Off-the-Wall Thinking

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You’re dining alone at a restaurant tonight, and your server seats you at this table. Which seat would you take?

Image courtesy of Wikimedia / Benoît Prieur

Most people would choose the chair at the farther end of the table, preferring to face into the room with the wall behind them. In the 1970s, a geographer named Jay Appleton offered an explanation for this widely demonstrated human behavior, called the “prospect-refuge theory.” Appleton posited that humans evolved seeking spaces of refuge where threats could not approach from behind. At the same time, an open view allowed early humans to notice resource prospects and approaching threats.

Whether or not it’s true that the preference for facing into the restaurant has roots in an evolutionary need for physical security, I think we can all agree that being able to check out the decor, people-watch, and observe the action happening around us is, at the very least, more interesting than facing the wall.

If this is such a widely-recognized human preference, then why do the designs of so many museums force visitors to do the exact opposite—looking at content on the wall with their backs to the room?

One answer is that designing this way is typically the easiest, if not the only, practical option. Putting the content on the perimeter walls maximizes space in the gallery for visitor throughput. Building separate surfaces for content would cost money. Moreover, the visitors aren’t sitting at tables in restaurants. They’re on the move, and a wall can’t always be at their backs simulating refuge.

I do wonder, though, if museums have become so accustomed to this norm that they sometimes forget they have more options. When I see digital interactives in museums, for example, nine times out of ten they’re against the walls. This has always been the go-to method because walls allow for hiding electrical wires, mounting screens, and keeping the interactive’s users out of the way of other visitors.

But take a look at this example from the SparkLab! innovation space at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC:

View angle 1
View angle 2

The entire time visitors are doing the interactive, they can see around the pillar to everything else that’s happening in the room. This keeps them connected and gives them a chance to get excited by what they see other visitors doing. If the goal is to spark interaction, participation, and engagement, doesn’t this make so much more sense than having visitors face the wall?

My theory is that the longer the dwell time is at a particular space in an exhibit, the more important it is for that space to be designed with refuges and prospects in mind. If visitors are going to be standing in one place for a while doing an interactive, why not align with natural human preferences and maximize their comfort?

Visitor Experiences at Ripley’s Aquarium You Can Believe (Or Not)

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Say what you will about the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! franchise’s integrity when it comes to interpretation and collections, but when it comes to visitor experience for edutainment, they know their craft. Here are some things that stood out on my recent visit to their aquarium in Toronto.

Moving Walkways

You know that problem where visitors always seem to be either rushing past something or crowding around something? Could the solution be as simple as installing airport moving walkways?

Check out this tunnel experience. Riding the moving walkway sets a pace for slow-looking, ensures every visitor gets to be right up against the glass for the entire route, and decreases walking fatigue. Want to pass by quickly or linger at any one spot? Simply step off the walkway onto the normal flooring beside it, and hop back on any time you want. But there was a clear preference–just about every visitor I saw opted to use the moving walkway over the regular walking path.

‘Catch of the Day’ Interactive

The popularity of this not-at-all glamorous-looking interactive surprised me. When arriving, I saw parents trying to tear their kid away from it. When leaving, there were already two families cued up behind me.

How it works:  You stand on the scale and press a button to select one of four types of seafood. The screen displays the market value of that type of seafood per kilogram and calculates how much a catch of that seafood equal to your weight would be worth.

The kid who didn’t want to leave was experimenting with all kinds of combinations–how would the price change if they jumped on the scale, if they had their sibling on the scale with them, if they asked their parents to try it? For every variation, they tried it with all four kinds of seafood to see how they could get the highest result.

Something I really appreciated was that it didn’t show your actual weight. The only body image implication given was that it’s better to weigh more.

Screens for Labels

There are very few print labels in the aquarium. Almost all are digital screens. This greatly improves readability in the dark environment, and it offers the aquarium flexibility to change the label content any time they want. With the rise of E-Ink, I expect digital labels to become increasingly common.

A screen can cycle through multiple labels, enabling the aquarium to provide unlimited content with no increase to information density at any one time. Here are four different “Tube Anemone” labels that all cycled across a single screen. Each of their content stands alone, so if you only stay long enough to read one, you wouldn’t know the difference.

If paired with RFID in the future, the visitor experience could be entirely personalized with labels that convert into any language, reading level, text size or color contrast for accessibility, thematic topic of interest, and so on.

