These days, the art at art museums can feel less important than “engagement,” a metric that’s arguably more measurable—from a marketing and budgeting perspective—than beauty or cultural relevance. Indeed, many notable arts institutions across the country have hired engagement officers or directors of engagement in the past few years. Some have even set up entire engagement departments.
As to what museum engagement actually is, Gamynne Guilotte, chief education and engagement officer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art since her hiring last year, told Observer that, “there is no simple answer. It means different things at different institutions.”
Engaging with the public and inspiring the public to engage with art museums can involve several different kinds of initiatives and activities, from classic educational programs for children in primary and secondary schools and public lectures for adults to outreach efforts targeting populations without much experience with museums and creative accessibility campaigns. As such, engagement officers at museums work across departments, interacting with staff in a variety of specializations, including curatorial, education, communications, visitor services, volunteer coordination, museum operations and marketing, to “create a space that is welcoming to visitors,” Guilotte said.
She, for instance, conducts visitor surveys, arranges educational programs (some aimed at school-aged children, others for adults in the community, yet others for university classes and museum members), and takes part in curatorial meetings where new exhibitions are planned. “I’ve never said ‘no’ to an exhibition,” she said, “but I pose questions that sometimes stop them in their tracks: What is the relevance of the exhibition? Who do you see as the audience for this exhibition? What is the one thing that you want visitors to take after seeing the exhibition?”
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For Berit Ness, the newly hired inaugural chief engagement officer at the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, focusing on engagement means “thinking of the visitors’ experience even before they come in,” which additionally gets her involved in overseeing the museum’s website to make sure that it is easily navigated. Then there are first impressions to think about. The front entrance to the museum, until 2019, consisted just of lockers in which to place bags and a campus police officer standing watch but now offers comfortable seating, some artwork on the walls and places to charge electronic devices—all reflective of a newer way of focusing on the visiting public and the museum experience.
Still, engagement remains a somewhat nebulous concept, referring to (in Ness’ words) making the museum into “a place of learning, of respite, of world-building.” Less loftily, she refers to engagement as a “conduit for visitor services to speak with other departments, such as the exhibition teams.”
Guilotte described engagement less as a particular activity than as a vision of how museums should look to interact with the public. “You can describe it as how we enter into an equitable and reciprocal relationship with our audiences that isn’t just transactional,” she said. “We are listening as well as speaking, employing tactics that help meet visitor needs.”
Traditionally, museums have focused on the demographics of their visitors—the age, race, ethnicity and gender, in large measure—but she now also examines the psychographic aspect: “What are the motivations for visiting a show? Why are people coming here?”
Another challenge museum engagement officers must contend with is how success might be quantified. Success can be measured in visitors. The education department of a museum might identify how many school children have been brought in on field trips, and curators could point to attendance at exhibitions. Memberships and overall revenues are clear metrics. Marianna Pegno, director of engagement and inclusion at the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona, told Observer that she measures “success in terms of deepening relationships with people in the community over a multi-year period.” Success in engagement, according to a spokesperson at the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, is measured in terms of “the degree to which it allows people to develop a connection to the art,” and one of the key activities of that museum’s learning and engagement department is to help write the exhibition wall texts and individual artwork labels so that they are meaningful to a broad range of people, rather than leaving the task entirely to curators whose focus may be more limited.
In the current year, the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and SFMOMA have brought on engagement officers, “responsible,” according to a release from the latter institution, “for anchoring the institution’s efforts to connect with a wide range of audiences through educational and public programs, in-gallery experiences, community partnerships and off-site collaborations.”
They are not alone. In recent years, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia, the Palm Springs Art Museum in California, the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky, the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, and the High Museum have all created roles for engagement specialists, joining the ranks of museums such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MFA in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, among many others.
Malika N. Pryor, chief learning and engagement officer at the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, noted that “engagement officers are a relatively new position in museums,” reflecting “a more expansive view that museums have taken in recent history that includes community collaboration and education into the fabric of programs and curatorial development and execution. The renewed—or in some instances new—commitment to validating local and/or community voices is a cultural shift in the sector away, to some degree, from an expert-only focus to one that acknowledges the value of contemporary context and diverse voices.”
Dennis Gephardt, a senior credit officer at Moody’s Analytics specializing in nonprofits, told Observer that the key to institutional success is “organizations remaining relevant to their audience.”
Engagement is just the latest way art museums have sought to broaden their appeal, and it manifests broadly, particularly via efforts to increase diversity. It’s evident in recent changes in the people being hired or selected as docents at institutions (more women, more people of color), the programming (more music, more talks, more workshops), the exhibitions (more works by a diverse range of artists), the acquisitions (more works by women, disabled, LGBTQ and BIPOC and Indigenous artists) and the amenities (yoga classes in the galleries, guided tours for caregivers or parents of very young children). In the post-pandemic world where going to the museum is no longer a habit, museum officials have found that, in addition to luring back the old crowd, they have to give new communities reasons to visit. As Guilotte put it, “Museums cannot be just temples on the hill, waiting for people to come to us.”
