How Much Transparency is the Right Amount? A Museum Visitor Response Case Study

Jessica Keyes, Manager of Interpretation, Baltimore Museum of Art

It is broadly accepted that transparency is one of the necessary conditions for accountability, but in an educational context, how much transparency is the right amount?

As art museum educators, we seek to be accountable to our visitors in exhibitions featuring challenging artworks by providing them with opportunities to look closely, think critically, and respond in thoughtful ways while offering support when they may be confused or offended by what they see. At the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), the Education department undergoes an interpretive planning process for each exhibition that begins with setting two to three visitor outcomes in collaboration with the curator. We then design our interpretives and programs around those outcomes and measure the success of our initiatives against them. We often find that in working to meet these outcomes we must balance transparency with limiting what we share. We are creating carefully guided experiences and we want to avoid overloading visitors with information that may not relate to the outcomes.

The BMA hosts an annual exhibition featuring the winners of the Baker Artist Awards, which awarded $85,000 in prizes to five artists in 2015. The prize is administered by the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance (GBCA) and winners are selected by an anonymous jury. The BMA works with GBCA and the artists to select and install artworks in the exhibition. This year’s exhibition of the 2014 and 2015 winners (the 2014 show was postponed due to renovations) included artworks that dealt boldly with issues of race and of surveillance, which we anticipated could lead to particularly strong reactions from local visitors still living with the impact of the Baltimore uprising following Freddie Gray’s death in police custody just five months earlier.

For the exhibition, we chose to use a visitor response station at the exit to build trust with visitors by offering them a safe and respectful environment in which to respond honestly to the artwork.

The visitor response station provided an opportunity for visitors to share and examine their reactions, guided by the question, “Share your thoughts. Each of these artists explores a facet of the world we live in. How has an artwork in the exhibition changed your thoughts or feelings about contemporary life?” This visitor response station was not strictly educational; the visitor outcome that guided the development of the response station was, “Visitors will explore their reactions to the artworks.” Our goal was to create a safe, inclusive environment where visitors could contemplate, criticize, or question the artworks, and we displayed most of the responses regardless of whether they were celebratory or critical of the artwork and the museum.

Design

The visitor outcome, “Visitors will explore their reactions to the artworks,” was developed over the course of two or three conversations between Gamynne Guillotte, Director of Interpretation and Public Programs, and myself, in which we explored all the facets of the artworks that could challenge our visitors. As a juried show, the Baker Artist Awards do not have a unifying theme, so we were looking for an outcome that could be as general as possible while remaining meaningful. While we typically focus on close looking and critical thinking, our anticipation of emotional responses to some of the artworks led us to aim for an activity that could be as inclusive as possible of these responses.

We were very intentional in crafting the question; we didn’t want to single out the artists whose work was most likely to provoke strong responses, but we used the verb “change” in order to prompt visitors to think more critically about their reactions. We chose the wording “facet of the world we live in” and “contemporary life” because, while broad, they apply to all the artworks and not just the most challenging ones. Visitors wrote their responses on three-by-five inch note cards, which were moderated by BMA staff twice per week before being added to a Rolodex for public viewing. We chose a Rolodex for the display medium because we wanted all responses to be weighted equally, rather than have staff choose the “best” responses.

It was also important that the responses could not be read in a top-down, left-right, hierarchal way.

In a context where we anticipated a higher than typical proportion of emotionally driven responses, this decision came partly from a desire to respect our visitors and partly from the realization that curating the responses for display would necessitate an explanation and defense of a stringent moderation process that could not be transparent because of reviewer subjectivity inherent in the selection process.

With the goal of including the broadest set of responses possible, we reviewed each card according to the following guidelines:

1) Does it respond to the art?
2) Does it contain hate speech or profanity?

If the answer to 1 was yes and 2 was no, then it was placed on view in the Rolodex. Due to limited space in the response station, we chose not to include the moderation guidelines in the station itself at first. However, we added the guidelines after three weeks in order to improve our transparency. The resulting set of comments represented a broad range of visitor responses, positive and negative, thoughtful and superficial, critical and emotional.

The Responses

While the BMA does not require the Education department to report out on data gathered from our interpretives, we do seek to gather as much quantitative and qualitative data as possible to help guide our planning for future projects. The following analysis represents my informal review of the visitor responses as they relate to the visitor outcome.

We received a total of 739 responses, of which 600 (81%) were placed on view and 139 (19%) were not. Starting about four weeks into the exhibition, to make space for new responses, we began removing earlier responses where identical comments (for example, “great show” and “creepy”) were in the new batch of responses. Of the approved responses, we considered 157 (26%) to be thoughtful or critical (22% of the total responses). Two education staff members reviewed the approved responses together and judged them to be thoughtful when the visitor commented on why they responded a particular way or they described how the artwork made them think about something else in the world. The other 443 (74%) approved responses were made up of statements of emotional response, congratulatory phrases, or single words.