That said, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the aquarium’s use of digital labels is that their reels did not include French translations. Most major attractions in Canada are bilingual. Given how easy it is to do this with digital labels, this seems like either a huge oversight or, more likely, a telltale sign of cost-cutting.

Sensory Stimulation Breaks

It was nice to see these little booths interspersed throughout the aquarium where visitors could step away for a quiet moment.

Touchables at Scale

A nice “touch” of universal design was that touchable models were provided in both blown-up size for more detailed exploration AND life-size for realism. Even visitors without visual impairments can benefit–how many times have you searched for a critter in an aquarium tank or terrarium without knowing what size thing to be looking for? I also liked how the apple in this example added to the sense of scale.

Adding Flair to the Hardware

If the practical demands of your space necessitate ugly furnishings, why not spruce them up like the aquarium did with this funny shark fin “Caution” sign and turtle storm drain?

Anticipating What Will be on Visitors’ Minds

I’ve written before about the importance of “answering the obvious question.” If there’s a question everyone will be asking (e.g. “Why are Great Whales called ‘Great’?”), you should answer it head-on in your interpretation.

That goes for talking points as well as questions. The aquarium had a good example. One of the most popular fun facts about octopi is that they have a penchant for escaping their aquarium tanks. It’s even the subject of a New York Times bestseller, Remarkably Bright Creatures–which I heard more than one visitor mentioning to their group by the octopus tank.

With this label, the aquarium anticipated the topic of conversation, gave visitors interesting and relevant info, and got a built-in opportunity to humble-brag about the ingenuity of their method of keeping their octopus in its tank. A win-win for everyone.

What do you think about these? I’d love to hear your take.

Inspiring Action: What’s Really the Goal?

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Many museums have missions to inspire visitors to make some kind of change in their lives. Art museums want more people to do art and support artists. Science museums want people to fight climate change. Holocaust and human rights museums want people to be upstanders and civic activists. Etc.

So how can museums with goals to inspire action actually do it? And when they do it, how do we know if it’s working? And for that matter, does it even matter if it’s working, so long as the intention is clear?

My impression of the industry status quo is that intention and messaging matter more to stakeholders than results. Donors and Boards of Directors are satisfied if they see that an exhibit has calls to action and maybe even guidance for getting started. Evidence that visitors are following through isn’t not wanted, but it’s usually not seen as enough of a priority to justify the costs of setting up a mechanism to track–if the calls to action are specific enough to be realistically trackable at all.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t think it has to be. But I do think we should be mindful of the potential consequences and be selective and intentional in our efforts. We should be asking questions like, when is the goal really to spark an action, versus when is it to deliver the message that your actions can make a difference?

Consider, for example, this sign at an organization highly regarded for its interpretation, the San Diego Zoo.

The sign says that, while extinction does occur naturally, many extinctions are being accelerated by human actions ranging from over-harvesting to pollution to climate change. It ends with a question to visitors: “What actions can you take to help protect the environment?”

My question here is, what is a visitor supposed to do when they encounter this sign? Is the goal for them to take a moment to brainstorm ways they can help the environment? If so, how likely do we think it is that a visitor who reads the sign will then do the action? Alternatively, is the goal perhaps to persuade the visitor who dismisses concerns about extinction as something that would “naturally happen anyway” that they should, in fact, care? If that’s the goal, how likely do we think this sign will change their mind?

Next, we might consider, if there’s any chance that the sign might achieve its intended goal for some number of visitors, however low the chances may be, then what’s the harm in having it anyway? My concern is the possibility that, for all other visitors, this sign becomes one more droning voice among the countless calls for environmental action that they’ve seen elsewhere in their lives, ultimately having the opposite of the intended effect by further desensitizing them to the cause.

Compare that to this other sign at the San Diego Zoo, which tells visitors that they “can help do giraffe research” in four easy steps: go to a website; make an account; watch a tutorial; review photos.

On this sign, what’s being asked of the visitor is clear, actionable, even measurable. A visitor can take a seat on a bench and do the action right here and now. If, say, after a year of having the sign posted, engagement on the website hasn’t increased by a target amount, the zoo can take the sign down and reclaim the real estate for other, more impactful messaging.

What about calls to action that aren’t so cut-and-dry? What if we really want to inspire long-term sustained engagement and behavioral change after the visitor goes home? That may not ever be trackable, but is there something we can do at a smaller scale to get some sense of our impact? 

