This is a recorded session from the 2025 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. As museums take on challenging topics, audience reactions may be strong and varied. In this session, consider how museums can utilize feedback while remaining true to their mission and collections. Gain insights from a candid panel of museum professionals on how to thoughtfully accept or reject feedback and build trust by communicating these decisions to the community.

Speakers:

• Dorothy Rivera, Manager, Research and Exhibits, The Mary Baker Eddy Library  
• Amalia Kozloff, Senior Curator, Museum of Pop Culture  
• Stephanie Rayburn, Evaluation Researcher, Denver Museum of Nature and Science  
• Erica Frazier, Curatorial Specialist, Arab American National Museum

Transcript

Dorothy Rivera:

My name is Dorothy Rivera. I’m the manager of Research and Exhibits at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston.

Stephanie Rayburn:

I’m Stephanie Rayburn. I am an evaluation researcher at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Colorado.

Erica Frazier:

My name is Erica Travis Frazier. I’m a curatorial specialist at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

Amalia Kozloff:

And hi, I’m Amalia Kozloff. I’m the senior curator at the Museum of Pop Culture, MoPOP, in Seattle, Washington.

Dorothy Rivera:

All right, so I’ll start briefly by talking a little bit about the Mary Baker Eddy Library. So out of curiosity, has anyone in this room heard of Mary Baker Eddy before they decided to come to the session? Oh, a couple of you. That’s going much better than I thought. Excellent. So, Mary Baker Eddy was a woman. She lived in the 19th century and after a lifetime of suffering from ill health and one very serious accident, she sort of turned to her Bible. And through her study of her Bible, she found an opportunity for healing. And this led to her writing a book called Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. She founded the Christian Science Faith, which is now known as the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston, Massachusetts. She founded the Christian Science Publishing Society, several religious publications associated with Christian science. And the thing that probably most of you’re the most familiar with, which is the Christian Science Monitor, which is a newspaper.

So, we are the archives of the First Church of Christ, Scientist and the Christian Science Publishing Society. We also have collections relating to Mary Baker Eddy and her life and times, we have artifacts, film, documents, really pretty wide variety of material. And our mission, which I’m going to stand up and read because it’s surprising how little I actually have to do this. “The Mary Baker Eddy Library provides public access to original materials and educational experiences about Mary Baker Eddy, the ideas she advanced, her writings, and the institutions she founded and their healing mission. Next, we have Stephanie.

Stephanie Rayburn:

So, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science is a combined natural history museum and science center. It was originally established in 1900 as the Colorado Museum of Natural History. And it is comprised now of an over 700,000 square foot museum. We have collections that span from dinosaurs to gems and minerals to Indigenous belongings, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that when we talk about our examples as well. And we also have a Curiosity Cruiser Museum on Wheels that goes out into local communities. We have two playgrounds, play centers, that are on-site in malls in Denver, and a play area in City Park that is just adjacent to the museum grounds itself.

We have eight permanent exhibitions and space for usually two to three temporary or traveling exhibitions at any one time, and then extensive collections for study that are not on display. So, a lot happening within our museum, a wide breadth of subject matter. And we are an institution that’s very embedded in the community. So, our mission here is to be a catalyst to ignite our community’s passion for nature and science. And community is a really important word here in our mission in that most of our visitors come from the local community. We do get tourists that come to the museum, but they are a much smaller percentage of our visitors.

And then our vision to further that is that we want to empower our community to develop a love for nature and science and to protect our natural world. So, if we are serving our community, we have to understand our community, we have to take feedback from our community, and I’m looking forward to sharing with you some of the opportunities and challenges that has provided for us.

Amalia Kozloff:

Hey all. Have any of you been to MoPOP or anybody familiar with MoPOP? Nice, thank you. So, we’re one of the few pop culture museums in the world. That is what we collect. We have been collecting for 25 years. We have everything from musician’s memorabilia. We have the largest Jimi Hendrix collection in the world. It was started as a Jimi Hendrix museum. We have movie props, born-digital media. We have all sorts of things that require a lot of community-based feedback and the challenges that come with that. We deal with a lot of very passionate fan bases, as you can imagine in pop culture, so we are always in conversation and in dialogue with those. So, I’m really excited to be here to talk with this group of people. We’ve been chatting for a couple months now, and we have an amazing rapport. As our museums are, we’re very aligned on so many things. It’s a really interesting thing.

So yeah, here is our mission, which is very short and sweet, but I also put up our curatorial philosophy up here, which is something that we’ve been developing in the past few years. And just as a really quick synopsis of that, we activate the transformative power of pop culture. And by the way, my printer printed this really wildly, so please excuse. Through participative experiences, discovery and play. Our curatorial practice combines rigorous research, which is really important as we all know, with creative interpretation to explore the cultural and society impact of pop culture, engaging audiences with diverse narratives that celebrate identity, creativity, and innovation. And so today, along with Dorothy, Stephanie, and Erica, I’m really, as I said, thrilled to and a little bit scared to share how we engage with feedback, evaluate it, and implement it while still maintaining that mission-driven approach.

Erica Frazier:

So, the Arab American National Museum opened in 2005. I’m happy to say that just two days ago, May 5th, we celebrated our 20th anniversary. Thank you. Though we have a little bit of a longer history, we grew out of a cultural arts programming office out of ACCESS the… Oh god, I’m going to butcher this. Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, which is the largest Arab American social services organization in the country. We’re known as the Jewel of ACCESS. We are one of the four national institutions of ACCESS. And so, when the museum opened in 2005, it began collecting and we house one of the largest archives of Arab American documents, objects, and oral histories. That’s another big component of our collecting.

Our mission, as you can see is, “The Arab American National Museum is a touchstone that connects communities to Arab American culture and experiences.” And so sometimes that means that we are connecting with people within the community and representing them or acting as a support for them, and sometimes we are an access point for people who are outside of that community who wish to learn more.

Dorothy Rivera:

All right. So, what we’re going to be talking about now is we’ve sort of got together and came up with some focus questions that we’d all addressed in different ways through the course of our work. So, we’re going to kind of have a discussion based off of these focus questions. If you have anything that you want us to follow up on, feel free to let us know. We’re happy to bring you a microphone. But to start off, what are our goals in soliciting feedback? And I know a couple of you had some points that you wanted to start off with that.

Stephanie Rayburn:

Yeah. So usually, we are soliciting feedback with the intention to gain some understanding about how our audiences are experiencing our institution. User experience at its most basic level is what is your experience? Was it positive or negative? I’m thinking about the last trip I took; the airport had a smiley face, or a frowny face iPad set up. So that distills it down to a really basic level, but that’s largely what we want to know. We want to understand whether people liked it, did they not like it? Why did they like it or not like it?

But beyond that, we really want to have an opportunity to deepen that understanding in a way that allows us to drive engagement. If we understand how or why people are having a positive or negative experience, then we can modify the work that we are doing in a way that makes them more likely to have a positive experience and maybe makes them more excited to come back.

We also are wanting to deepen our understanding of the content of that visitor experience. What are they really engaging with? How do they like a certain type of activity over another type of activity? If it is activity based, do they like activities? Do they like immersive experiences or not like immersive experiences? Do they just want to read about things? Do they want to be able to have hands-on experiences? And when we can understand those things, it helps us to align our exhibits and our off-site experiences with the needs of the people who are likely to interact with us.

Dorothy Rivera:

I think one thing that we spend a lot of time doing also is just kind of trying to figure out what is happening with different audiences. And you’ll hear me talk in particular a lot about understanding that the patrons who sort of walk into our institution, the visitors who walk into our institution aren’t a monolith, they’re not experiencing things in the same way. And I think particularly for us, we have a lot of people who come in who are general members of the public. They may have never heard of Mary Baker Eddy; they may not know what Christian Science is. They may think Christian science is Scientology. It’s really not. Please, don’t confuse the two. But you also get academics. And so, you’re trying to figure out what’s going on out in the world, how are different people interacting with your exhibits, and how can you meet them more effectively where they are?

