigger people based on their lived experience. Our inability to account for every single trigger doesn’t mean we can’t account for many of them.

2. “Content warnings prevent healing.”

Another argument people make is that if people avoid their triggers, they will never learn to cope or heal from their trauma. While recovering from trauma does sometimes involve learning to identify triggers and reduce the impact they have, that’s something an individual should be allowed to work on and navigate at their own pace, ideally with the support of a trauma therapist or someone else trusted in their life. I don’t think museums or any other public institutions should have the attitude that forgoing content warnings will somehow help people develop a more resilient nervous system. To me, this sounds less like genuine concern than shaming trauma survivors for being “too sensitive,” which I find particularly offensive knowing so many of us who are incredibly strong and compassionate. You are not “coddling” someone by providing a content warning; you are demonstrating that you have compassion and empathy for their life, history, and struggles.

3. “Content warnings make anxiety worse.”

There are also people who point to studies saying that content warnings make someone experience anticipatory anxiety, stirring up a reaction before they have even encountered the content. I think there are a couple of issues with this argument.

First, if someone is feeling anxious over a content warning, it’s likely because they have underlying trauma or experiences that do put them at risk for being triggered by the material. A traumatized nervous system will make someone feel more hypervigilant, possibly increasing feelings of anxiety, panic, or overwhelm. If reading a content warning causes someone to feel this way, imagine what might happen if they encountered the material without advance warning.

Second, even if it is true that a content warning causes a startle sensation, that response can be a helpful cue for the visitor. Based on their reaction, they can decide whether to 1) follow through on engaging in the exhibition, feeling more prepared than if there was no content warning, or 2) opt out, feeling they were given enough information to make the right choice for themselves in that moment. Moving through a response like this can help build resilience.

Another issue with the argument that content warnings make people anxious is that people are often referring to general content warnings, which are not best practice to begin with. It is true that content warning that is too broad can potentially create more anxiety than necessary, because a person is left guessing about what they might face. For example, saying “this exhibition contains violent imagery” is very different from saying “this exhibition contains imagery of interpersonal violence and discussion of domestic abuse.”

4. “Content warnings are a form of censorship.”

At many museums there are debates, and sometimes clashes, over where to position certain objects. For example, a museum might be planning to hang a work of art that depicts racial violence, and a few staff feel strongly that it should be positioned in the lobby or some busy interstitial area, perhaps with the thinking that the work is so powerful they want all visitors to see it, or that they want to communicate loudly that this is one of the topics they are addressing at the museum. When other staff advocate for the work being positioned somewhere more discreet because of its traumatic content, these staff members might fire back, calling that censorship.

Being trauma-informed is not about censorship; it’s about thinking about neurobiology and considering all nervous systems with care and compassion. Jarring objects in lobbies or interstitial places do not give people a chance to get oriented to the museum, nor do they give people a choice to bypass seeing them. What if you are a Black teen visiting an art museum for the first time with your school and you have lived experience of being attacked because of the color of your skin and one of the first things you encounter is a large painting depicting people that look like you being attacked? Or if you are a survivor of rape and you go to an art museum as part of a social prescription program, only to encounter a work depicting rape that you can’t avoid and weren’t given any notice about?

This is not to say that museums should not be showing such works at all, but that the right context is important, both for the visitor and for the work itself. Works that are activating or have challenging material need to be properly witnessed. They deserve the right setting and framing to fully support visitors in giving them the time and attention they require. A visitor can’t acknowledge their own internal reactions to a work, notice and name emotions and bodily sensations, and reflect on what’s before them in a space that isn’t set up to allow for that. It doesn’t do justice to the object or its maker to position it in a space where visitors can’t even sit and hear their own thoughts, where there are multiple things happening that don’t involve contemplating meaning (e.g., ticket scanning, information desks, and elevator banks). Following trauma-informed guidelines doesn’t take away a work’s provocation or power; if anything, it supports them by reducing the chances of someone becoming emotionally flooded and thus unable to engage.

5. “Content warnings take away from the experience.”

I once read an article in The Guardian where Sir Ian McKellen said he was against content warnings, because he felt that theater was meant to shock and giving people advance information ruined this experience. I completely disagree, whether we are talking about the theater, films, or museums. For one thing, it’s very easy for people who don’t need content warnings to skip over them, if they prefer. They are there for people who do need them, the same way physical accommodations are there for people who need them.

One of the best content warnings I’ve read ever was for Jagged Little Pill: The Musical. It read:

“Age recommendation of 14+. Please note: This production contains strong language, adult themes, drug use, and moments of sexual violence that some may find triggering. Jagged Little Pill addresses many topics of contemporary life, including sexual assault, opiate addiction, transracial adoption, gender and LGBTQIA+ identity, marriage struggles, and mental health.”

The warning also highlighted the use of strobe lights, haze, and strobing video effects, and provided additional information and resources for those who wanted them. For me, this warning did not lessen the impact of this production at all. I felt every ounce of that production in my body and experienced a range of emotions, but I knew what I was getting into, so that I was able to stay present throughout the performance even though some of my past trauma paralleled what took place on the stage. For some people with unprocessed or fresh trauma taking in this production might be too much, but thanks to the content warning they can make that decision for themselves.

Rather than taking away from the experience, content warnings build trust between the audience and the institution. By consistently providing content warnings that follow best practices, museums are communicating to visitors and staff that they are reliable and trustworthy. On the flipside, when they do not provide them, or haphazardly provide them based on the whims of different staff persons, or provide them only after a visitor complains, their trustworthiness plummets. To truly show care, we must take a proactive rather than reactive approach.

Content Warning Best Practices

A content warning should be as specific as possible.

Think about advisories that you’ve seen on film or tv series that were too general, saying something like, “This film contains nudity, strong language, and violence.” That doesn’t really tell a person much, besides perhaps determining age-appropriateness. For example, based on their lived experience, a person might be able to watch a movie with some forms of violence (such as battle scenes with swords), but not other kinds (such as depictions of bombings in war). A helpful content warning would say something like: “This section of the exhibition contains discussion of sexual assault and suicide, along with drawings that depict self-harm,” or, “This gallery space includes a sound installation of sirens that sound for thirty seconds every seven minutes, as well as periods of dimmed lighting during the thirty seconds the sirens are sounding.”

Give visitors the information; don’t tell them what to do or how to feel.

Everyone is different, and different things may help someone at different times. A museum can’t make blanket recommendations of how someone should experience an object or a particular space or program, because there’s no guarantee how someone will experience something. Museum visitors are not monolithic. We shouldn’t edge someone into trying something they might have reservations about trying.

Provide content warnings in the right place and at the right time.

If a particular exhibition or gallery contains content of a sensitive nature, let people know before they’ve entered the space. Be clear about whether it’s the entire exhibition or gallery, or one section of it. If it’s one section, share if there’s any way to bypass that section or not. For example, “The third gallery in this exhibition contains pornographic imagery. If you would like to skip this portion of the exhibition, you will need to pass through the space.” Another content warning sign should appear in the gallery or section of the gallery with the sensitive content to help cue visitors.

Ensure the content warning is highly visible.

Don’t bury a content warning at the end of an introductory text wall or a web page of an exhibition. Provide the information in multiple spots and in highly visible locations so that visitors have easy access to it.

Don’t add additional information to a content warning sign.

Messaging on a content warning sign should be focused. Adding additional text such as “please do not touch the art” diverts focus from key decision-making information.

Don’t make assumptions about how someone will experience something.

While experiences at museums can feel therapeutic to some people, this isn’t true for everyone. A museum might assume, for example, that a mindfulness program it offerd is soothing for all and therefore fail to build in trauma-informed supports. While it can be helpful to remind people attending a program that they are free to leave when they want, please remember that if someone hasn’t been given proper advance warning about something potentially activating and they end up getting triggered they might not be able to leave even if they want to. Sometimes when trauma is triggered a person might freeze and feel unable to escape what their body and mind is registering as dangerous.

Don’t call out specific diagnoses or groups of people.

For example, saying “this gallery contains audio of screaming that plays every five minutes. Visitors who have PTSD or autism might find this overwhelming, so please use discretion.” Every person is different, so the museum shouldn’t make assumptions that all people with PTSD or autism will find something overwhelming. This approach can also make people with these diagnoses feel othered or unwelcomed, instead of normalizing their needs.

There can be exceptions to this, such as the content warning I wrote for Guadalupe Maravilla’s Healing Sound Baths installation and audio playlist at MoMA. It reads: “Sound Baths can be soothing and healing for some nervous systems, but not all. If you are sensitive to sensory stimuli or have unprocessed trauma, the experience might bring up unexpected emotions, sensations, physical responses, and/or disorientation. Go at your own pace and check in with yourself. If you notice yourself beginning to feel overwhelmed or feel dissociated, it’s a good idea to stop listening and take steps to get grounded.” In this case, it felt important to give people a heads up that the experience can bring unprocessed trauma to the surface before someone is ready to deal with it, because of my own past experiences being overwhelmed by yoga and meditation.

Consider staff too.

For trauma-informed practices to really be folded in museum culture, we need to also think about how all this applies to staff as well as visitors. I think a lot about Andrea Montiel de Shuman’s article “No Longer in Extremis” from 2020, where she wrote about her experiences having her trauma and advocacy for trauma-informed interpretation dismissed in the museum workplace. I’ve been in meetings where the conversation centered on a work of art about trauma matching my own, and experienced that horrible feeling of being sucked back in time, powerless and frozen and unable to make it stop. I’ve also witnessed other colleagues become triggered during meetings and end up in the place of trying to both advocate and take care of themselves. It happens far too often. I’ve heard colleagues express that they want to feel safe—safe to share their opinions on important matters, safe to be in community with one another, and safe so that they can do their jobs to the best of their ability. But how can people feel safe, from a nervous system point of view, if they aren’t being given context and choice? Meetings, just as much as an exhibition, sometimes need a content warning. And everyone should have a choice about how they want to engage or opt out of an experience.

A (non-exhaustive) list of where content warnings can be helpful:

Subject matter

• Ableism
• Abortion
• Abuse (e.g., sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse, domestic abuse, childhood abuse, incest)
• Adoption (e.g., interracial adoption, abandoned by birth parents)
• Animal cruelty or death
• Blood
• Bullying
• Classism
• Death, dying, or grieving (e.g., parental loss, death of a child, death due to violent accident or war)
• Eating disorders (food restriction, emaciated bodies, purging, body checking, binge eating, fatphobia, body shaming, diet talk, body loathing, exercise addiction)
• Explicit language
• Foster care
• Gambling
• Gun violence (e.g., armed invasions)
• Hoarding
• Homophobia and heterosexism
• Immigration, migration, or displacement
• Incarceration
• Institutionalization (e.g., inpatient treatment for mental illness)
• Isolation and loneliness
• Kidnapping, stalking, or abduction
• Marital struggles, divorce, or custody battles
• Medical procedures, injuries, or trauma
• Mental illness
• Miscarriages
• Natural disasters, fire, or climate crisis
• Neglect
• Police brutality
• Poverty, food scarcity, or housing insecurity
• Pregnancy, childbirth, or infertility
• Racism, racial violence, or racial slurs
• Religious hatred (e.g., antisemitism and Islamophobia)
• School shootings
• Self-harm
• Sexism and misogyny
• Sexual assault or rape
• Sexual content (e.g., sex workers, sex trafficking, pornography)
• Slavery or servitude
• Substance abuse
• Suicide or suicidal ideation
• Transphobia and transmisogyny
• Violence (e.g., murder, torture)
• War (e.g., bombing, hostages)

Sensory inputs

• Audience participation or interaction
• Bright lights or extreme lighting design
• Cavernous spaces
• Darkness
• Fog or mists
• Foods with known allergens
• Hazy lights or atmosphere
• Intense or sudden changes in light levels
• Jarring sounds (e.g., sirens or doors slamming)
• Loud sounds, changes in volume, high-pitched tones, intense bass, or shouting/screaming
• Mirrored spaces
• Overlapping sounds
• Scents and fragrances
• Sound baths
• Strobe lights, strobing videos, or flashing lights
• Temperatures (e.g., overly hot or cold conditions, cold wind/blowing)
• Textures in interactive installations (slimy, sticky, etc.)
• Tight spaces, low ceilings
• Uncomfortable seating (seats without backs, hard seats, sloped seats, seating that is too low)
• Uneven floors
• Vast open spaces, spaces with glass partitions, or elevated perspectives (e.g., bridges overlooking open spaces)
• Vibrations

This is a recorded session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. Panelists in this session share how they incorporate Spanish language into visitor and staff experiences. Featuring four case studies from a diverse set of institutions, this session explores the presenters’ motivations and approaches for incorporating Spanish into their work, successful strategies, and challenges they have faced. While the focus of this session will be Spanish, the lessons shared for creating access, inclusion, and belonging are applicable across languages and can shed light on how museums and cultural institutions can effectively communicate with diverse audiences, fostering a more inclusive and accessible environment.

Additional Resources:

Creating Access, Inclusion, and Belonging through Language slides

Transcript

Eleanor Hill: Good morning everybody, my name is Eleanor Hill, I am the Senior Evaluation Researcher at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and I am so excited to welcome you to this session today.

We’ve been working together on putting this together for the last few months and we’re really happy to be able to share with you some of our different ideas about how we can create access, inclusion, and belonging through language. And we’re also really excited to hear from you what you all have been doing as well. So, I will hand over to our first presenter, Melissa, and see you shortly.

Melissa Brito-Alvarez: So, I’ll be presenting on the bilingual initiative the Dallas Museum of Art has embarked in the last couple of years. I’m the manager of access programs and resources, so I develop programming and design accessible material for our museum goers and out in the community. Oh, let’s start here. As early as 2016, the Dallas Museum of Art launched its internal language inclusive initiative, dubbed the bilingual initiative. This initiative aimed to enhance the museum’s Spanish language offerings by developing actionable strategies.

The committee overseen this endeavor comprised of representatives from various departments across the museums, ranging from senior to newest staff members. The first wave of the initiative focused on recruitment. The museum aimed to enhance diversity in three primary areas by 2018, in exhibitions that involved improving diversity through label text and didactics through the galleries, necessitating in the creation of a new translator position.

In marketing and visitor experience, this entailed considering the overall experience of general visitors through the website, digital and flyers, I can’t remember the other media name, and then just general media presence out in the community, as well as enhancing our guest services by hiring more bilingual staff.

And lastly, education, this involved hiring more staff to facilitate in outreach programs that were culturally relevant throughout the Dallas Metroplex. These positions included a Spanish-speaking required director of community engagement and a Spanish -speaking required teaching specialist for school and youth programming. And that’s when I was hired. So I was the teaching specialist for family youth in school and access programming. And by 2019 is when I joined the committee.

And I just want to share some of the insights that we gathered. Just setting up for success. If your institution hasn’t had like any initiative of this point, these are kind of some of the points that I think are really important to consider. When I joined, I was the first Spanish speaking representative in the committee. So, you know, it takes time and hiring. I think the biggest problem I saw in the committee at the very beginning is kind of getting stuck on staff grievances and really trying to leveraging what those sound like. And it really takes a moderator to take those grievances and really strong feelings that staff feel, especially when your voice hasn’t been heard or, you know, just kind of the direction of some types of your programming is going, to really take those and kind of put them into action items and listen for most.

And then the — oh, I keep pressing the button, sorry guys. But the most important part that we really committed to was getting to know our city first and it really guided our purpose and goals when being the demographics of the city of Dallas.

So, one in four residents in Dallas are born in another country. The most common country of origin is Mexico followed by El Salvador, Honduras, India and Ethiopia. As of 2017, there were 6 ,000 residents who were immigrants. And 42 % of people living in Dallas speak another language other than English in their homes. And 67 languages are spoken in the homes of DISD students.

So, we really were trying to figure out what languages were spoken in the city. And then we were also guided by this really amazing cultural plan that our city had done. It had taken about a year of a reporting strategy. And it was really to get equitable access to cultural institutions. And in their report, they highlighted cultural relevance and how to gather community through the arts.

Also, they identified cultural deserts within the city and Highlighted where those cultural cultural deserts were located in the typologies of the city and this whole report can be found in the city of Dallas And I think it really helped us kind of gear what zip codes to hone in on for community outreach and Where where we would kind of you know, do all of our programming at Lastly a baseline evaluation to gauge Latinx community needs and perceptions. This evaluation took both onsite and offsite at other cultural institutions through educational programming.

So, we did, oh, I’m sorry. The thematic finds from the two focus groups conducted was non -attendance was deliberate and not default condition resulting from lack of awareness. Belonging is an intersectional, encompassing memories of past cultural interactions and sensitivity to feeling other due to linguistical, cultural, and physical differences. The discourse of control and regulation within gallery spaces makes people feel a sense of cultural dominance for both children and adults.

The opportunity to practice emerging English language skills was a big highlight for subgroup of participants who did not have young children, and the group emphasized in the importance of understanding cultural nuances and avoid the categorization of their experiences as belonging to a singular or homogenous group or subgroup.

And so, with that in mind, we created action items. A lot of the action items were created based on community feedback, feedback from staff, not in the committee, our personal anecdotes and grievances, and examples from other museums. During the development of this list, we realized that this really extended beyond a language checklist for translations. It was truly creating a sense of belonging, so the list had to include important elements like stroller parking and large print labels for the visually impaired.

We employed various strategies to organize the multitude of action plans developed by the committee. Initially, we had about 130 items, which needed to be condensed to fewer than 100. And we used guiding questions to really hone in on what can be done within the group and things like what departments would be needed in this project and is there a budget for it.

So, we ended up with about 70 action items after combining many of the broader themes together. So the action items are accessibility /mobility and seating, amenities, bilingual marketing content, inclusivity representation, community engagement, interpretive material for gallery spaces, membership opportunities, recognition and reckoning, signage, finding and graphics, staff training, staffing and hiring practices, visitor expectations and feedback and welcoming /creating access.