Imagine a zoo that has a goal to inspire visitors to eat less meat. It’s neither a realistic goal for the zoo to convert devout meat eaters into vegetarians during their visit nor to track a visitor’s diet after they leave the zoo. But one idea the zoo could try is to have messaging that encourages visitors to pick a meatless option for lunch today. Perhaps they even offer coupon cards at the entry gate that visitors can use on meatless options at the zoo’s cafes. The zoo now has a way to quantify the initiative’s reach (e.g. how many meatless vs. meat meals have been sold this month compared to last?) and to give visitors positive reinforcement that their choices have real environmental impact (e.g. “x decrease in meat meals sold means y gallons of water conserved” could be displayed in the cafes, like the water bottle refilling stations that tell you how many plastic bottles have been spared through collective use). Maybe the visitor will take home the message that having a meatless meal every now-and-then can still be enjoyable and is a positive step they can take for the environment, even if they aren’t ready to become a full-time vegetarian. If the visitor doesn’t change their long-term behavior, at the very least, they have already made a positive difference during their time at the zoo.

One place I think we can start with inspiring action is to get clearer about what our real goal is for any given project. Here are some common categories yours might fit into:

  • Inform and raise awareness about an issue
  • Evoke deep feeling and personal attachment around an issue
  • Empower people to believe that they can make a difference
  • Connect and organize people who want to help
  • Get people to accomplish a specific task (e.g. write a letter to your congressperson)

It’s perfectly clear why museums that want to inspire action usually touch on all of these. If you’ve told someone about a problem, then made them care about the problem, next you tell them what they can do about the problem. The logic behind the formula is well-intended and sound.
…It’s just that I’ve never seen an exhibit that has convinced me it actually works. And I suspect that’s because we are trying to do too much.

What other goals belong in this list?

What could it look like to target just one or two of these goals in an exhibit, rather than trying to do all of them at once?

My favorite take-away from ‘Ted Lasso’ for creative people

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I’m a big fan of the show Ted Lasso. And though the series ended a while ago now, it’s been on my mind a lot lately while I’ve been mourning the passing of an inspiring and beloved manager (much like Ted) who had hosted team building events for us to watch the show together.

The show has wise messages for people in any career, but one of my favorites for culture workers and creatives specifically is: be curious, not judgmental.

Museum people are the most curious people I know. For many of us, curiosity is what drives our lifelong love of learning, our sense of wonder and craving for experiences that transport us emotionally, our desire to understand every rhyme and reason of visitors’ behaviors, and our creativity itself. You needn’t tell us to ‘stay curious.’

Yet we can probably all recount moments at work when we found ourselves on the judgmental side of the spectrum.

Consider a time when a colleague handled a problem in a jarringly different way than you would. In this situation, did you find yourself using a judgmental mindset or a curious one?

Judgmental MindsetCurious Mindset
“They probably just don’t have the experience yet to know better.”“What might be their reasons for doing it that way?”
“They’re not understanding the problem.”“Are they seeing other problems than the one I’m focused on?”
“That’s so like them to be
[insert personality trait].”		“How do the differences in our personalities make us capable of results I couldn’t get alone?”

Here are what I see as the most common causes lurking behind our judgments:

  • Ego – this is the voice that says, “My conviction in my beliefs or approach means that other takes must be inferior.” 
  • Unconscious bias – this is the voice that says, “Some people need to earn my trust more than others.”
  • Fatigue – this is the voice that says, “With everything I have to get done, my internal productivity machine can’t afford the monkey wrench of an unexpected change.”

Do you agree? What else would you add to this list?

Museums: from Appealing to Essential

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Sometimes museums get caught up in strategizing how to be attractive (or interesting, or relevant) to their audiences when a more helpful framing of the problem would be to ask what can make them more essential.

What’s the difference?

Imagine a library closure: parents scrambling for expensive school books, job seekers struggling to access their applications, anyone who doesn’t own a computer blocked from checking their email. Devastating, right? Now imagine if your museum was to close–would the impact be as critical? The volume of complaints you can expect to receive reflects your institution’s attractiveness, whereas the gravity of the complaints reflects its essentialness.

Unlike libraries, most museums aren’t inherently essential to their communities. Instead, they focus on attracting visitors in order to compete with other community spaces for attention and revenue. But is it really too ambitious to think that these museums could become essential to their communities if that was their primary goal?

