A Student Committee for Interpretation at MHCAM

By Kendra Weisbin and Allison Logan

Who we are

Founded in 1876, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum (MHCAM) is among the oldest college art museums in the country and specializes in innovative approaches to teaching with art. The Museum’s collection includes over 17,000 works of art, decorative art, and material and visual culture from around the world and through time. With a teaching mission of providing direct engagement with art and material culture, Mount Holyoke’s students are one of our most important audiences. The Museum also provides employment and career development opportunities to approximately 25 undergraduate students a year, and reaches many more academically and through extra-curriculars, with roughly 160 class visits and a myriad of student events each year.

MHCAM staff deeply value the perspectives of our students and have prioritized cross-departmental initiatives that bring student voices into our work. It was in this spirit that we first formed a Student Interpretation Committee in 2023. We conceived this as a direct opportunity for students to provide diverse perspectives on the effectiveness and accessibility of MHCAM’s interpretive materials. This feedback is all the more urgent given the Museum’s current phased reinstallation of its permanent collection galleries, set to be completed by our 150th anniversary in 2026. The full-scale reinstallation will rehang the collection chronologically, moving away from the previous geographic approach and creating space for important works of art and material culture that have not historically had a home in the Museum’s galleries. The reinstallation also necessitates a re-envisioning of our interpretive materials, an endeavor in which we want students to be actively involved. 

Forming the first committee

While students have long written labels at the Museum on a one-off basis or as part of a class assignment, we wanted this to be a more sustained collaborative effort. Taking student advisory committees as inspiration, we envisioned a process that would bring in students with different interests and backgrounds. We hoped to create a format that would provide a learning experience for them while allowing the Museum to gather essential feedback about our current interpretation from our most important constituents. 

It was important to us that the Museum compensate student committee-members for their time and create a structure that students would be able to fit into their busy schedules. We decided to invite all members of our student staff to participate, including interns, student museum educators, guides, and student receptionists. Their supervisors agreed to have them conduct this work as part of their regularly-paid positions for three 90 minute sessions over the course of one semester. The ten students who chose to join the committee in 2023 began by giving general feedback on the Museum’s interpretive labels, moved on to critiquing our tombstone format, and ended by conceiving and pitching new tombstone formats in groups – ultimately voting on their favorite. After some small adjustments based on staff feedback, the Museum piloted this new tombstone format in the special exhibition Relaunch Laboratory in fall 2023, and continues to seek feedback. The generative impact of this feedback, along with continued staff conversations, was the impetus behind forming a second iteration of the Student Interpretation Committee in 2024. 

Reconvening the committee

The 2024 committee was a mix of returning and first-time participants. For this re-formed committee, we wanted to focus on the content of tombstones and the challenges of multi-object labels, as we envision more of these for our Museum’s 150th anniversary reinstallation. At the first meeting of the 2024 Student Interpretation Committee, we invited students to each select a label in the galleries to critique. The group met at the Museum, where they listened to each other provide short presentations on their chosen labels, touching on strengths and weaknesses. Based on these comments, we collectively brainstormed potential solutions for improving the labels.

For example, several students chose a label for a 19th-century Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) cradleboard in our galleries. The label was written by a present-day Mohawk artist, who worked with staff to craft a label reflecting on the historical object through the lens of their contemporary practice. Many students were confused by the label, not understanding the writer’s relationship with the Museum, and some even assuming the label-writer was the maker of the object on view (not noticing the earlier production date in the tombstone). After much discussion, we concluded that more contextualizing information was needed for people to understand the label writer’s relationship to the cradleboard, as well as the process by which the writer was invited to engage with the Museum. Conversations like these continue to reveal the importance of being transparent about process and intent in our interpretive materials, making the inner-workings of the Museum more visible to visitors.

In this first session, students also came prepared to discuss two multi-object labels, with an eye not only to content but also format and structure. We displayed the labels printed at poster-scale—24 x 24 in—and students used sticky notes to provide feedback directly on the text. Students offered fascinating perspectives—suggesting tweaking major themes to better connect objects and discussing the paramount importance of thoughtful formatting to ensure that objects on view are easily matched to their descriptions in the label. 

Together, these exercises provided critical student feedback for the Museum. Perhaps more importantly, this process created a shared language of critique among the students and began to build trust between each other and Museum staff.

Figures 1 and 2. Digitized version of poster-board labels with summarized notes

Diving into the nitty-gritty

After the session described above, students were excited to dive into challenging tombstone issues that had come to the forefront during student and staff feedback over the last year. These included: describing unknown makers, identifying cultures and places made, clarifying original-language titles, and the inclusion of dynasties and reigns. Students came prepared in four small groups, each tasked with discussing one of these topics. 