Of the 139 responses we chose not to put on view, 124 (89%) were simply off-topic, for example, “Hi Mom,” “#squad,” and drawings of eyes all made multiple appearances. Only two responses during the entire run of the exhibition could be considered hateful or profane, one with a white supremacist message and the other a drawing of genitals. We anticipated and prepared for a much greater number of inappropriate comments, and believe it is a testament to our visitors and our relationship to them that they responded within the bounds of propriety more than 99% of the time. The other 13 declined responses were pulled from view about halfway through the show at the request of an artist whose work they referenced. Staff had mixed feelings about the request because of the open and inclusive environment we were cultivating, but ultimately chose to grant the artist’s request because it did not detract from subsequent visitors’ experiences in a significant way.

One of the most interesting outcomes is that several of the response cards became sites of conversation. At least five of the approved cards on view had additional comments added to them by later visitors who either answered a question that was asked or indicated a shared sentiment. For example, one visitor wrote, “Wrong timing for the KKK exhibition,” and another visitor replied on the same card, “(when is the right time??).”

Challenges

Perhaps the biggest challenge of this approach was the concern from BMA staff about creating an open forum that would give equal weight to both celebratory and critical comments. In planning the response, we drafted all the problematic response scenarios we could think of. While we were relieved to discover that most visitors responded well within acceptable boundaries, the concern that we might miss the one offensive response required more frequent and close staff attention to the moderation of responses than we typically allot for — around 45–60 minutes per week.

Additionally, few visitors responded to the actual question posed by the prompt. In designing the response station, we decided early that it would not be a strictly educational space and that visitors who chose to criticize or respond in an off-topic way would be as welcome as those who chose to respond thoughtfully or critically. Therefore, the disconnection between the question and responses does not represent a failure of the response station. We will, however, take this outcome into consideration when designing future response stations where we are aiming for stronger educational outcomes.

In terms of design, the Rolodex display presented a challenge in relation to the moderation process. It was possible for visitors to add cards directly to display rather than to the submission box, thereby bypassing moderation. Most of the cards submitted this way were unsuitable for display, and staff had to go through the hundreds of cards on view twice per week to weed out unmoderated cards.

Successes

While most of the responses did not answer the question posed by the station, a large majority did respond to the artworks in some way. We effectively struck a balance between visitor needs and the exhibition requirements, while maintaining an environment in which a very small minority of responses were inappropriate.

The most positive outcome from this visitor response is that we have learned that we can address challenging issues head-on and that our visitors will meet us with respect and honesty, most of the time. In a field where museums dealing transparently with turbulent issues are still noteworthy (for example, 30 Americans at the DIA and Rijksmuseum renaming project), we are working to increase our engagement with our community on the issues that matter to them. Each successful program gives us confidence to experiment more broadly the next time.

Outcomes

The Baker Artist Awards visitor response station findings will inform my work in several ways going forward. First, I’m curious about the response cards that became sites of conversation and I would like to foster this sort of engagement. In this and other projects in which visitors connect anonymously with other visitors we have had some very thoughtful and thought-provoking responses, for example with our Postcards from Home activity in the Joseph Education Center exhibition, Imagining Home. While the percentage of visitors who respond to these activities is lower than with less-demanding response stations, their level of engagement seems to be much deeper. In this case, transparency plays a big role in ensuring that visitors feel safe sharing their thoughts with another visitor and their personal information with the BMA because we can clearly communicate how their responses will be used, and then only use them in the stated ways.

Second, I found it very telling that many of the responses asked questions similar to, “why are you making me so uncomfortable?”

I believe that discomfort is a positive response to art, and that as educators one of our roles is to help visitors understand that their response is normal and can lead to a deeper understanding of themselves and the world. This value is rooted in the idea that transparency creates safer and richer learning environments, and has shaped my thinking on several projects since the Baker Artist Awards visitor responses.

Conclusions

Transparency is increasingly becoming the standard to which we aspire, as visitors and funders demand accountability for how we spend our resources and for how we define and engage our target audiences. Outward-facing transparency relies on open and honest internal communication; reaching alignment on transparency for interdepartmental communication can be as difficult as sharing information with the public and the unpredictable responses the transparent practices will invite.

However, full transparency may not be a desirable goal. As educators, we seek to shape the experiences of our visitors, and withholding or de-emphasizing certain elements of our work or processes can allow us to create rich, focused learning experiences within the time-based and spatial limitations of a visitor response, tour, or activity. Based on my experience with the Baker Exhibition visitor response, I would argue that the greatest challenge in being transparent is to separate the helpful information from the unhelpful and to set those boundaries intentionally and proactively.

Jessica Keyes

Jessica Keyes is Manager of Interpretation at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she designs activities and tools to help visitors learn about art. She has an MA in ethnomusicology from the University of Alberta and certificate in museum studies from the University of Victoria, where she focused on how musicians and museums create meaningful and memorable experiences for their audiences.