Amalia Kozloff:

Sure, I can go. For us, and I’m going to just talk from a curatorial lens since that is the department that I’m in, we do surveys like Stephanie was mentioning, like post-program surveys, all of that. But from a curatorial lens, we always do a lot of formative evaluation and focus groups on upcoming exhibits in a timely manner that gives us enough room and flexibility that we can incorporate what that survey, what that evaluation is giving us.

And so, for us it’s really with this intention of, again, pop culture is people feel very passionate about these topics and we want to be thoughtful about that, and so we want to go into the community and actually ask them what they think. If we’re doing an exhibit about Star Wars, what do they want to see? What are they really interested in? And that doesn’t necessarily, and I’m sorry, I’m kind of jumping to the next question I think, or a few questions, but that doesn’t necessarily dictate what the end result is, but it does inform a lot of our curatorial decisions. So that really is the intent for us, and we can get to some of the rest of it later. I know Erica has some things to say.

Erica Frazier:

Well, the Arab American National Museum represents Arab Americans, and those are people that trace their ancestry to 22 nations. They’re recognized by the Arab League of States. So, as you can imagine, that is a very diverse community. You’ve got people from North Africa, the Levant, and you have a varied mix of push-pull factors that might lead to immigration, migration, different level of religious diversity and different degrees of observance and faith practice. So, in a community museum, that’s especially difficult because we’re trying to cater to not only 22 different sort of nationality backgrounds, but also the very nuanced identities they’re in.

Dorothy Rivera:

All right. So, I guess the next thing that we really need to discuss is how are we going about collecting this feedback? Because like I said, we’re all talking to sort of different audiences and we’re meeting them in different places. So, what have you guys found are really kind of successful ways to collect feedback from your visitors?

Amalia Kozloff:

You have to give them swag. Truly, no, at the end of an exhibit, we have a wonderful group of volunteers that we call our data squad and they stand there with their iPads and they collect the information at the end of an exhibition and ask those questions, as well as also collecting dwell time, which we have found is really helpful even if it’s self-reported. But usually, you can give somebody a pin or a bag or something. But yeah, swag is a good motivator.

Erica Frazier:

Ours is always food. You will never come to the Arab American National Museum and leave hungry. So, if you’re looking for any sort of constructive feedback, provide food.

Stephanie Rayburn:

We provide neither of those things. So, this photo that I have up here actually is of one of our research assistants, Simone. We have a staff of 30 episodic research assistants who their only requirement to maintain their episodic employment with our museum is that they hold two shifts a month. A shift of data collection is usually three to four hours and in return they get free passes to come to the museum and they get paid. But mostly, these are folks who love science, or they are trying to, maybe they’re a student and wanting to gain some experience or they’re retiree and wanting to still step into that world of work on occasion.

And what they give our visitors is a friendly smile. They stand outside, this is Simone here is standing outside of our gems and minerals hall. And they’ll stand there, they’ll stand at the museum exit depending on the type of data that we’re collecting, and systematically ask visitors. So, our most commonly used systematic format is for them to ask the first adult in every third group that passes by them and that reduces their bias, so they’re not only asking people who look like they would be open to providing feedback, and then those visitors of course have the opportunity to say yes or no.

We also try to keep our surveys really short, so under five minutes. We prefer to try to keep them to two or three minutes, so they’re providing really quick feedback. And we largely are successful at this. On a given day that we’re collecting data, we’re usually able to collect anywhere between 20 and 50 survey responses.

Dorothy Rivera:

I am at the bottom of the pile for this because I have no swag, I have no food, and I definitely don’t have 30 researchers to do feedback or evaluations for me. What I do get to hang my hat on though is some really fantastic frontline staff. We have a research space where we have one of our research staff in all the time, we have a first floor really fantastic exhibit called How Do You See the World that I’ll talk about later. And we have hosts who are down there and the thing that we really prioritize in both of those locations is kind of one-on-one interaction with patrons. And we’ll sort of talk to them about, “What are your experiences here? What made you want to come? Do you have any questions? Here’s the exhibit of… What made this sort of interesting to you?” And one of the components actually of our How Do You See The World exhibit is there’s a chance to give feedback through this really fantastic, well, like, “What sort of emotions did this exhibit elicit in you? What gives you hope? What sort of inspires you?”