And with all these action items, we kind of had to decide, well, what do we do first? And so, we prioritized everything on a one to five scale using, is it family-friendly, is it welcoming and accessible, does it and tendons, and is there psychological safety involved? And one of the top– so this is kind of like a breakdown of some of the ones that I saw that kind of hit all of them.

Some of the top-rated action items were creating a land acknowledgement. English and Spanish content side by side in larger print and to expand the materials into the permanent collection. Non -binary restrooms, featuring, we would need to feature more local artists and cultural nuances within the gallery spaces and use imagery for more family friendly or like being able to use visual language for our guests to know how to interact and see themselves within the gallery spaces and our marketing materials.

And so, towards the end, it really, a lot of the 70 points didn’t all get, you know, done. Some are still in work in progress right now. Our land, culture, land acknowledgement is still in progress and, but we did increase the Spanish language programming.

We now have individual restrooms. We have changed the style of our social media. We have large print label books for all special exhibitions, but not permanent galleries unless they are being refreshed. And now all special exhibitions are bilingual. And as well as if we get a refresh, the refresh gallery gets bilingual treatment as well.

Something that I think was kind of jarring is that out of the 25 members of the group, five ish years later, ten are still with the museum, so it really, there is a lot of staff turnover, but with staff turnover, there was new ideas and new projects that came about, one of them being our new branding, which was to translate the museum’s and a slogan and so our slogan “Imagine Your Journey” was translated to “Imagina Tu Aventura” and which I personally like a little bit more. And yeah, it’s just been kind of a really interesting progress. I think early on in my career being part of this initiative has really guided my work. Again, when I look at where I’m going to be trying to go do outreach program I still look at that cultural plan that our city did and I think if anyone can take anything away is that it really does take time especially in within an institution that you’re just working in your department. Luckily my institution our director it was just a big initiative for all of us to work in so if you guys have any questions let me know.

Eleanor Hill: Hello everybody, my name is Eleanor Hill, I’m the Senior Evaluation Researcher with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. We are a large museum based in Denver, Colorado. We focus on nature and science and we have a lot of content.

So, when we’re thinking about integrating Spanish language into a museum setting, It is a very large project, as I know it is, for all of us. And so, we have been using research and evaluation as we think about that and try to bring more language into the museum.

So, I want to start just by telling you a little bit about how we think about having Spanish at our museum. We think about it in terms of access, so enabling people to actually come and access our content. We also think about it in terms of inclusion and belonging, it doesn’t matter if you can access it in English if you also want to access it in Spanish.

We think about it in terms of the whole museum experience, we don’t just want pockets of the museum to be available in Spanish, we want to have everything available in Spanish and it’s going to take a very long time. And we also think about it in terms of content translation, as well as translation, and I’ll say a little more about that shortly. The things that we have right now, and this is not a comprehensive list, but some of the things that we have right now are bilingual positions. These were introduced in 2018. They are positions where, as part of a person’s role, they are expected to use their Spanish language skills. This could be speaking with guests or Spanish speaking staff members, it could be translating content, it could be creating content, and staff are paid a differential for using these skills.

We also have several exhibit and programming elements available in Spanish. We have one fully bilingual permanent exhibit, and similar to what Melissa was sharing, we do have elements of other exhibits that have been refreshed that are now available in Spanish as well.

We have bilingual temporary exhibits, if they don’t come to us bilingually, we add some kind of guide to make them bilingual for our guests. We have a Spanish planetarium show, we collaborate every year with the Mexican Cultural Center and do a Dia del Nino event, and we have programming available that we use on our floor in schools and fairs and festivals that is in Spanish.

And then the third thing that we have is the language accessibility committee. So, this was established in 2022, partway through doing this work. We’d already started it and then decided we needed this committee. The focus of the committee is making the museum available in Spanish. However, you’ll notice it says language accessibility. That is because while right now we’re really focused on Spanish, we know that that is the need in our communities. We do recognize as our communities change and grow, there may be a need for other languages in the future. And through the work we are doing now we can learn how we can bring other languages in the future. We have a mix of bi-lingual and non bi-lingual staff and we have representation from across the museum. Different roles from facing back of house and also staff from different levels which is really important for getting the message around the museum and creating buy-in. And one of the things we have is the VP champion who really helps us take that message to leadership and create buy-in as well.

So, I want to share with you two pieces of research and evaluation that we have done to support this work. The first is, in 2021 we did an internal translation needs assessment. We went to 36 staff members to learn what translation services were needed across departments, what positive experiences they have had in the translation process, and areas for improvement. And I’ve pulled out just three of the findings from it that I thought would be interesting for today.

The first is we heard we need clear guidelines and processes because we just didn’t really have them at this point. We said, I guess got very excited. We wanted to produce things in Spanish and we needed to step back and put into place these guidelines and processes to protect our staff and to make sure that we were delivering the best content we could, the kind of standard that we expect.

So, to do that, we have created a Spanish style guide. We now have a page on our internal internet that shares how to do translations, and who you can speak to if you don’t have that capacity on your team and you need help. We’ve added more bilingual positions, and we have training for managers and supervisors in how to manage those bilingual positions.

The second thing we heard is that it’s not just about translating content. It’s also about creating bilingual and bicultural content. Some of the folks who had already been doing this work at the museum for a long time said to us, our very best experiences are when we are involved early on in the process and we get to design this in Spanish, not have it designed in English and then translate it to Spanish.

And so, the way we try to do that is by having a Spanish speaking staff member on content creation teams. It could be for a new program; it could be for an exhibit refresh or an exhibit redesign. And we make sure that those people are involved right from the beginning so that they can ensure that this content works in Spanish and it’s not just about being able to translate it, it’s also knowing if it is culturally relevant for our Spanish -speaking communities.

And then the third thing is that we heard this needs to be about the complete guest experience and I mentioned this at the beginning, but I think one of the best examples that I hear come up again and again is we have a Spanish planetarium show and this is fantastic.

And people can’t necessarily buy their tickets in Spanish. So, are we really meeting an access need without doing that? That is a huge job, it turns out. I am not a tech person, but it turns out it’s very complicated. So, we are working on that. And it’s going to be some time before we can truly say that you can have a complete guest experience in Spanish.

The second piece of research we did was a community needs assessment. This was a panel study. We worked with Alcama, who we use as our survey platform, and we took this survey off site. We didn’t want to speak to people who were at the museum. We wanted to make sure that we heard from some people who were not at the museum, because if they’re there, they’ve already made it. They’ve already overcome the barriers that we have put in place by not having things available in Spanish.

We heard from 316 respondents from English-speaking households, and 302 respondents from Spanish-speaking households. The survey was in English and Spanish. And we asked people, do you want content in Spanish? Why do you want content in Spanish? And how would you like to access Spanish content?

I’m going to just share with you the results from the respondents from Spanish speaking households today so just three questions. The first is that half of these respondents are more likely or will only visit a museum if content is available in Spanish. We already had a lot of institutional buy-in but it’s still really, really helpful to be able to say, people want this and this is why we should do it. We heard that the biggest reason respondents from Spanish speaking households wanted museum content in Spanish is because they would enjoy it and also because it would make them feel like they belong.

And then finally we asked respondents to share with us for various different offerings around the museum how they would like them to be accessible in Spanish. The one I’m sharing with you today is specifically for permanent and temporary exhibits and we heard from our Spanish speaking respondents that they would like a staff member or volunteer guide, a booklet, exhibition panels, and labels in Spanish. Those were our top three responses.

(audience member speaks indistinctly)

So, we had, everyone could multiple select. So we had, if you were in categorized as an English -speaking household, you spoke English at home, and English in another language excluding Spanish. If you’re a Spanish -speaking household, Spanish at home, Spanish in any other language including English. And then I also broke the results down by those who indicated that they had a preference for reading, speaking, or writing in Spanish. I didn’t share that with you because it’s kind of getting a little deep right now, but very happy to talk about it. Thank you for asking.

So, this question has been really, really helpful as we consider our next steps. One of the things that we have decided is that our ultimate goal is to have bilingual exhibit signage. And, as I’m sure you all know, this takes a lot of time and resources. We can only do that holistically when we redesign an entire exhibit. And we have a lot of them, so it’s going to take a long time. So, in the meantime, we’re leaning on these results that we learned from the survey and we’re trying out what we are considering secondary mechanisms to get content across to our guests.

So we’ve been testing Spanish guides which so far we have been using a QR code for people when they arrive at the exhibit. They can scan the QR code, they can either read the content or listen to the content.

We’re also going to try a paper version as well. And one thing that we really like about this is that it could be applied to other languages. And then we’re also doing something called notches in Español this summer. We’re gonna be testing our Spanish guides. We’re going to test a Spanish movie. And we’re gonna test what it’s like having additional staff and volunteers on the floor. We heard from folks that they would really like that.

And we also want to know from our side, what is that staffing model Like what are the things that because we’ve not really tried to put a lot of Spanish speakers on the floor at the same time, what are the things that we might not be thinking about that we need to consider to protect those staff and their time and make sure they’re not working loads and loads of shifts, and to make sure that our guests have a great experience.

So that is where we are heading next. I have put a QR code with some resources if anyone is interested in the survey questions and the interview questions that we used.

