Interpretation in Bay Area Museums

This post brings together highlights from a conversation with three Bay Area art museum interpretation experts–Abram Jackson of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), Erica Gangsei of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Lisa Silberstein of the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA).

Abram: As an inaugural director of interpretation, when I tell people my title, there is a rush of confusion over their faces. Often the follow-up question is “What does that mean? What do you do, exactly?” I understand that the answer might be different from institution to institution. So, how do you respond to the question of what you do as interpretation professionals?

Erica: Interpretation is a field that’s really centered in the audience and the museum visitor. So what I say when people ask what I do is that I work to give the visitor a scaffolding to help them have a more meaningful experience with the museum. The museum can be a really intimidating place, and a modern and contemporary art museum can come with its own particular flavor of intimidation. My job is to help visitors feel the museum is for them and to gain some insight. Not by giving them answers or trying to put facts inside their head, but by empowering them to understand that they’re already bringing the tools with them to look at and connect with modern and contemporary art. It’s really about helping them find that power within themselves to connect with what we have on view. 

Lisa: My role is “experience developer,” which obviously gets a lot of questions. So, I usually say that it is a combination of curatorial and interpretation. I’m a visitor advocate on the collaborative project team which includes curators, designers, and project managers. I say it’s ensemble work because we’re doing it together. I’m responsible for making the content we’re showing meaningful, accessible, and relevant to the widest audience possible. That’s our objective and we do it in a variety of ways. I also work really closely with community partners to get their voices into our exhibitions.

Abram: Museums are increasingly more responsive to what is happening outside their walls. What is the role of an interpretation professional in our current political climate?

Lisa: Now more than ever, we need to be doing the work that interpreters are doing. Culture is shifting. Perspectives are changing. People are hungry for this too. We have a responsibility to allow for a multiplicity of voices and it makes our work better. 

I’ll give an example. One of our practices at the OMCA is to have community advisory groups. One of our advisory groups is a Native advisory council that we’ve had for almost 20 years. We co-created a section in the History gallery with them called “Before the Other People Came,” which is their title, and it goes through all the different regions in California and the Native people that live there. Recently, we met with the group in that gallery. The advisory members hadn’t been there in a while and they were looking at the language that was on the wall. It said, for example: “We lived on the rocky coast. We lived in the coastal plains.” They questioned why the language was past tense, and demanded that we change the language. They suggested that we cross out the “d” and add in “still” so that it would say: “We still live on the rocky coast. We still live in the coastal plains.” 

Instead of just making that change and not saying anything about it, we worked with our graphics team to make the change explicit. We put a vinyl cross-out on the “d” and a carrot with “still” above it. We then added a panel that acknowledges the change—that as culture shifts, language evolves. We shared with visitors that we worked with our Native advisory council to create this section and recently we’ve made some changes. Do you notice what the changes are? And why do you think we made those changes? This allows for the conversation to continue. It’s not just “okay, we did that and now we’re good,” but let’s talk about what’s going on right now around all of these issues.

Abram: This work is not always easy. Have you experienced pushback when advancing visitor-centered approaches?

Erica: Everyone who does this work experiences pushback in some form or another. Part of the reason why is we are actually shifting the gravitational center of institutions by operationalizing this work. How early in an exhibition planning process does interpretation have a seat at the table? Which story are we centering within an exhibition? Is it centered around scholarship? Is it a story of collectors? Is it the story of a visitor and the questions that they might have? We are problematizing certain aspects of museum practice that might not be comfortable for people who hold institutional power to address. I have experienced pushback but I think that every conversation about it is constructive.

This conversation has been condensed for the blog context. To quote Abram, you can learn more about “what happens when three interpretation professionals walk into a bar” by watching the full program: