Ever rewatch a movie you loved at 20 and realize, 10 or 20 (or 30!) years later, that you're now rooting for completely different characters?
The movie didn't change. You did.
I've been thinking about how the same thing happens with museums, and why it matters for those of us who make exhibits.
"Who are you this time?"
A few years back, the late, great New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote a lovely essay about the Frick Collection here in New York ("When a Museum Feels Like Home," The New Yorker, February 15 & 22, 2021).
Schjeldahl first wandered into the Frick in the late 1960s as a young critic who knew next to nothing about the Old Masters, and he spent the next half-century falling for its paintings one at a time.
His first Frick crush was Ingres's portrait of the Comtesse d'Haussonville. Decades later, he could still feel its pull, but he could also see its oddities: an arm that doesn't quite attach where it should, a chair no actual person could sit in.
Same painting. Different Peter.
Because the Frick doesn't push one big curatorial storyline at you, Schjeldahl argued, it works more like a mirror. Each visitor brings their own moods and tastes, and the collection reflects them back. Or as he put it, in a line I can't stop thinking about:
"A visit there is a biographical event: who are you this time?"
What you notice, and what you breeze right past, tells you something about where you are in your life.
That’s the idea of the “biographical museum visit.”
Same museum, different you.
Think about your own "home" museum, whatever and wherever it is. You've probably visited it as:
• A kid. Dragged along, bored by the paintings, obsessed with the gift shop or the one weird diorama.
• A student. Looking for an assignment, or a date, or both.
• A new parent. Scanning every gallery for bathrooms, stroller ramps, and things that won't break.
• A grandparent. Slowing down, and suddenly noticing all the stuff you rushed past those earlier three times.
The Rivera Court (pictured above and below) at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is definitely one of my biographical museum visit touchstones.
• As a child, I was probably more interested in the physical architecture of the space than the frescoes themselves.
• As a 20-year-old freshly graduated from college and volunteering at the old Detroit Children's Museum across the street from the DIA, I would spend many lunch hours marveling at the colors and compositions that Diego Rivera created. The Rivera Court has rightfully been called the "American Sistine Chapel."
• As the son and grandson of men who spent their whole adult lives working for the Ford Motor Company at the historic Rouge Plant, the "Detroit Industry Murals" carried a very personal meaning.
• And lastly, as a father and husband, I wanted to show my family something that meant so much to me.
The objects in the museums stay put, but the visitors keep changing. Which means every museum is really several different museums, depending on who walks in the door.
So what do we do with that?
Here's where it gets practical for us exhibit folks.
1. Keep some anchors. Part of why the Frick works as a mirror is that so much of it doesn't change. Not every gallery needs a refresh every five years. A few beloved "touchstone" objects or exhibits give returning visitors a fixed point to measure themselves against. (Children's museums: that one climber or water table that three generations remember? Think hard before you rip it out.)
2. Design for the second, fifth, and fiftieth visit. Layered content (a quick hit for first-timers, deeper stuff for people who've seen it before) rewards people for coming back as different people.
3. Ask visitors to notice the change. A low-cost comment card that asks "When were you first here? What do you notice now that you didn't then?" can produce some of the most moving visitor feedback you'll ever collect. Bonus: post the best ones.
4. Let them write to their future selves. A "postcard to future me" that the museum mails back to visitors a year later costs a pittance, but turns a single visit into a relationship.
The museum as a long conversation
Schjeldahl understood that the best museum relationships aren't one-and-done transactions. They're long conversations, picked up again every few years, where the museum mostly stays the same, and we show up a little older, a little different, and (hopefully) a little wiser.
Our job as exhibit and experience makers might not be to deliver the "right" experience on a single visit, but to build places that are worth returning to.
Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!
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