Thank you.

Kerry Butcher:- Hello, everybody. My name is Carrie Butcher, and I’m an interpretation associate at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. And I’m excited to kind of continue our presentation and speak to a project that a small team of us embarked on with 22 local artists with ties to Latin America.

Before I dive into the project specifically, I thought I’d back up and give a little bit of specific information about Spanish language in Kansas City, which borders the Kansas and Missouri metro areas. So being in the Midwest, our demographics, particularly with languages spoken in the city, are diverse, but much less so than some of my presentation colleagues from Dallas and Denver. Recent census data estimates that more than 50 ,000 Kansas Citians and speak a language other than English at home and roughly 20 ,000 people have a limited English proficiency. On the Kansas side of the city, 8 % of residents speak Spanish as their first language whereas on the Missouri side where our museum is located, it’s lower at only 3%.

So, when I started at the Nelson Atkins in 2022, there was a lot of curiosity about how to bring bilingual or multilingual content into our museum, which had been well on their way through programs and other initiatives.

When I moved there, learning more about my new cities worked some important questions for me and our team. If we did pursue multilingualism within our museum, what communities do we serve and how do we best serve them.

So, in the spring of 2023, I worked closely with the Nelson Atkins curator, Stephanie Fox -Nap, who’s the curator of American Art and Contemporary Arts, and she selected 22 local artists from across the Kansas City, Missouri -Kansas region, to be part of an exhibition umbrella that we call KC Art Now. The broader KC Art Now project started in 2020 to highlight the local talent in our community. And for this third iteration, our museum director asked that we bring together artists living and working in Kansas City who have connections to Latin America, a strong and growing portion of our community on both sides of the state line.

The artists Stephanie selected with input from our key members of the community had cultural ties to Columbia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Peru, Mexico, and Uruguay. And while some of the artists are second and third generation immigrants, many of the participating artists were first generation immigrants or DACA recipients. Another interesting component was the range of artistic practices and styles and generational representation.

So, while many of the artists had formal backgrounds in art and education, many of the artists were self -taught. Our first kind of huge priority before delving into any content was spending time with studio visits and in -depth conversations with each of these artists.

We understood very early on that there were a lot of anxieties and apprehensions about embarking on this project with the museum. We didn’t really know a lot of the artists, myself especially, and we knew we had a responsibility to dispel those anxieties as much as possible during these early visits.

We focused sessions less on our own priorities, but really treated these visits as a discovery, sitting less in sessions, and offered a space to hear their ideas and encourage them to really think big about what work they’d like to contribute or create brand new.

After we had a chance to connect with the artists on individually in their studios or homes, we organized a gathering in partnership with the Maddie Road Center, which is pictured here, of one of the participating artists as a founder and director. We made this decision very consciously as we wanted to gather in a space that was already comfortable and familiar for many of the artists.

During our roundtable discussion with the artists at the Maddie Road Center, I brought up our institution’s recent research and interest in wanting to build on and create further bilingual content, resources, and programming. While the artists already knew that they would be writing their own labels for this exhibition, the artists raised a lot of important questions for us. Some of those where has the museum traded translated content into Spanish before? We had a few artists note to us that while they felt comfortable speaking in Spanish They were not as comfortable writing or reading it themselves and how that would work during the translation process and Lastly and probably the most critical was that artists did not want that they’re authentic voices to be lost during the translation process So really paying attention to that was a critical part of this project. So after the roundtable, in kind of divesting– or digesting a lot of that information, the critical next step for me was to find a Spanish translator and editor for the project, as we did not have one already in house.

And while our museum had worked with larger translation companies like Erickson for things in the museum voice, the curator and I were conscious about really retaining the artist’s voice, particularly when we don’t speak or read vanish ourselves. I ended up finding a translator who had been professionally translating within the community for over seven years as a freelancer, but whose full -time work was as a UX designer. We both thought that he had knowledge and background of the arts, and he was really willing to take on this task to translate labels without really knowing what the work looked like, or knowing the artists themselves. I will note that our translation process and review process that you see here was a lot less linear than it appears, but we want to be sure that the artist had the opportunity to review and ask questions and make changes on their translation to make sure that they felt like their voice was authentically reflected. At the Nelson -Atkins we have a really long and lengthy editing and review process for labels including our museum director who reads every single label that comes through the museum. So, you can imagine how much more work that adds when you have a Spanish editor involved and also 22 artists that are looking at the labels individually.

Another key component of including bilingual text is the consideration of the design and space. For this exhibition, we were working with a really small space and tight exhibition layout with varying dimensions available. As many of the artists we’re still figuring out the final scale of their works. We worked closely with our graphic designers, I think one of whom is in this room, to consider the designs for both the wall and barrier labels. The designs often used a subtle color palette of pink and blue to help visitors understand the break between English and Spanish texts.

I wanna point out that Rodolfo’s label on the right is in Spanglish. This was a conscious choice of the artist shared in his words via email, it may be somewhat confusing, but so is being a Mexican and US American. And to honor that complexity, the translator, Rodolfo and I worked closely to translate the text fully into Spanish as another option, but not translating either back into full English.

So, while bilingual translation of the text and artist labels was a central part of this endeavor, we also wanted to continue to find further layers for people to engage with the artists throughout the long run of this 10-month exhibition.

You may have noticed on the previous slide that there was a small mobile icon and prompt at the bottom of the label. During these early studio visits, we realized during our conversations that each of these artists in the exhibition was an extremely nuanced individual and many layers beyond just their cultural identities informed who they are and the stories they chose to tell through their art, including their personal experiences. So, we used our mobile app called Smartify, which is a free app. Anybody can download it. I’m happy to chat more about it. We conducted individual interviews with each of the artists to provide a different lens or take on the work than what you just see in the label.

Visitors can use this app in the galleries to scan a work of art. So, they hold their phone up in front of the work of art, and it pulls up their label content and the audio content. Additionally, we hosted an opening celebration, as we heard from a handful of artists, that celebrations and gatherings with friends and loved ones was such an integral part of their shared culture. When the exhibition closes in September, we plan to host a similar closing reception. And of course, throughout the 10-month run, artists will have the opportunity to collaborate with other colleagues in our education department from drop -in talks and lectures, poetry readings, documentary screenings. The programming really speaks to the multidisciplinary talents of the group.

So I don’t have a lot of like in -depth findings like Eleanor had, but we are currently working with our staff evaluator to learn more about the value and impact of the exhibition, particularly the label content. We are in the early stages of that survey, but I’m sharing a few quotes here that I learned from our evaluator that I think really speak to the value of centering local community members.

My particular favorite is on the bottom right where a visitor shared that they made a connection to some of the pieces and gained a perspective on others. In my mind, this really reflects the core principles of the exhibition. So visitors might not relate specifically to the artist’s individual stories or experience and how they manifest in the works, but they can find appreciation in learning something new that they may have not thought about before.

Lastly, I’d like to share a few kind of takeaways that I’ve really tried to think about and move forward with in a lot of projects that I’ve taken on since this. The first one is really moving at the speed of trust.

I really keep this in mind in anything that I do. It’s one of my favorite sayings. So really thinking about how our role in dismantling the fears and concerns and apprehensions of people we work with in the community, particularly those we haven’t really worked with before, takes time and you can’t rush to achieve something that hasn’t been done before.

Embracing the unknowns is a really important one, despite the fact that we had done iterations of this project two times before, we had not done it with this group and this group of artists in this scale. So, there’s no way to know what you might encounter and so kind of listening to those artists was really important.

To piggyback on that, there’s no one -size -fits -all approach. Much of what we had done before didn’t really apply and we had to like pivot in terms of like what the artists were producing, how they wanted their labels to be done. There was a lot of unknowns and artists needed a lot of help in kind of like writing and understanding what visitors want to know about their art.

Lastly, I really want to emphasize that documenting your process is really important, particularly when you’re embarking on a new endeavor for the first time. There are so many different areas of museum work that are interested in doing bilingual initiatives. And I’ve had so many colleagues ask me even where to begin. So, I would really encourage you all to take the time to document the work and process. Not just for you or your other colleagues, but to share out in conferences like these.

Lastly, I’d like to share an image of the group of artists who are really lovely. And thank you so much for your time. I am here for questions. You can find me via email, but happy to chat more after.

Thank you.

Julietta Da Silva: All right. Hola. Hello, everyone. We’re Museo de las Americas, and we are a community -driven museum focused on creating inclusion and belonging through the Spanish language. My name’s Holieta. I’m a Community engagement manager.

This is Sean, our language and interpretation programs manager, which is really just basically fancy ways of saying that both Sean and I work with community here at Museo, and we’re excited to tell you a little bit more about that today.

Museo de las Americas was founded over 30 years ago to represent all of the Americas, todas las Americas, and with that we really believe that we serve as cultural stewards because we represent so many underrepresented cultural backgrounds.

We are focused on being the premier Latin American Art Museum in the Rocky Mountain region. And with that, we also are focused on making sure that we are presenting all of these different cultures in ways that honor and respect them. And so because of that, language is naturally a part of that process and naturally a part of who we are and the work that we do.

We truly believe that it is both our social and cultural responsibility to represent these underrepresented backgrounds and to be a platform for them by bringing them to the forefront of the Rocky Mountain community.

We really embrace the diversity that is the Americas. We really hope to be able to build bridges between these cultures and communities and through the programs that we offer, we hope to be able to foster community as well.

And today we’re going to talk a little bit more about how we do that with both our adults and our youth.

Now, I know many people in this room may have never been to Colorado, maybe have never been to Denver, so obviously I want to tell you a little bit more about what our community looks like to kind of contextualize our conversation. And as well, I come from a background in tech, so obviously I got to start with the data, I got to start with the numbers.

And so with that, in 2020 Hispanics and Latinos of any race made up about 21 % of Colorado’s population. And of that, just about half speak Spanish. And there’s a lot of reasons as to why.

We’ll get into that in a second. As well in Museo in 2020, we decided to issue a membership feedback survey because we wanted to understand who our members were, why they came to Museo, and what they were looking for from us from a program’s perspective. The number one takeaway that we found in our survey was that our community that came to us in order to get feel connected to their culture.

And again, like I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of reasons why Latinos in the state of Colorado may not feel connected to the Spanish language. And in the survey, we found that they wanted to have a place where they could practice their language safely with their community.

And so, with that, we decided to create a Spanish Conversation Club.

I’m the host of our Spanish Conversation Club. You’ll find us at Cirveceria Colorado in Platte Street, if you ever in the neighborhood, stop by. My goal of the club is to be a lot less academic and a lot more based in community building. I want to create a welcoming space where we can practice Spanish, celebrate our culture, and connect with comunidad. And so, with that, we meet on a monthly basis. We have fun monthly themes that get us excited about speaking Spanish with one another. We ask each other icebreaker questions, whereas that’s my opportunity as the facilitator to figure out where’s your level of Spanish. And then from there, I break people out into small groups and we participate in a ton of fun, different activities. We’ve done things like popcorn storytelling, to reading news articles together, reciting recipes in Spanish, and even playing fun games like Cloteria.

I’m happy to say that this meetup is always sold out. I have a ton of regulars, and yeah, it’s just a lot of fun. You can see in the picture that I’m not lying. We have a lot of fun Spanish Conversation Club, but that’s just a little bit more about our adult programs and the programs that we do for them. To get more back into the Colorado statistics of things because I know y ‘all don’t know much and I’m excited to tell you more is that of Colorado’s Hispanic and Latino population the majority of this population is under 18 years old so that’s mostly our youth.

As well within this last year in Denver we’ve had a lot of Central and South American migrants move into the city which is naturally going to impact what our communities looks like and what their needs are and so with that I’m happy to pass it off to Sean who’s gonna tell you a little bit more about the programs that we create to melt these kids and their families feel more welcome as neighbors.

Sean Trujillo: Thank you, Julietta and hello everybody. Museo serves children in the Denver Metro area in three different ways and I’ll get to that here in a sec but first I want to tell you a little bit about the students that we serve and who teaches them from Museo.

So about 90 % of our students that take part in our programming go to dual language immersion schools, are enrolled in dual language immersion schools in the Denver Metro area, which is very nice. And about seven out of eight of my creative workshop teachers speak both English and Spanish and teach bilingual. And about half the workshops that I get requested are requested to be bilingual.

And 70 % of all the total students that we serve at Museo throughout the entire year speak English and Spanish, would Spanish be in the primary language spoken at home. And lastly, three of four of my summer camp teachers conduct summer camp classes in English and Spanish.

Now Museo has three different pillars to our education department in which we serve the children in grades K through 12 in the Denver Metro area.

Firstly, the first pillar is my cultural workshops and tours. Now these are hands -on immersive experiences that we host onsite or we go off -site and this is offered through for grades K through 12 and we serve about 4 ,000 kids annually and as I mentioned these are requested to be primarily bilingual activities.

My second pillar is our Los Juvenas Leadership Lab. Now this serves my 11 to 15 year olds. It’s an after school program and it’s an arts and technology based program and it has a separate youth council to where the youth meet to give input about the program to make it more youth led.

And we have three cohorts per year and about 15 students per cohort. And my last pillar to the education department is our summer arts and culture camp. Now this is our multidisciplinary arts integrated camp and it serves our youngest group of children, our four to 11 year olds, and we have this every single summer and serve about 65 to 70 kids per year. Now, my summer camp truly is the highlight of our education department.

We’ve been doing this camp for 15 years and every year we choose one country, one Latin American country of focus and we learned about the dance, the music, the visual arts, and the theater of that particular country and this year we’re focusing on Cuba which is going to be pretty fun.

So, after three weeks of camp the students put on a wonderful final performance for the community and for their families and they do also the visual arts show too which is really fantastic.

Now naturally, this camp is taught in English and in Spanish to meet the needs of the students and the families. And it’s very popular amongst our Spanish -speaking community as a form of cultural and language connection. And it’s very popular amongst our non -Spanish -speaking community as a form of cultural and language immersion for their students.

So, to wrap it up, our programming still the adapting. I’m very proud of our programming because we have been publicly recognized of having some of the best programs for children in the Denver Metro area. So, we’re very proud about that and we still keep adapting to the needs of our community,

especially as we welcome our newest neighbors, our migrant community. So thanks for listening everybody. I’ll give it back to Julieta.

Julietta Da Silva: Thank you, Sean. No, we really appreciate you coming and listening today. You were able to learn a little bit more about our work, not only as people that work at Museo de las Americas, but also as cultural ambassadors through language.

Museo represents Latino art and culture from many different countries, and creating this programming is for the betterment of our communities. As Sean has mentioned, we have been recognized publicly and Denver for having some of the most important cultural programming and being one of the most important cultural institutions in Denver. And we genuinely believe it’s because everything that we do is led by what the community tells us that they want to see. And so here’s some information for you to keep up with us. Nos y vitamos. We invite you all to come visit us in Denver, Colorado soon. That’s it.

This recording is generously supported by The Wallace Foundation.

In either case, you would be right, but you wouldn’t be thinking big enough, say Kylie Peppler, Maggie Dahn, and Mizuko Ito, authors of the Wallace-Foundation-sponsored report The Connected Arts Learning Framework: An Expanded View of the Purposes and Possibilities for Arts Learning. While they agree with both of these arguments (which they dub “art for art’s sake” and “art for academics’ sake”), they believe neither one gives enough credit to the full impact an arts education can have. Such exposure can not only enhance students’ artistic and academic development, they say, but impact other areas of their lives, like personal relationships, emotional well-being, and career development. For that matter, the impact doesn’t stop at the individual student, but can spill over into communities and society more broadly, as networks and relationships build, civic engagement increases, and areas for social progress come to the fore. In that light, artistic and academic growth are only small parts of a bigger holistic system of learning that the arts feed into.

This bigger system has a name in educational research circles: the connected learning framework. However, as the report’s authors explain, the term is not yet widely known in out-of-school or arts education, despite its alignment with many of the goals and outcomes its practitioners pursue. To bring the framework into wider use in our sectors, they have adapted it into a new subgenre they call “connected arts learning,” in the hopes of giving educators useful new language for describing and extending their impact. Here’s a brief summary of the framework and how museums can use it (and already are).

What is Connected Learning?

“Connected learning describes how educators and researchers can create meaningful learning opportunities by building relationships, basing learning on youth interests, and providing opportunities linked to real-world issues and communities,” the authors write. It takes a big-picture view of the role of learning in our lives, looking beyond acquiring information and skills for their own sake to the way these activities build our interests and develop our identities as we grow. In this way, connected learning emphasizes the “why” of education and asks whether the structures and practices in place are optimal to nourish those outcomes.

Connected arts learning, in turn, “describes meaningful art education that connects young people’s interests in the arts to present and future opportunities by building relationships and networks, both within the arts organization and extended to the broader community.” While it is a universal framework encompassing the needs of all young people, its emphasis on the role of culture, community, and identity is especially helpful for determining how to support those from marginalized backgrounds. For that reason, the authors center education scholar Tara J. Yosso’s concept of “community cultural wealth,” which “focuses on the ways young people from historically minoritized groups can derive power from within their communities, rather than being pushed to assimilate into dominant cultural norms.”

In other words, if connected learning negates the idea of learning in an educational vacuum, connected arts learning negates the idea of learning the arts in a cultural vacuum. Instead of leaving their communities behind to learn skills and knowledge developed in other cultures, students learn to look deeper into their communities and unlock the beauty, opportunities, and resources that exist around them.

How does this translate into concrete programs? The authors identify five general approaches they came across in their research, which are not mutually exclusive but often overlap within one program:

1. Culturally Sustaining Arts: Basing arts learning on the cultures and identities of the learners and community.
2. Future Forward Arts: Preparing or involving youth in the workforce or civic life by helping them build relationships with working artists and activists.
3. Networked Arts: Embedding arts learning in social networks that include youth, family, and educators.
4. Doing Well By Doing Art: Supporting mental health and overall well-being by explicitly responding to students’ social and emotional needs.
5. Youth Voice Arts: Giving students a platform to develop their perspectives, leadership abilities, and voices in public by combining activism and art.