Tips for becoming essential

Connect to local issues. I like to picture a state or regional museum that gets its inspiration from local news. In this example, the newspapers tell us that our county has had a critical shortage of nurses since the pandemic. The regional museum responds by producing an exhibition that investigates the topic–how and why did this problem come to be? Why is it worse in our county than in neighboring ones? What do current and former nurses in the area have to say about the issue? Going beyond what the newspaper coverage could offer, the museum offers artifacts that provide supporting evidence, programming bringing in subject matter experts who speak about the issue from all sides, community organizers who connect and rally visitors to advocate for change, medics who train people on first aid they can do at home to relieve strain on hospital ERs, and so on. The museum has now become the place where anyone can come together to help solve this crisis in their community.

Lean into what makes your take unique. How might a science museum that wants to do an exhibition on climate change think about making it more essential to visitors? The topic itself is essential, but what would make the museum a critical part of the visitor’s engagement with the topic–that is, what can the museum provide for visitors that they can’t already get on the internet or someplace else?

One option would be to offer hands-on learning activities that give personalized feedback. Urban gardening is a great practice for sustainability, but some people will need an in-person tutorial to get started. Most people know they should recycle, but how many feel confident in their ability to sort their recycling correctly? The museum could test visitors’ sorting accuracy via an interactive and give them suggestions for how to improve. Perhaps they could also show a model of what environmental impact each visitor’s specific errors would have over a set period of time if not corrected.

Collaborate with community problem-solvers. As an aficionado of pet rabbits, I once had an opportunity to rethink a petting zoo at a science center. My proposal for the rabbit exhibit included partnering with local animal shelters to house adoptable rabbits in indoor playpens that visitors could enter for supervised one-on-one socialization. There could also be craft activities for visitors to make toys for the rabbits out of recycled paper and cardboard. These minor changes would preserve the function and appeal of the original petting zoo while adding an essential solution to real community problems (uninformed people dump their pets, wreaking havoc on local ecosystems, and shelters get overcrowded and under-resourced in their ability to supply enrichment). Plus the museum would gain a permanent place in the hearts of any adopters who happened to meet their new family member through their experience visiting. Being essential makes you more attractive to visitors, but not necessarily the other way around.

Brown rabbit in a rectangular play pen with clear sides. Playpen has carpeted flooring, a litter box, a hay feeder, and a pet bed.
Wouldn’t you rather visit a rabbit here than in a traditional petting zoo? And it’s better for the bunny. Image courtesy of Blue Clover Rabbitry

So if you haven’t already, try asking yourself of your current project, “How can this help my museum be more essential to its audiences?” I’d love to hear about whether or not it was a helpful exercise for unlocking new ideas.

What I learned from my favorite exhibit of 2022

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My favorite exhibition I saw this year was Great Whales: Up Close and Personal at the Royal Ontario Museum (“the ROM”) in Toronto. Here’s my attempt to summarize key takeaways from its whale of an achievement.

  1. Say who’s speaking.
      Press the mute button on the all-knowing institutional voice and pass the mic to your subject experts. These intro panels with photos, bios, and quotes made me feel like I was getting a private walking tour of the exhibit.

      Exhibit intro wall panel that gives pictures and paragraph biographies for three experts who will speak throughout the exhibition.     Wall labels feature quotes from experts, including the expert's picture and a description of their relationship to the content.

    • Really include community stakeholders.

      As an outsider looking in, I’m not qualified to judge whether this exhibition was a “good” example of community involvement. But I’d like to recognize that the voices of Indigenous experts were utilized throughout the exhibit (not just acknowledged as a one-off at the beginning or end), and tobacco offering stations spoke directly to Indigenous visitors.

      Statement crediting input of Indigenous community experts near the start of the exhibit

              
    • Put numbers into perspective.

      “We lost 10% of a species, and that’s equivalent to humanity losing all the people of North and South America” says a lot more than “we lost 10% of the species.”



    • Take your labels from prose to poetry using the literary devices of consonance and assonance.


      Notice how many words in this label have “d” sounds, either with the letter “d” actually in the word or phonetically with double “t”s.