And we collect those cards, and we archive them and that gives us a sense of what sort of feeling are they taking with them from the exhibit. Because I guess we’re… And again, I’ll talk about this exhibit in greater depth later on, we’re less focused on what facts they learned. We’re not really interested in a specific learning outcome, but did it give people a chance to think about who they are and their place in the world and how do they relate to one another? So that’s a big part of how we approach it. And those frontline staff, a lot of them write daily reports. Those are shared with senior managers, they’re shared with the board of directors, and it kind of gives us a chance to see are people kind of taking the message away that we’ve sort of put out there, why or why not? And how can we meet them better where they are?

Erica Frazier:

And I think so far, most of the examples that we’ve given have been cases where we are intentionally soliciting feedback. But as we all know, we all get a lot of unsolicited feedback that are not maybe through these more formal methodologies like surveys and dwell time and things like that. And so increasingly social media, Facebook, Instagram, are becoming mechanisms that people are communicating their concerns with us. And I sometimes wonder, and I think the next slide speaks to this like, “What is the motivation there? What is the intended outcome? Is it public embarrassment, humiliation, or is it start a thoughtful dialogue?” And who really knows? Though the museum is located in Dearborn in Michigan, we are a national institution, and we have stakeholders across the world too, so that feels like a space that we do have to pay attention to because that’s where some of our people, our community members are coming from. And so, we do have to take that into account, but what weight do you give that type of feedback?

Dorothy Rivera:

All right, which kind of brings us to the last of the last slide and the first of the next slide, which is once we’ve collected this feedback, we’ve all worked very hard on it, whether it’s been in collecting swag and food or whether it’s been sending our staff into the mall and hoping for the best. What do we do with this feedback? How do we sort of analyze it? Who do we talk to about it and how do we use it to influence our decisions as sort of content developers, as programmers? Who wants to go first?

Stephanie Rayburn:

So, I can jump in here. I am very lucky to work for an institution that has a high capacity for evaluation. And so, we have, in addition to our research assistants who collect data, we have a team of five on-site evaluators who regularly code and analyze the report on the qualitative and quantitative data that we collect. And we collect data through our on-site methods, but also through sometimes we send out emails to our members. We also will use our survey platform. We can pay that platform to have panelists who are from the larger community that maybe doesn’t come to the museum in case we want to get a better idea of what their experience is, what their wants and needs are, and how we might apply that to our institution.

But then we also have to be really thoughtful about how we balance that data. Members are really excited about giving us feedback. They give us a much higher percentage of feedback than they actually represent in any one day of visitorship. So, what we have to do is weight that data. So, whenever we’re collecting feedback from these different channels, our average daily member visitorship is 30% of the people who walk through our doors are members. And so we weight our data so that if we’re collecting data from emails for example, we are weighting it so that the member responses only account for 30% of that total data so that we are not biasing our responses in favor of members, so members don’t have an outsized voice in the reporting that we do and in the decisions that we make unless we want that.

Amalia Kozloff:

I’m just going to add, because that brought up a good point, about weighting the data that you’re getting. We actually send all of our evaluations, at least the formative evaluations for exhibition development to our staff as well because it’s important that they have input. I mean, it’s hugely important. I think that sometimes that gets overlooked, but it is weighted differently, and I think that that has to be taken into consideration as well. And that’s just because we have to look at, again, they’ll respond at much higher rates than we’re necessarily getting from even members sometimes, but I just wanted to bring up that I think staff is an incredibly important resource that most folks don’t think about when they’re asking for feedback. So yeah, that was it. Thank you.

Dorothy Rivera:

All right, so that brings us to really one of the key questions that we have here. Like we said, not all feedback is created equal, and we’ve sort of talked a little bit about how we rate feedback comparatively, but this one scared my kids, I have to be honest. Go back. No, it’s the Terminator, that’s where I lost them to be fair. So, I guess that then brings us to what standards guide our decisions? How do we then make these choices about, all right, we’ve had these people tell us that they either really love this exhibit, or they really hate this article that we published, and they don’t think that we should have done it. How do we decide when to say, “Yes, absolutely. That is valuable feedback. We really need to reevaluate some of what we’re doing”? And how much should we say, “We’re really sorry that this made you uncomfortable. Here is why we sort of made the choices that we did”?

