Can Museums Engage Visitors in Civics?
Recently, for a Kera Collective coffee break, where we talk about relevant research and news, we read this thoughtful post by Sarah Jencks on AAM’s blog about why museums need a civic strategy. It made me think about some resulting general questions: can a museum meaningfully engage in civics? What does it mean for a museum to have a civic strategy? And how can engaging in civics create a reputation of trust for museums when thinking about community work? These are seemingly simple questions, but I believe that museums as institutions have to think deeply about their standing before attempting to incorporate civic engagement.
Civic engagement is when people attempt to identify and address issues of public concern, which could be done on an individual basis or collectively. Museums are institutions largely framed by their colonial origins, where colonialists and imperialists brought back items from conquered areas to display in their home countries. Yet, many museums have not engaged critically with their troubled past. As a result, museums are still engaging in the myth that they are neutral and objective, rather than formed through colonialism. This is important to frame the dialogue around civic engagement within museums.
Centering Visitors
One way that museums can work through complex stories and complex pasts is by critically engaging visitors. Through centering visitors in artwork, objects, and stories, visitors can begin to understand the museum as a place where they can form, change, or reinforce their thoughts on civic engagement.
Some museums do this very thoughtfully. We worked on a summative evaluation of the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum’s exhibition To Live and Breathe: Women and Environmental Justice in Washington, DC, where the exhibition design implored visitors to think about environmental justice in three physical areas of the exhibition: where we live, where we work, and where we pray. At each of those vertices, visitors could engage in an activity. There was one activity where visitors read about a quilt made by members and activists of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” which memorialized those who died from environmental toxins. Visitors could then create their own quilt square. This sort of activity pushes the visitor to make connections between the past they’re reading about and their present.
Photo of the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum’s exhibit, featuring the quilt made by Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” members and activists.
Allowing Protest
Another way of incorporating visitors into your museum’s civic strategy is to allow differences of opinion and not shun those who hold views that may be problematic. Museums can be critical spaces of sharing and shaping opinions by engaging visitors in museum activities, exhibition design, and experiences that challenge their views.
Allowing museums to be a third space, where individuals can gather, means allowing visitors to engage in protest. Whether that’s Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro performing a sacred dance to statues from Cambodia or people wearing keffiyehs inside the museum as a form of solidarity, museums should encourage protest. Doing so initiates the process of building trust with visitors, especially local communities.
Creating Space for Discussion
In a post for our Learning Hub last year, Emily Skidmore pondered if exhibitions actually change visitor perceptions through a museum visit. She wrote, “I think exhibitions can affect visitors’ attitudes and behaviors, at least temporarily, but that many museums miss opportunities to do so by defaulting to the passive transfer of information as their main interpretive strategy rather than tapping into a visitor’s emotional response.”
A way to challenge this passive way of delivering information can be through actively creating events around exhibition content and inviting community members to engage with the content, reaching out to public and private school teachers for workshops, and generally holding spaces for the purpose of dialogue. As part of our multi-year project with the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), I observed one of APAC’s teacher workshops, where the APAC team invited District of Columbia Public Schools social studies teachers to tour the Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond exhibition. Throughout the workshop, teachers seemed to be surprised and excited by the connections they could make in their teaching to the exhibition content (which was largely framed around Asian Americans in DC’s Chinatown with reference to protests, Asian American history, and connections with other minority groups in DC).
All in all, I’m hopeful that museums can shift towards civically engaging visitors more meaningfully through adopting unique strategies. As our political environment becomes more and more divisive, museums are at a critical position to offer reform.