      “Dies…body….dense…bottom…down…cold, dark…depths. Does matter? Hundreds…deep-sea…decades.” (13/64 total words in the label = 20% of word count)

      We can do the same exercise with “L” sounds:

      “Whale fall…whale…falls…miles…whale…fall….minerals…cold…large whale fall…. (12/64 = 19% of word count)

      And “s” sounds:

      “Dies…its…is…so…dense…falls…ocean…sometimes…miles…brings…nutrients…minerals…ecosystem….ocean depths. Does…support hundreds…deep-sea species decades (21/64 = 33% of word count)

      Any of these combinations could stand alone as a poem in its own right, abstractly conveying the label’s message. Together, they flow into a readable label without being heavy-handed with alliteration.

    • Find piece harmony with your objects.

      One thing I learned from taking chess classes in high school (besides that I’m no good at chess), is the concept of “piece harmony.” There’s something that       just looks right about a chess board where all the pieces are positioned to support each other. No knight is left unprotected, no pawn blocks another’s path.

      Great Whales gave us a masterful example of positioning the smallest objects in the exhibit (these specimen jars) right before one of the most shockingly large objects (the whale heart). The visitor doesn’t just read the message that big whales support small life–they feel it in their surroundings.

         

    • Answer the obvious question.


      “Why are they called GREAT whales?”

      “Is that REAL?”

      If there’s a question everyone will be asking, confront it head-on and answer it.

         

    • Speak to hope and action.

      Fear of loss catches attention, but doesn’t sustain long-term motivation. Inspire people to make a positive change by suggesting specific ways to help.

         

      Share relatable success stories.



    • Be up close and personal.


      The subtitle of the exhibition was “Up Close and Personal,” and that’s precisely where it took me.

      It taught me what we have in common with whales so I could relate to them as neighbors.



      It used sensory cues like smell to put me in the action of a salvage expedition.



      It even turned the assumed appeal of “up close and personal” on its head.

      No part of the exhibit stayed with me longer than the revelation that so few North Atlantic right whales remain, we can know them each by name and picture.

        

        

    I know you meant well. It’s time to stop managing unpaid interns.

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    Unpaid internships often get talked about at the high level – what museums and boards and grant awarders and accreditation orgs and graduate programs and so on should do to put an end to them.

    Of course I agree with these sentiments, but this time I want to call upon a different, equally powerful audience to act. If you’re an entry-to-mid level museum worker who trains or manages interns as part of your day-to-day work, this one’s for you.

    Here’s what I ask of you:

    By this Labor Day, tell your boss that you’re no longer OK with managing unpaid interns.

    The time, energy, and resources you have put into developing your interns are real and probably have had real impact. With exposure to your training and network, your interns have honed their talents and perhaps even gone on to get great jobs.

    But these individual successes come at indefensible cost to the museum field and every worker in it, including your interns and yourself. This cost can be summed up in two points:

    1. While aspiring workers who can afford to forgo paid jobs for months at a time get ahead in their careers, others–disproportionately people of color–get shut out.
    2. Interns bring knowledge and skills to your museum from their education and prior work experiences. Valuing their abilities at zero lowers the bar for salaries for all your museum’s staff.

    Here are some better ways you can help aspiring museum workers start their careers:

    • Help them research paid positions where they can gain transferable skills for museum work, even if outside of museums.
    • When hiring for paid positions, evaluate applicants’ abilities based on transferable skills, even if gained outside of museums.
    • Coach them on improving cover letters, resumes, interviews, and salary negotiations.
    • Connect them to your professional network through email introductions, social media, and low cost community events such as happy hours.
    • Create volunteering opportunities at your museum that people can sustain alongside full time employment at other organizations–max 5 hours per week, flexible schedules.

    Have courage and raise this conversation with your boss this summer.

    Let me know how it goes.

    Why can’t museum apps be more like Wordle?

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    The museums of the world have made a lot of bad apps. These failures have had enough collective negative impact on user trust to make some market experts, such as Colleen Dilenschneider, ponder whether the tainted reputation of museum apps can ever recover enough to allow any new app to succeed.

    Call me foolish for holding onto hope, but I’ve long believed that museums can make apps that people will love. However, these apps would have to look very different from the app most museums have on the market –you know, the one called “[Insert museum name] App” that features maps of the museum, what exhibits are on, and “read more” about what didn’t fit on the object label.

    What I’d like to see is for a museum to establish a brand as a producer, with a homegrown portfolio of mission-oriented, mobile-friendly experiences that audiences want to add to their day-to-day lives. For an example of what I mean by such a portfolio, download the New York Times Crossword app, and see how it builds the brand of The New York Times with its diverse offerings of wordplay games.