Already, there are countless examples of museum programs that take these approaches, whether or not the educators in charge are aware of the connected learning framework. For example, the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library has helped Iowa youth develop employable skills and practice activism through a monthslong project to build a replica of the Berlin Wall (Future Forward Arts, Youth Voice Arts). The Museum of Children’s Art has enrolled Oakland teenagers in a yearlong Community Futures School, where they lead discussions of oppression and its solutions, analyze futurist texts, and work with professional mentors to create artworks that combine technology and Afrofuturism (Culturally Sustaining Arts, Future Forward Arts, Youth Voice Arts). The Hammer Museum has hosted fourth-through-sixth-grade classes from underfunded Los Angeles schools for weeklong Classroom-in-Residence programs, opening a supportive space for students to reflect on heavy topics like grief, and supported their teachers with months of professional development to incorporate art into lessons (Networked Arts, Doing Well By Doing Art).

How Can Museum Programs Incorporate Connected Learning?

While you’re likely already working with elements of connected learning in your programs, studying the framework and the body of research behind it can help you enhance your impact. In particular, you might uncover aspects of your program design that are undermining your goals by minimizing the role of student interests, relationships, and opportunities. Peppler, Dahn, and Ito provide a rubric for assessing how well your program aligns with connected learning in these areas, as well as a series of questions you can ask to bolster each one. Here is a summary:

Stoke Interests

Even when educators aim for broad impact on students’ lives, they “still sometimes try to get kids interested in arts learning without first discovering what interests those kids already have,” the authors write. Instead of trying to “get young people interested in art,” connected arts learning uses art to explore what they’re already interested in. This means finding ways to collect input from students and develop the curriculum to follow their passions, rather than developing it in isolation based on outside sources. To accomplish this, one organization the authors interviewed relies on a youth council, an external evaluator, and informal conversations with students. An example insight: Whereas staff thought youth would be interested in experimenting with cutting-edge technology like virtual reality, they learned they were really more eager to experiment with the humbler medium of podcasting.

To center learners’ interests in your program, the authors recommend asking these questions:

• How do you incorporate youth interest and voice into programming?
• How do young people drive decision-making?
• How do you include learners’ identities and cultural backgrounds?
• How are the arts leveraged to engage learners?
• How are new interests supported in collaboration with professional artists?

Build Relationships

The traditional arts education paradigm tends to minimize relationship-building, consisting mainly of short-term engagements where educators lead students in individual projects during a confined class time and encourage them to practice on their own. Connected arts learning, in contrast, endeavors to build long-term relationships with youth and their families that extend beyond the classroom and allow for collaboration. This includes welcoming families and communities into both shaping and participating in the learning experience—not only in special events or projects, but day to day.

The authors suggest asking:

• How do you cultivate affinity-based networks of support?
• How do you support learners in working collaboratively with others?
• In what ways are relationships among young people, artists, and families accounted for in your programming?
• How are channels of communication kept open to support and sustain arts learning?
• In what ways are inter-generational relationships incorporated and leveraged to connect youth to arts opportunities?

Provide Opportunities

Traditional arts programs don’t think far beyond the classroom walls, measuring success by learner’s achievements within the program itself, and rarely introducing them to opportunities that extend beyond it. Connected arts learning flips this on its head, intentionally cultivating opportunities for learners outside of the classroom, whether connecting them with mentors, providing them with career training, or giving them chances to perform, exhibit, or engage in civic life.

Ideally, these opportunities are not just arts-related, but allow participants to explore any interests they may have. They are also not just career opportunities, with the goal of getting students on a stable financial path, but have the broader goal of helping them develop a meaningful life. (As one staff member interviewed tells the authors, “A lot of college and career readiness is based on the presumption that low-income students have to get set on a path much earlier…. I’d also like to strive for something where they can have the time to explore, just like a student of any income level.”) Finally, when these opportunities include professional work, like internships, apprenticeships, or leadership positions, students are ideally paid.

Questions to ask:

• What types of arts opportunities are communicated and offered to young people?
• How do the goals of the arts program connect young people to opportunities beyond the program itself?
• What are the values of the class or program and how are those values embedded in the arts experience?
• In what ways are young people matched with inspiring opportunities that align with their arts interests?
• How do you support networking that can connect youth to opportunities in and outside of the arts?

Adam Rozan: Can you share with me what the Living Room space at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts is?

Victoria Ramirez: We call the space the Cultural Living Room, and to us, it is Little Rock’s living room. It is a gathering space that anybody is welcome to use at any point during their museum visit. We wanted to design a flexible space where, for example, students could come and work on their laptops, friends could meet and catch up, or community groups could gather.

We are a free museum, which means everyone is welcome and able to use the space as they wish. Also, because the Cultural Living Room is adjacent to the galleries, it is an integral part of programming. Often, our gallery tours will begin or conclude in the Cultural Living Room, which allows the conversation to continue.

AR: My first exposure to a space like yours was at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which opened its own Living Room space as part of its renovation as a welcome area for the community. Was the Gardner’s Living Room inspirational to you?

VR: Absolutely. I have long admired that space and found it innovative and well-suited to the Gardner. I love the name, its design, and how the space complements the rest of the building. Similarly, for AMFA, the design of the Cultural Living Room honors both the museum and our community. The space itself features large sweeping glass windows on all four sides. On one side, the Cultural Living Room faces a neighborhood that connects the museum and the community. It is interesting how, from the inside of the museum, one has a view of the neighborhood, but similarly, from the outside, there are views into the Cultural Living Room. Often, I have heard how much people enjoy driving by the museum at all hours of the day and seeing people milling about inside. That view of the interior of the museum reflects the life and energy we want people to experience during their visit. It is fascinating to drive by at night and, often see a party inside the museum.

AR: What was the design process like for the space, and what are some of the amenities it offers?

VR: Designing the Cultural Living Room was a very careful and deliberate exercise. We hired an interior designer to help select beautiful furnishings and fabrics that would stand up over time. We ensured the space was functional with power outlets, speakers for music, and a coffee and beverage bar that is open for drinks and snacks during public hours. We even added “strong points” to the ceiling with the plan to hang art in the space at some point in the future.

The space is outfitted like a living room with soft seating, wi-fi, books, and games. The beverage bar is popular, serving coffee, adult beverages, snacks, and child-friendly items.

AR: For comparison, what’s the price of a regular drip coffee in the cultural living room compared to a coffee elsewhere in Little Rock?

VR: The price is in line. We wanted to create a place that was a unique experience but not one that would break the bank. Coffee at the museum is $3 for a small and $3.25 for a large.

AR: Is the Living Room only an informal space, or is it designed for larger-scale events as well?

VR: The space serves as an informal space as well as one designed for larger events. Our emphasis is on flexibility. In addition to supporting internal museum events, the space is available for rent as part of our revenue-generating facility rental program.

AR: Thinking more broadly about the museum field and cultural organizations, do you foresee more emphasis on flexible spaces in future cultural institutions?

VR: Absolutely, the trend toward flexible spaces must continue. Designing spaces that can accommodate a variety of functions ensures resilience and adaptability. All museums must consider their current relevancy and for decades to come. Flexible spaces will help museums evolve as the art world grows, keeping up with the changing expectations and requirements of institutions and the communities they serve.

AR: Do you think the living room concept displaces the concept of museums as a third space? Now, it’s about the museum being an extension of the community home.

VR: Perhaps third spaces and living rooms are concepts that seek to define the same space. Specifically, third spaces might describe the types of activities happening in the museum, but the term “living room” seeks to explain how we hope you will socialize and feel in that space. When designing AMFA’s Cultural Living Room, function, comfort, and the spirit of being a welcoming community space were all priorities. This intentionality is so essential for the design of the space, as well as in the descriptive words you choose, programming, signage, and the whole package.

If so, you’re not alone. Between the long-term effects of the pandemic and the ongoing push to create more welcoming cultures, an increasing number of museums are rethinking the program models they’ve inherited, which are often many decades old and informed by outdated assumptions. Long-prevailing hallmarks of these models, including arduous training programs, intensive time commitments, and inflexible scheduling, are leading to declining ranks and stagnant demographics, many volunteer managers believe. Meanwhile, undefined reporting and authority structures are leading to tension and confusion, in some cases, as the organizational charts of museums evolve.

Still, there are compelling reasons for museums to engage volunteers, not only for the benefit of the institutions, but for the public themselves. Volunteer opportunities can be a meaningful chance to explore curiosities, interact with the community, make friends, and build skills. So, the question is: How can we design programs that maximize these positive outcomes, working with the goals of museums today and welcoming more (and more diverse) people in?

There may not be easy, one-size-fits-all answers, but between the growing body of successful examples, there is an emerging general framework. To figure out what that looks like, I spoke to two of the most knowledgeable sources I know: my AAM colleague Susan Zwerling, who wrote our Designing a Museum Volunteer Program toolkit (now in its second edition), and Elisa Kosarin, CVA, a longtime volunteer engagement consultant. With thanks to them, and the many volunteer managers who shared their experiences in publications I reviewed (see a selected list at the end of this post), I identified a basic six-step process for transforming a volunteer program.

