Building Trust with Authors, Audiences, Artists, and the Team

by Julianna White

As an editor, my work is as much about trust as it is about style, tone, and comma placement. Being one link in a long chain of writers, reviewers, designers, and production specialists creating content for a museum with the visitor in mind, building and maintaining relationships might be the most important role an editor plays. Keeping this trust in check, from concept to print, allows for the honesty and respect that leads to confident work we feel proud to share with the public.

Trust Through Shared Understanding

This couldn’t have been truer working on the catalogue and exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for which trust with the team, authors, artists, and audience was essential. The collaborative spirit of the project was years in the making. It began with a convening of around forty-five scholars to discuss the possibilities and limitations of a show about race and American sculpture. From there, an advisory council formed, many of whom wrote for the catalogue, and the co-curators emerged as well. They worked very closely with SAAM’s interpretation team throughout the project, which led to my early involvement as the project editor.

Before there was a fully developed book concept and exhibition plan, in early 2021 I joined a dozen or so other staff members for training with the Sites of Conscience, made possible through a grant secured by the interpretation team. It was intense—for eight weeks, we met for two hours, twice a week. We were asked to be open-minded and vulnerable as we talked about cultural humility, dialogue, and community engagement. We discussed our ideal non-negotiables for the project and grew a muscle that helped us constantly check our perspectives—something I carried with me throughout the project, from tone and word choice to how I approached feedback with each writer. In short, we built trust through vulnerability and shared understanding. We continued to meet once a month after the training ended, allowing members of the team—from the visitor service managers and social media specialist to the exhibition designer and public affairs lead—to feel involved and heard before they were handed the content. For me, I learned to deeply understand the intentions of the team, including how we wanted visitors to feel when approaching this show, which gave me confidence to make editorial decisions based in layers of understanding.

The Power of Time, Collaboration, and Care

The resulting project takes a bold step in reframing many historical pieces in SAAM’s permanent collection to show how sculpture is intertwined with concepts of race and power in the United States. It also features work by artists who have been encouraging dialogue about these concepts as early as the 1920s. The show invites reflection about power and identity and US history—it asks people to reckon with how the past still influences the present and imagine possible futures. The interpretation team took care to provide the visitor with multiple ways to approach this content, from an introductory video overviewing major themes; a gallery guide with questions, links to Smithsonian resources, and a reading list; an audio guide with voices of the curators, artists, and student collaborators; to a space at the center of the exhibition for people to rest and reflect, where they can share feedback, chat about prompts offered on the wall, and even play a game designed to connect further to select artworks. The catalogue is a dense deep dive but also offers multiple entry points, with long- and short-form essays, a transcribed conversation, and 100-word explanatory captions.

The project was a success due to these layers of careful, collaborative work. Even so, the process of producing it and its opening and reception have highlighted increasing concerns in how to produce this content. As the opening date neared this past November, those concerns came down to specific word choice, even capitalization of terms. But we had a strong collective defense to scrutiny, strengthened by time, collaboration, and care. (It didn’t hurt that we documented certain team decisions along the way, complete with citations and resources.)

An Urgent Conversation to Maintain Trust

Around this time, a request for session proposals for the 2025 National Museum Publishing Seminar came through my inbox. This biennial conference brings together a wonderful community of museum editors, designers, publishers, and others who love to inspire one another and tackle collective challenges. I felt an urgent need to discuss some of the concerns I was dealing with as a museum editor in this moment with this group, namely, how can we keep producing this content with confidence and with the trust of the public and colleagues?

The conference committee supported my idea for a panel about tools and strategies we can use to maintain trust with authors, audiences, and artists through what and how we publish. With their help and the help of others in my museum networks, I had many generous conversations with people willing to talk about this and share their knowledge—including many from the interpretation field. I was able to gather Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, Director of Content Strategy at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kari Dahlgren, Director of Publications at SFMOMA; and Julie Trébault, Executive Director of the Artists at Risk Connection to talk about proven ways we can produce “sensitive content” with care. Kari talked about Proyecto Mission Murals, an IMLS-funded multiyear project that included a digital publication and many other programs, coordinated by SFMOMA’s Education and Community Engagement division (which contains the Publications department). This community-based project sought a sustained and meaningful dialogue with local Mission muralists and residents, whose sociopolitical murals of the 1970s and ’80s were under threat, as the artists age and the mural sites disappear with new construction. The museum engaged with community advisors, who guided development of each element, providing ample time and intention for their involvement. This led to conducting oral histories, an audio zine, a short documentary film, a fully bilingual digital publication, lesson plans, a symposium, community residency, and more. With all of this, they shared and preserved a largely untold history in a deeply meaningful way that gained trust from the local community and global audiences alike. 

Kelsey used the project Gary Simmons: Public Enemy to share how MCA Chicago aims to balance artist intent and visitor experience for the many projects they produce with living artists. Her teams, including Content Strategy, Interpretation, and Creative, worked with the curators and visitor experience staff to address the layers of complex references in Simmons’s work. The goal was to care for visitors and staff while honoring the artist’s intent. To accomplish this, interpretation developed a three-phase plan for staff training based in early focus groups and involved weekly videos discussing the content, in-person workshops, and special training for frontline staff. One resulting element was a space within the exhibition for rest and reflection. They invited external experts to curate reading lists for this space and stocked it with the material and printed the lists on free bookmarks. Visitors could also write in their own suggestions. Taking care of the staff and expanding collaboration outside the museum created a richer visitor experience.

Julie spoke about how her efforts relate to how and what we produce, especially in working with artists. Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) is a global organization committed to protecting artistic freedom. They defend the rights of artists and cultural workers at risk across the world. Julie provided an overview of current trends, including findings of the January 2025 report, The Censorship Horizon: A Survey of Art Museum Directors, which found that nearly 65 percent of art museum directors felt “pressure not to include an exhibition or piece of art” at some point during their careers; 45 percent indicated specific cases within the last three years. She talked about the quiet ways that political pressure can seep into cultural work and impact whose stories are told and whose are erased. She talked about the dangers of directives that don’t involve debate and conversation. The ARC brings awareness to violations and builds alliances with artists, institutions, and many other groups. They encourage development of clear internal processes for navigating threats, understanding risk assessment and management, and building cross-sector alliances for solidarity and community mobilization.

As a panel, I asked them about how best to determine “sensitive content” in order to prepare for (and embrace) challenges, how we can mitigate self-censorship, and the necessity of building in process to help with all the above. Museums are seen as one of the most trusted sources of information in US society. I think it helped to remind this community of the strategies that exist—already proven successful—to keep moving forward with care and integrity to ensure we maintain that trust.

Note: The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent affiliated institutions.