    …which brings me to Wordle. Wordle was recently acquired by the NYT for the Crossword App. It’s a perfect example of what a museum (or the NYT, for that matter) could have done, but didn’t. Still, museums have a great opportunity to learn from what Wordle got right and to apply these learnings to make equally compelling digital experiences for their audiences.

    Here’s a checklist of the qualities which I believe made Wordle a success and which would hold true for a great museum app:

    • People can use it every day.
    • It requires less than 10 minutes of attention per use.
    • It provides a predictable but slightly different experience each day (Wordle never changes its UI or what it asks users to do, but it also never repeats the same word).
    • It’s relevant to the organization’s mission, but it’s not about the organization and its stuff.1
    • It’s not trying to solve its organization’s problems (e.g. if your visitors are having trouble navigating your museum, a map app is no solution).
    • It doesn’t have to be an “app” – it’s better to make a mobile-friendly browser experience until you have enough of a portfolio to justify an app that lives on users’ phones.
    • Its branding allows flexibility to become a part of a larger digital experience portfolio (Calling it the “[museum name] app” puts all your eggs in one basket and leaves no room for new products)

    “What could an app that isn’t a Wordle-copycat look like?”, you might ask.

    My favorite example of a real product from a museum so far is the Carnegie Institute’s Dawn Chorus, an alarm clock app that lets you wake up every morning to recordings of bird calls from the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

    Honorable mention goes to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, which helps you make informed choices regarding sustainable seafood when you’re on your phone at a restaurant. I don’t know how many people go out for seafood daily, but the ability to use this tool recurrently outside the aquarium and the fact that it’s a mobile-friendly website (no requirement to keep a mobile app on your phone) earns this one a pass on the “can be used every day” check.

    Here are a few more possibilities I can imagine:

    • For a science museum: a tracker app (à la diet/fitness apps) that helps you monitor your environmental footprint–how much trash/recycling/compost did I create today? How much water did I conserve?
    • For a local historical society: a mobile-friendly interface that lets you submit one photo or question a day about something you’ve seen around town, and the museum replies with a photo or comment that’s relevant to it (akin to Ask Brooklyn Museum in spirit, but the key here is making it usable outside a museum’s own space)
    • For an art museum: a learn-to-draw or -paint app that gives you one new drawing or painting, which can be completed in less than 10 minutes, to do on your phone each day

    1. For Wordle, “organization” refers to The New York Times.

    Sites of slavery shouldn’t be called “historic homes.”

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    Before white supremacists converged on Thomas Jefferson’s hometown earlier this month, Jefferson was already enmeshed in a controversy about the news that Monticello is restoring a room to include more of Sally Hemings’ story. Widely circulated pieces by journalists like Britni Danielle and Shaun King have since responded to the rhetoric of calling Hemings Jefferson’s “mistress” and American society’s clemency for Jefferson.

    While focused on Monticello, these critiques broach an issue at greater scale throughout the United States. We should be talking more about the problem that nearly all historic sites that once had slavery were preserved not because they were sites of slavery, but because they were impressive homes of white slaveowners.1

    Many historic sites have begun teaching about enslaved peoples through tours, special programs, and signage—but these efforts remain auxiliary to the core mission of educating about the historic home and homeowners. Monticello doesn’t even mention slavery in its mission statement. In case you’re wondering, Mount Vernon doesn’t either.

    Briefly set aside any familiarity you have with historic homes and take a few moments to consider how absurd this convention really is. Here’s an exercise you might do:

    // Think of a site of crimes against humanity outside the United States that you can visit as a tourist today. Could you imagine this place:

    • Having been saved as a historic site for a reason besides remembering the crimes against humanity and people harmed there?
    • Being marketed and most commonly known as the home or workplace of [name of oppressor]?
    • Telling visitors that [name of oppressor] had a complicated relationship with the people they harmed, and visitors can opt to take a separate tour about those people while they’re there?
    • Selling postcards and other souvenirs showcasing the beauty of their architecture or landscaping?
    • Hosting weddings, anniversaries, baby showers, and other joyful events?
    • Being mirrored by sites matching these criteria throughout its nation or region with a frequency and ubiquity comparable to historic sites in the United States that once held enslaved people?