Step 1: Talk to Stakeholders

Just because you have a mandate to “restructure” or “diversify” your program doesn’t mean you’re ready to start. Without agreed-upon parameters for what those words will mean in your case, you may not create anything but disarray. Instead of rushing into change for change’s sake, it’s best to start by talking with stakeholders about what you’re seeking to change, why you’re seeking to change it, and what the new vision for the program should be.

What stakeholders should you talk to?

• Board and leadership. Supportive and aligned leadership will give you the organizational pull to ensure change moves smoothly from concept to execution. In the best of cases, all sides will be on board with change, and these conversations will be about defining what change to prioritize. In more difficult cases, where you may need to do some convincing, program managers suggest emphasizing the opportunity to extend impact and align with organizational goals through program adjustments, as well as the liability for the museum’s reputation and visitor experience if it does not embrace change.
• Staff. Leadership and volunteer managers may not be fully aware of the staff needs that could use community support, especially in departments that haven’t traditionally worked with volunteers. For that reason, it’s a great idea to conduct a comprehensive needs assessment across the organization. Preferably in a structured, synchronous format, ask each department where they could ease their burdens and generate a list of potential volunteer opportunities in the areas they identify. Supporting public programs, helping in the garden, packing art supply boxes? Collecting protest ephemera or supporting voter registration drives? It’s all been done! Think big and think outside the box.
• Volunteers themselves. If possible, there is great value in getting your existing volunteers’ input, for several reasons. First, it avoids blindsiding your corps with any changes and can minimize the chances of a public backlash, as some museums have experienced when they’ve overhauled their programs. Second, it gives you the important perspective of the people who volunteer themselves, who may be more open to change—and more brimming with novel ideas—than you expect. If you have a smaller advisory group on your corps, like a volunteer board, you might consider starting with them.

What questions should you ask these stakeholders?

• Who are you trying to include? Remember, there are many kinds of diversity, including race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, age, ability, economic status, national origin, languages spoken, and many other aspects of identity. As with diversity initiatives for audiences, you’re not likely to have much success if you try to be vaguely “inclusive” to all these categories at once, since different demographics will require different strategies. Instead, it’s best to define what aspects of diversity are lacking in your corps and what types would be most significant and realistic for your museum to gain. (For example, if you live in a city that’s 70 percent Latinx but your volunteers are all white, or a city with a median age of 35 but your volunteers are a median of 65, those could be good places to start.)
• What should volunteers do? There are multiple ways to transform a program, whether that’s tweaking existing opportunities, replacing those opportunities with others, or simply adding new opportunities. What departments will you assign volunteers to going forward, and what will they do in them? (This is where your needs assessment will come in handy.)
• Who should volunteers report to? Many institutions do not have a defined place for their volunteer programs on their organizational chart, which is one reason why power struggles and miscommunications can occur. Where should your program go? The field is divided on that issue. Some museums structure theirs within a dedicated volunteer management department, some nest them inside education and interpretation, some put them in visitor services, and some assign them to human resources, among other options. There may not be one right answer, but try to choose the one that will be least siloed and have the strongest relationships with the rest of staff.

Once you’ve spoken to these stakeholders and established the answers to these questions, you might consider putting them into a formal document, like a strategic plan for volunteer engagement, so you can share and cite those findings as you embark on the next step.

Step 2: (Re)design Your Roles

Now that you’ve identified lots of organizational needs that volunteers can support, and a vision for where you do and don’t want them to be working, your task is to narrow down this list and define specifics. (Think convergent vs. divergent thinking.) What are the best, most manageable ideas for new roles, and what will it take to get them up and running?

To maximize the impact of these new roles, and successfully recruit new people your current structure may be excluding, here are a couple questions to keep in mind:

• How long should the assignment last? Museums tend to automatically envision long-term or indefinite volunteer positions, with significant training upfront, but this level of commitment is likely to deter people with busier or less predictable schedules. (In fact, research suggests organizations that offer more flexible positions have had less trouble with recruitment and retention post-pandemic.) As you (re)design your roles, think about how you can vary their length and duration, giving people the ability to build their engagement over time. Assignments can be:
  • One-time, such as supporting a special event or one-off pilot program
  • Episodic, such as serving on a gala committee or assisting with an exhibition installation
  • Regular, such as working a welcome desk or conducting educational outreach
• Where should the work take place? Another important aspect of flexibility is where the volunteers work. Do they need to be on site for their assignment (at the museum or another location), or can their work be fully or partially virtual? When possible, removing the need to commute to a specific location can make opportunities more attractive and feasible, particularly to those who have disabilities, those who live farther from your work site(s), or those who have limited free time. Even if some of the work for a role requires being on site, you might be able to reduce the burden by making parts of it virtual (or virtual-optional), like training, meetings, or administrative work.

To allow for this flexibility, you may be able to create multiple roles, even within the same departments or supporting the same needs. You might have some regular volunteers who sit at your welcome desk weekly, for example, while others greet visitors during public programs or popular exhibitions, and some speak to visitors from home via digital kiosks.

Step 3: Revisit Your Training

Once you know what roles you’ll be offering, and on what basis, it’s time to consider what training you’ll require for them and how you’ll administer it. This can be equally important to attracting diverse volunteers as varied durations and responsibilities. Long, detailed trainings—like the crash courses that are typical of many docent programs—can discourage would-be volunteers, not only for the sheer time (and sometimes money) they require, but for the sense of psychological commitment they impose. While you want your volunteers to feel well-prepared for their roles, you don’t want them to feel like they must undergo an elaborate initiation to join you. Make it easier for them to say yes to your program by providing efficient and flexible training appropriate for what the role will require. Consider:

• Time commitment. Can you reduce the length of trainings by distinguishing essential from supplemental information? Can you minimize the amount of information volunteers must learn by dividing their areas of responsibility?
• Location. Can you make trainings less demanding by offering them in fully or partially virtual formats, or hybrid/virtual-optional?
• Scheduling. Can you offer asynchronous trainings that volunteers can complete on their own time, or a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous? Can you schedule trainings outside of typical work hours, or offer alternatives for those who cannot make those times?

When aiming to increase diversity, you should also consider what training you might provide your corps to help them cultivate a welcoming environment and potentially discuss issues of identity with visitors.

Step 4: Rethink Your Recruitment

At this point in the process, you should have a new range of opportunities that are appealing and feasible to people with a variety of life situations. Now the only remaining question is how to reach those people and tell them about the opportunities.

Particularly if your museum and/or its existing program reaches a limited demographic, this will require thinking beyond traditional marketing or word of mouth. While it’s always a great idea to share opportunities through the museum’s communication channels, or to ask staff and volunteers to spread the word to their networks, this may not reach those outside of the demographics you’re already serving. Instead, you’ll need to think in terms of broad, proactive outreach to the community. Here are some strategies suggested by program managers at the International Spy Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art:

• Build a list of referral sources, such as young professional organizations, retired teacher associations, disability service organizations, and community centers. Reach out and ask if they can help communicate the opportunity to their members and patrons.
• Go out into the community. Visit gathering places like libraries and community fairs and tell people about your opportunities and the benefits of volunteering.
• Connect with local colleges and universities. Besides being full of people who are looking for skill-building opportunities, and can likely help with any age diversity goals, higher-learning institutions are a great way to connect with international students, who can help you diversify the languages spoken and national origin among your corps.

Step 5: Communicate Your Changes

Once you’re ready to unveil your revamped program, it will be important to communicate the changes carefully to your stakeholders, particularly existing volunteers. Ideally, you want to avoid alienating them during the transition, making it clear that you value their past contributions and welcome them to join the new structure going forward, if they are willing to embrace it.

Here are some suggestions from Justine Gregory Dodson, who overhauled Denver Art Museum’s volunteer program:

• Communicate what you’re changing (and why) as often and in as many venues as possible, such as newsletters, meetings, and learning management systems.
• Identify key stakeholders to communicate with one-on-one and address any misapprehensions with, such as volunteer leaders and known champions or challengers of change.
• Find ways to honor the past contributions of volunteers at your museum, such as plaque displays in your building or an “emeritus” program for those who retire from the program.

Step 6: Evaluate Your Changes

As with any new or updated program, you don’t want to stop developing once you’ve implemented the changes. Look for opportunities to gather feedback and data on how the revamped program is working. If your museum has a research and evaluation team, or the means to engage independent evaluators, this would be a good opportunity for partnership. If not, consider informal feedback mechanisms, like basic surveys, check-in conversations, or comment cards. Be sure to take any findings to heart and make any necessary adjustments that arise—they can make all the difference in your program’s success.