Amalia Kozloff:

Sure. Okay. I have a fun one. We can start with that. So, in one of our newer exhibits that opened last year, Massive:

The Power of Pop Culture, which is kind of this foundational exhibit that we have. We’ve always had genre-based exhibits for horror and sci-fi, but we never had one where we actually dug into like, “What does pop culture mean? What is it? What does it mean to you? What makes an icon?” So, one of the interactives that we added to this exhibit is at the very end where we were asking, “What’s next in pop culture? What do you think as a visitor is next in pop culture?” And it actually, it looks like a jukebox, so it will populate depending on how people are voting, and it has this list, and it shows about five things at a time.

And I have to say Chappell Roan’s been up there for like a year and a half and has not lost number one. But we’ve also gotten weird things like there was one we got peat bog craze, which none of us could figure out. I still have no idea. Anybody know, anyone? So yeah, my point being that sometimes you get feedback that is not useful. So, I think that’s an incredibly important thing is I think part of this conversation that we’re having is not all feedback is equal. Who are you listening to? What voices? And we want to make sure that the voices are all in the room, but sometimes you do get, as Erica was saying, the people that just want to throw something weird at you or complain.

Dorothy Rivera:

Yeah, and I want to sort of touch a little bit on what Amalia was saying because we talk about getting feedback from our visitors, but we’re also getting feedback from our stakeholders, other staff that we work with, members of our board of directors. And as I am forced to do so often these days, I’m turning to 1930s Germany because we have some actually really fascinating content on 1930s Germany, there were a lot of Christian scientists who lived in Germany in the 1930s. Christian science actually ended up being banned along with so many other things in Nazi Germany, but some of the stuff that we get from the 1930s is really interesting because you don’t go from zero to taking over all of Europe in the drop of a hat. There are people who sort of think, “Oh, this seems like a reasonable guy, he’s going to rescue Germany, this is going to be fine.”

And so, we had these folders of correspondence from Christian scientists who were living in Germany who they thought, “Hey, this guy seems great. Everything’s going to be fine. Let’s move forward with this.” And I definitely had a couple of people in the organization who were very nervous about us doing content with this material, who were nervous about us making it available because they thought, “Oh no, we’re going to be calling someone a Nazi and their descendants are going to be very upset.” I encourage everyone to live their lives in a way that their descendants will not be embarrassed by them 50 years in the future, but this is where best practices come into play because those of you who work with archival collections, you know there are certain standards we go through when we’re trying to decide whether or not to open something.

Now, if it’s something relating to personally identifiable information, if it’s from five years ago, if it’s immigration records that said your great-grandmother had syphilis or something like that, those things we keep closed, if it’s your grandfather was a Nazi, he shouldn’t have been a Nazi. And I kind of turned into what Marilyn Johnson was saying this morning about using the objects to speak for themselves. We had this great letter that was from a representative of the Christian Science Publishing Society in Germany, and we had a Christian Science Monitor report who got beaten up at a Nazi rally because they thought that the guy was making fun of Hitler. And the guy who is the Publishing Society rep was less concerned that the Monitor reporter got beat up and more concerned that he was making the Christian Science Monitor look bad somehow by getting beat up at a Nazi. The logic of this kind of my brain falls apart a little bit.

But what we did was we didn’t write an article about how this man was a Nazi. We put the letter that he wrote saying nice things about Hitler on the internet and sometimes it really is beneficial to just kind of let the object speak for themselves, because then I didn’t have to deal with, “Oh, what are you saying about this person?” I’m dealing with, “What is he saying about himself?” And that was way to kind of get past that sort of nervousness and that sort of discomfort within the organization. You kind of let the object speak for themselves and a lot of us have really strong collections that we can allow to do stuff like that.

I’m so glad Amalia’s on this panel because then we can really use a lot of these really great photos. I don’t have gremlins in my collection, but they’re awesome.

Amalia Kozloff:

It’s from The Dark Crystal.