    If you’ve answered “yes” to all of these, I’d be grateful if you would comment. As it stands, I’m unaware of a phenomenon quite like this existing anyplace else. //

    Being a white person, I can’t understand or speak for the stories of enslaved people. Yet, being a Jewish person, some part of the mistreatment of these sites feels personal. A Holocaust museum is meaningless if the nation it’s in denies reverence to its own sites of oppression. If all oppression is interconnected, then disrespect for one site of crimes against humanity must put the authority of all of them at stake.

    Influenced by scholarship and movements led by museum workers of color, many historic homes (Monticello included) have set aims to tell their sites’ “complete” stories by integrating more information about enslaved people into their interpretations.2 These efforts are often called steps in the right direction, but I’m concerned they may be off-target in addressing the problem. The issue isn’t that these sites are failing to tell the whole story. It’s that they’re still telling the wrong story.

    Maris Jones once wrote, “Our trauma is not an accessory.” Her sentiment, while expressed in a different context, makes plain why inserting stories of slavery into the existing narrative is insufficient. If Black stories can “complete” a site telling white stories, but not the other way around, then the Black stories are being used to accessorize the white stories at their own expense. Treating Black people as supporting characters for white people is counterproductive to teaching about slavery. Similarly, trauma isn’t a puzzle piece that completes the oppressor’s story. It doesn’t exist to complicate visitors’ understanding of the esteemed slave owner. Museums and historic homes shouldn’t be talking about the slave owners in the first place.

    Aside from the moral question of whether these people deserve to be remembered, there’s a tactical question of whether interpreting them through their property is even a tenable mission for historic homes. It’s not always obvious to me how seeing a famous figure’s house and personal effects helps visitors understand the significance of their work and contributions to society. By comparison, interpreting the evidence the house bears to crimes against humanity and the lives of people who were enslaved there is unquestionably relevant to the place being preserved.

    My most recent experience touring one of these houses happened about a year ago. The docent began with a biography of the (white) homeowner, gave a who’s-who of consecutive (white) tenants, and concluded with a tour of the house’s slave quarters. It took me some time to process how readily it was taken for granted that white people belonged in the story. If the homeowner is so unknown that a docent has to tell visitors who they were, there’s a good chance they don’t need to be mentioned at all.

    Some would probably argue that visitor expectations make omitting narratives about slave owners impossible—anyone touring a house would want to know who owned it. But visitor expectations of hearing this trivia more often indicate when sites are failing to define or communicate their real significance. Many docents at natural history and art museums, for instance, don’t include details like who built the museum and what year it was built in their tour scripts. When the mission to teach about art or natural history is clear to visitors, they are more prepared to expect that a tour will focus on these subjects.

    To clarify their purpose for visitors (and staff), historic homes might reexamine what 1-2 aspects of their site most make it worth saving. In doing so, I think many would find a gross discrepancy between the people they’ve been featuring and those who matter.

    So what does Monticello’s mission tell us about how the site perceives its value? It’s unlikely that seeing Thomas Jefferson’s bed and tea cups teaches visitors much about the Declaration of Independence or his Presidency. This suggests the site is still telling his story out of belief that it’s important for people to know who he was as a person and, by extension, what kind of person founded America.

    Herein lies the problem: there are hundreds of historic homes all exhibiting the wealth and power of the same kind of person across the country. Even if all of these sites individually have good intent, collectively they convey that only this kind of person could have had the means to make an impact worthy of national memory.

    We can remember this when we ask why white visitors are drawn to seeing the wealth of these sites even when artifacts of that wealth don’t serve the educational mission the site claims. We can remember it when we ask why knowing what kinds of linens Jefferson owned is considered valuable information in the course of American history. And we can remember it when we ask why white supremacists found symbolic value in meeting at Jefferson’s hometown.

    Peggy McIntosh once described an example of white privilege: “When I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.” If being told that people of your color built your nation is an indicator of privilege, then sites like Monticello must ask what it means to be the ones doing the telling.

    Footnotes:
    1. Nearly, not all. There are some notable exceptions, such as the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana.
    2. It would be impossible to cite all influential scholarship and movements here, but a few examples include Black Lives Matter, #MuseumsRespondToFerguson, #BlkTwitterstorians, Visitors of Color, The Incluseum, Museum Hue, and the Brown Girls Museum Blog. For more examples, see this list of publications compiled by La Tanya S. Autry.

    Special thanks to Camille Bethune Brown, nikhil trivedi, and Jordan Thibodeau for their helpful input for writing this post.