Further Reading

While this framework covers the basics of transforming your program, there are many more nuances to consider as you do so. Here are some AAM publications that will help you along the way:

• Rethinking the Status Quo by Jenny Woods, Brandi Shawn-Chaparro, and Abbey Earich
• Designing a Museum Volunteer Program by Susan Zwerling (Purchase required)
  • How Can We Make Volunteer Programs More Inclusive and Accessible? By Susan Zwerling and Kia Hunter
  • Do Volunteer Programs Need Reinventing for the Reopened Museum? By Susan Zwerling and Marcie Keller
• Questions an Organization Should Ask When Transitioning a Volunteer Program by Susan Zwerling, Jenny Woods, Justine Gregory Dodson, Mary Fernandez, and Brandi Shawn-Chaparro (AAM members only)
• Museums and Equity: Volunteers by Elizabeth Merritt
• How Volunteer Programs Are Embracing Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion by Elisa Kosarin
• How the National Air and Space Museum Took Volunteering Virtual by Elisa Kosarin

Get your copy of the Designing a Museum Volunteer Program Toolkit today!

As the tracks for this year’s conference emphasized, wellness is not just something organizations can create externally, but something they can cultivate internally. In that spirit, I am writing this post to share the framework and lessons we used in our work so that staff of other organizations can also spend time tending to their well-being. I hope you will take time to follow along, whether individually or with a group, and prioritize the reflection and emotional openness that makes us all more joyful and effective as we work to impact the outer world.

Session One: Wellness Begins Within

The first session was a deep dive into where and how we get the support we need to move through the world. There are many messages available to us every day about self-care, wellness, fitness, and beyond. Many of those messages start with the premise that who and how we are is insufficient or incomplete in some way. We need to adjust this mindset. This adjustment can be grounded in, “You are whole, complete, and perfect just as you are. Nothing is wrong.” If we begin from here, then more positive choices are available that can be empowering, freeing, and uplifting for yourselves, your museums, and your communities. Beginning with our own wellness journeys, we are better equipped to assist others.

Part One: If You Really Knew Me…

Our session opened with a check-in, where we paused for one minute each to complete the sentence: “If you really knew me, you would know…” Each person shared whatever was on their mind and what they needed to be fully present and engage in the session. For many, this was the first time they had been asked to answer a question like this at work, and they eagerly participated, sharing details about hobbies, likes and dislikes, and secret talents that their coworkers had never known about.

Part Two: Levels of Healing

After our check-in, we reviewed the key points from an article by the National Equity Project called “Levels of Healing,” recommended by Grace Stewart, AAM’s Director of Equity and Inclusion. The article outlines several different levels of healing through a race equity lens to consider as you think about wellness:

• Individual Healing: Healing from institutionalized racism, finding your voice, your agency to express yourself fully.
• Interpersonal Healing: Intentional desire to reconnect with one another through storytelling, listening, and believing in one another. When we separate from each other—disconnect—we are being led by white supremacy, which keeps trauma alive while we suffer alone.
• Institutional Healing: An intentional commitment to creating a system/space for healing and care. Leaning into shared leadership instead of traditional top-down leadership. Community agreements on how to be with each other are key.
• Structural Healing: Pausing to unpack how things got to be how they are. The laws and policies that were designed to protect some and harm others. New co-created laws and policies must be established where everyone is seen, heard, and celebrated for who they are—safety for all.

As we reviewed each level, I asked for volunteers to share which they wanted to focus on in their reflections and why. The conversation was intimate and invigorating.

Part Three: We Are Like Trees

Next, I invited participants to reflect on their lives and determine what resources they can use to deepen their foundational roots. To illustrate this concept, we used the analogy that we humans are like trees, with root systems to support us as we move through our lives. Like trees, the deeper the roots, and the more connected they are to sustenance like nutrients and water, the better the chances are for survival. Also like trees, humans are resilient beings. Regardless of where our roots land—in rocky soil, in the cracks of sidewalks, in shady areas like illness, trauma, or divorce—we survive. The goal of our first session was to identify where and what our root system is comprised of so that we could not just move through the motions and survive, but move beyond negative experiences to thrive, with an abundant sense of “LIFE” (love, integrity, freedom, and ease) in our lives.

Part Four: Self-Guided Visualization

After this lesson, we moved onto an independent visualization exercise where I asked everyone to spend an extended block of time pondering a set of questions that walked them through the stages of their lives. I strongly encourage you to try this exercise out for yourself, taking notes on what comes up for you as you go through:

• Let us travel back to our elementary school years. What lessons and messages did you receive about how to take care of yourself, be safe, and develop tools for life? What did you learn at school? From your parents, immediate, and extended family? Keep breathing—there may be hurtful memories that present themselves. Let them move through you. All are welcome here.
• Now let us move onto the middle and high school years. What life skills and tools did you acquire, and from whom, for creating safety for yourself? Keep breathing. Things may be coming up, but know that you are on the other side of that now and you are safe.
• Now you are in your adult years. You are responsible for managing your life affairs—money, transportation, career, relationships, and more. What choices did you make to support you during this time?
• It is now the present day. Because of, and despite, all that came beforehand, you continue to explore and create new ways to support yourself. Are you seeking therapy, engaging in a spiritual practice, supporting yourself physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and beyond?

Finally, focus on what is currently fortifying your root system. Are there things to let go of? New things to explore? Are some of your roots on shallow ground and needing attention? What actions do you plan to take to fortify your roots?

Humans are resourceful and can identify, acquire, and release elements of our root system at any time. The key is to slow down enough to reflect and determine what is sourcing our lives. For some it is faith, religion, relationships, self-care practices: yoga, meditation, therapy, ecstatic dance, and beyond. Once we see what has been propping us upright, then we can choose if those are the best options for who we are now and who we are becoming, or if we need to make a change. The deepening of our roots will sustain us as the winds of change, challenges, and obstacles that may threaten to uproot us show up in our lives.

Part Five: Nurturing Your Root System

No matter where your root system originates from, even from trauma and fear, there is nothing “wrong” with it. But there may be areas that you find you want to change going forward, so you can deepen your roots and thrive more fully. As you explore these origins, grant yourself grace as you distinguish what you are doing and how you are being with your current root system. Are there any changes you would like to make?

Here are some things for you to ponder about the integrity of your root system:

• What are your practices that support your root system? For example, they may be meditation, yoga, journaling, therapy, etc.
• Are any of your current practices hindering your root system? Are you avoiding any actions that would be helpful, or choosing any actions that are numbing and distracting you from evaluating your life?
• What actions do you need to take to ensure that your roots are getting the nutrients you need to weather the storms and opportunities in your life? Do you need to get any support? Do you need to make a list of what you are or want to do? Do you need an accountability buddy to support you?

How can you apply the tree analogy to your museum and communities? Now that you have had an experience of comparing your life to a thriving tree, how can you share that with your team members, museums, families, and beyond so that they can benefit too?

Life will continue to provide opportunities for growth, and we do not need to perceive them as “bad.” By right of consciousness, anything that shows up in our life can be interpreted as either insurmountable obstacles and threats or opportunities to expand our thinking, feelings, and root systems. You are invited to explore the latter with curiosity and an open heart—your experiences will be more fruitful and life-giving.

Session Two: Dimensions of Wellness

In our second session a month later, we dug deeper into what we had uncovered in our previous exercises and reflected on what areas of our lives we might need to tend to.

Part One: Shares from Our First Session

To build the bridge between sessions, I asked for volunteers to share what had come up for them in the time since our last meeting:

• How have you been nourishing your root system? Have you engaged in anything new? Are there still things for you to try out?
• What are your immediate, short-term, and long-term wellness needs and goals?
• Have you identified resources (people, organizations, etc.) to support you?

What is true or not true about your current organizational culture that supports, or can support, your wellness goals?

Part Two: The Eight Dimensions of Wellness

After that, I introduced the team to another helpful framework for going deeper into their wellness journey, the eight dimensions of wellness:

1. Emotional: Become more aware of your feelings and accept them as valid indicators of what you are experiencing.
2. Spiritual: Explore your personal values.
3. Intellectual: Strive to be open to new experiences and ideas in all areas of your life.
4. Physical: This encompasses all areas of health that relate to the physical aspects of the body including nutrition, exercise, and weight management preventions.
5. Environmental: Become aware of how your external environment affects you.
6. Financial: Learn how to gain control of your finances so they work for you.
7. Occupational/Vocational: Derive personal satisfaction and enrichment from one’s work.
8. Social: Build a sense of connection and a dependable support system.

Part Three: Journaling Prompts

Next, I invited the participants to engage in another self-guided exercise, this time journaling about how the dimensions of wellness resonated with them. The questions we answered were:

• Out of the eight dimensions of wellness, which one(s) require your attention now?
• At your organization, which areas can you focus more attention and create intentions that would support everyone to thrive?

What support do you need to experience freedom in each dimension?

Both sessions were designed to help participants take care of themselves first before venturing out to serve their staff, museums, and communities. They can easily be adapted to support any audience, from professional development groups to parents and families. Regardless of our identities, whether age, socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, or beyond, we are all given one tree trunk in this lifetime. So, let us act with intention as we place our attention on well-being so that we are all thriving as we expand and strengthen our root systems.

I am grateful for Grace Stewart’s invitation to collaborate with the AAM team. Many additional big-hearted and brilliant team members participated, including key members of the leadership team. This experience reaffirmed my belief that humans inside organizations are willing to explore and heal individually and collectively. And that when we do, everyone benefits. Thank you for allowing me to witness your transformation, and the transparent deep care and support you offer to yourselves and each other effortlessly.