Dorothy Rivera:

Oh, Dark Crystal. I apologize. I’m the world’s worst millennial. So bad. All right, so and when do we engage external support? I know that’s something you guys wanted a chance to talk about.

Stephanie Rayburn:

So even as an institution with a larger evaluation capacity, we do engage external support when we need to do additional research to understand our wider community. And one of the ways in which we do that is through a community values survey process. And we work with an outside evaluation team who works with the museum to identify, first of all, what questions we’re most interested in asking, who within our community we’re really interested in learning from, often community members maybe who are not as frequently represented within our visitorship. And then that external organization can go out and conduct research within the wider community to answer those questions in a way that reduces the likelihood of us biasing those results.

Amalia Kozloff:

And I’m actually coming at this question from a very different angle because when we were talking about this, I was thinking more of when we’re downstream of the criticism. When do you engage that external support, a PR firm, or whatever it may be, which has happened. We’ve all had that experience or at least a lot of us had that experience where something goes completely amiss and you actually have to talk to a PR firm and talk to them and ask them like, “How do we deal with this?” Something goes viral. And if anybody saw my panel this morning, I did talk about this.

So, I think that that’s incredibly important. It’s like, “What are those processes?” And as I talked about this morning as well, putting those processes in place and figuring out what they are is incredibly important. It’s not just to do with the feedback, and obviously evaluation is pretty straightforward in a lot of ways it’s data, but what is the response? Where are we with the response? Who are we talking to in crafting that response? And I think that’s an incredibly important part of this conversation as well.

Erica Frazier:

And I know for us, we have a little bit of an interesting organizational structure with our parent organization, ACCESS. And so, there are times when we have a communications manager who her personal focus is the museum. She works in our physical space, but it technically reports to the larger communications department. And there are times where we have to determine whether that’s something that we handle at the museum level, or does it get run up the flagpole to the larger communications team to make a response? And sometimes their personal responses, there are phone calls to people from our deputy director, from our director, from various managers within the organization.

So, it really depends, I think, on how the feedback is being given to us and what the intended outcome is. Like I said, the motivation, is it somebody who just wants to express their frustration and needs somebody to vent to or are they expecting some sort of actionable change? And not so much in my current role, but at my last museum we had one of those boxes, those plexiglass boxes with cards that had ridiculous comments, and nobody signs a name. So, on some level it’s like how serious could you be about giving us constructive criticism or feedback if you’re not willing to maintain a long-term sort of dialogue with us?

Dorothy Rivera:

All right. And this brings us to Frontline Staff Support because I know a lot of us are involved in sort of creating the exhibits, writing the articles, developing the podcasts and programming, but we’re not always necessarily the people who are on the floor who have to deal with the angry patron who does not like that you called them ma’am, for whatever reason, this bothered them, really did 20 minutes of my life. But how do we make sure that we are preparing people to go out there and we’re sort of protecting them when we do send them out?

Amalia Kozloff:

Yeah. And I can start with this because I know I’m the one who brought this up. So, I think that those formative evaluations do give us a little bit of insight into how we can prepare our frontline staff, and I think it’s incredibly important. What are those conversations? What can we anticipate as conversations? And this isn’t just for exhibitions, I’m thinking of programs as well in education. I’m looking at one of our program producers in the audience who is laughing right now, but what can we provide? Because yeah, sometimes people will email us curatorial inquiries, but it doesn’t always come to us. It’s the folks on the front line. It’s security and visitor services that are having to deal with the really angry people on the phone or the angry people that are showing up.

And especially with some of the programs that we do, it does upset people. There are things that not everybody agrees with. So, I think that creating one sheets, what is the exhibit? What is the program about? What is the information? But also, what is that proactive communication? We involve our people and culture department in those conversations and that enables us also to do de-escalation training. Our frontline staff all get it and they get refreshers a couple of times a year, which I think is also incredibly important so that they know how to deal with those things and they aren’t put in the firing line, for lack of a better word, of this really angry person that comes in and is like, “How dare you do a drag camp for kids?” And are really upset about it. How do we prepare them and make sure that they have all the tools necessary? And I think that that’s, again, we can’t anticipate everything but what we can anticipate and also always taking those learnings, how can we improve? What can we provide better? What can we do better?