The first group kicked off the presentations with a lively conversation about objects with unidentified makers, weighing the terms “unknown,” “once known,” “unidentified,” “unrecorded,” and “currently unidentified by MHCAM.” Students favored  “unidentified” as direct and simple, but also felt “unrecorded” nodded to a sense of history. They were particularly interested in whether people should be referred to as “makers” (which is the Museum’s current standard) or “artists”, or whether there should be no standard—with terms like painter, potter, weaver, etc. used depending on the object. Student opinions were strong and varied; some thought that “artist” was an important acknowledgment of the individual agency of each maker, while others suggested it had too many culturally-specific connotations. Many agreed that “maker” had a democratizing effect when applied to paintings and material culture alike, though others preferred variation in the terms based on staff knowledge and research. Similarly strong feelings were expressed about the description of maker cultures. Many students felt the imperative to list both a maker’s culture as well as the place made, such as Unidentified Tongan maker (made in Kingdom of Tonga). Other students, however, argued that cultural designations might be confusing for visitors without that specific regional knowledge. We also discussed the importance of acknowledging that the culture of a maker is often unknown, and cannot necessarily be gleaned by the place of production or excavation. 

This conversation led naturally into the second group’s topic, about current versus historical place-names. Students ultimately felt that both should be included—for example, Unidentified maker in Lodz, Russian Empire, present-day Poland. The third group of students were tasked with discussing if and when object titles should be written in their original language. Across the board, students were in favor of this, with English translations in parenthesis: “Guan (jar);” “Kylix (drinking cup);” “Le Petit Pont (The Little Bridge),” etc. Students appreciated how this method better acknowledges the original context of the object, but also recognized the research needed to accomplish it. They unanimously hoped that it would be done when possible, but agreed it did not need to be standardized across all labels. 

Our last group tackled the question of including reigns, dynasties, and historical periods alongside object dates. We discussed the pervasiveness of this practice in many non-Western object labels, noting how we rarely see it in labels for European or American objects. Take, for instance, the commonality of seeing this first example versus the second: “Jug, 12th century, Iran (Seljuq dynasty, 1037–1194)” versus “Vanitas Still Life, Flanders, ca. 1650 (reign of Phillip VI, 1661–1665).” We considered whether to only include reigns and/or dynasties if it was a significant marker of time during that particular historical period. Students were divided on this issue, with some expressing the belief that as a teaching museum, we shouldn’t shy away from including more information, while others believed that extra text on labels could be a visual deterrent, preventing people from reading it at all. Other students made the argument that this type of information could be addressed in the chat section of the label and not in the tombstone. All four topics presented by the students prompted enthusiastic discussion and gave Museum staff much to think about as we continue to refine our label content and format leading up to our 150th anniversary reinstallation.

Looking ahead

The 2024 Student Interpretation Committee provided a wealth of information for Museum staff to consider as we rethink our labels ahead of the Museum’s 2026 reinstallation. One of the more unexpected takeaways from this committee was the near-unanimity of student opinion that tombstones do not need to be completely uniform or standardized. As Leah Manning ’24 explained: “I think that deciding [the information included] piece by piece shows that museums are putting thought and research into each piece they display instead of using a standard format ….That is what I love about museums though, it is the dedication to researching and giving a narrative to pieces that may otherwise be lost to history.” Keyang Zhao ’25 concurred, sharing: “I don’t think all labels should have to follow the exact same format. It makes sense for some additional information to be included on labels for certain objects but the same type of information will not work as well with other objects. It might be helpful to acknowledge that there isn’t a standard format that will work for all labels and that being flexible may be the best approach.” For interpretive professionals long-used to seeking uniformity (for reasons of equity as well as ease), this was a surprising consensus and one that bears further consideration. Students also felt strongly that a guide to deciphering tombstones should be included in the galleries—a strategy already being successfully employed at many other college art museums. Ideally, they suggested, this would be provided as a portable handout rather than in a wall-mounted format. 

Across the board, the students shared perspectives and ideas that would not have surfaced without the committee and we are enormously grateful for their participation. As we hoped, the students also found the experience valuable. Darwin Michener-Rutledge ’24, who had participated in both iterations of the committee, shared: 

I feel like this committee is one of the ways students can most tangibly contribute to the Museum. When so much of the museum workings are beyond our purview (acquisitions, exhibitions, etc), it’s a privilege to share our thoughts on how the art is presented to us. Being part of the committee provokes so many thoughts beyond just the logistics of label writing. What information does the institution consider valuable? What do I consider valuable? Why are or aren’t they the same? The Student Interpretation Committee allows us to better understand our own life experiences as they relate to art and what makes a space accessible, welcoming, and meaningful.

While students have long been important partners in considering the content of our interpretive labels, we hadn’t before considered bringing them into more technical conversations about the content and format of the tombstones. But as one of our primary audiences, students’ perspectives should be central to how we convey an artwork’s most basic and important information, and their insights were more valuable than we could have anticipated. Most importantly for MHCAM, perhaps, the model of a short-term, paid student advisory committee for task-based missions—like retooling tombstones—is a model to which we will be sure to return. As we look towards our 150th anniversary, and its accompanying reinstallation, initiatives like this one can help us ensure we are planning for a Museum that both includes and reflects the values of our student communities.