Experimenting with an Institution-wide Strategy for Interpretation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Client: Philadelphia Museum of Art | Location: Philadelphia, PA | Funding: Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global

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We developed audience outcomes for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Chinese Art Initiative and evaluated three rotations of temporary exhibitions.

OVERVIEW

The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) received funding from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global to plan a 3-year Chinese Art Initiative (CAI) with the goal to bridge cultures and develop new ways of connecting with their audiences. The CAI resulted in the development of three consecutive temporary exhibitions of Chinese art, on view 2021-2025, aimed to foster deeper audience engagement through fresh interpretive approaches to the PMA’s permanent collection of Chinese art.

APPROACH

We began our work with the PMA in a series of planning workshops to identify intended audience outcomes for the CAI that would guide exhibition development. Across the years, we had regular calls with the PMA around how the exhibitions were developed in alignment with the audience outcomes. We also conducted a summative evaluation after each exhibition rotation that looked specifically at achievement of the audience outcomes and made recommendations between exhibitions.

CLIENT TAKEAWAYS

In developing the audience outcomes for the CAI, the PMA recognized that they had identified common goals that drive most of the museum’s work—not just that of the CAI. The PMA aims for audiences to slow down to appreciate artworks, exercise empathy, and recognize humanity across place and time, with the ultimate goal that audiences recognize and find inspiration in our common humanity.

Given the universal goals being explored with regular exhibition evaluations, a cross-departmental team of curators, interpreters, and educators took an experimental approach to developing the three rotation exhibitions. They used the evaluations to test out different exhibition techniques, including integrating contemporary works of art from China along with traditional Chinese collections and pairing works of Chinese art with works of art from other cultures to explore a singular concept. The results were shared across the PMA and within the community of Asian art curators to foster learning and reflection about exhibition practices at the museum.