Erica Frazier:

We do something similar with new exhibitions. We have a docent training to help prepare them for those situations. And I vehemently believe that somebody making minimum wage behind a guest services desk is not responsible for sometimes dealing with an irate person. I think it’s so far above their pay grade on some level. But one of the other things that we do is as feedback starts to come in, we do sometimes do lunch and learn so that we as a staff can be back in touch with the material and continue those conversations so that as we go back out into the public, they’re better armed to deal with those situations because they do arise.

Dorothy Rivera:

And I will live and die with proactive communication. Proactive communication is your friend. A lot of you are sort of working with collections that you know where the boogeymen live in here, you know which trunks you open up and something’s going to jump out and try to eat your face, get in front of that as best as possible. And we use our website for that extensively. We know, and I’ll talk about this a little bit when we get to the case studies, we know there are a few issues that people will write into us about, will send us multi-page letters about, and what we do is we will just get in front, we will publish an article about it, we will tell you that this is the decision we’ve made. We will tell you this is why we’ve made the decision.

And that’s something that first of all people, it helps them to know that you’ve thought about this, you know this is an issue that you’ve put some real genuine thought into it and tried to deal with it as responsibly as possible. And it’s also, again, protection for our frontline staff. I have a team of like six researchers and a lot of what we do is just communicating with the public. “Oh, is this really true? Hey, what about this thing?” And having that article just radioed out, “Thank you for asking about this. We’ve been asked about this in the past. Here is a lovely article on our website.” It’s saves time, it saves energy, and it shows you that you have the whole weight of the organization behind this answer, not the individual that you’re talking to. This is what we as an institution have decided to say.

Amalia Kozloff:

Did you want to say something? I was also just going to say, because we are talking about trust here at AAM this year, that that level of transparency with our audience is incredibly important. So yeah, the more conversations that you have, the more open you can be about decision making, about why things are the way they are, why we have certain summer camps or why we chose a certain artifact. I think that that’s incredibly important as well.

Dorothy Rivera:

All right, good. I was just saying we’re going to go onto the case study, so we’re going to blitz through these sort of fairly quickly. So, for any of these where you guys have questions about any of this, we’re all very happy to talk about this afterwards. We’re happy to give you business cards, but we’re going to blitz these as quickly as possible, so we have time to take your questions as well. So, the first one that I have to talk about is the exhibit that I mentioned before, How Do You See the World? This is something that’s on the first floor of the Christian Science Publishing House. A version of this exhibit has been open since 1935, which is the three-story stained-glass globe that you can see here on the image. It’s got a transparent bridge that they literally had to put carpet on because people felt like they were going to fall through the bottom of it, and it is beautiful.

And like I said, this has been open since 1935. We know pretty well what people want to know about this. They’re interested in the architect; they’re interested in the process of building these. These questions and exhibit does not unto itself make. And I remember when we were sort of coming up with this exhibit, I don’t remember exactly how many years ago it was, but it was AAM was in St. Louis a number of years ago because now we’re sort of going through all these sessions about AI. When we were in St. Louis, we were going through all these sessions about feedback, how we collect feedback, we want to meet visitors where we are. When we’re developing our exhibits, we want to know what the visitors want to see. And we knew what the visitors want to see, and we did something different because we didn’t want to hang a whole exhibit on Chester Lindsay Churchill.

We really went back to sort of the founding of the Christian Science Monitor, which Mary Baker Eddy founded in an era of extreme sort of yellow journalism. Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst. “Let’s see how we can sell these papers with frankly as much smut as we can possibly put on the front page.” Those of us who were raised in the era of Newsies know the kind of headlines that we were sort of coming up with for this. And our board of directors worked with our partners and tried to cope with the exhibit that was really about fostering this sense of common humanity and hope. And when we’ve sort of talked to our board about it, it’s not just about how many visitors we get through the door, but what their experience is while they’re there. That’s sort of what’s important to them.

And we’ve really gotten a very positive response from it now that it’s up. People get to sort of sit and contemplate. They get to look at things like a Points of Progress exhibit that highlights articles in the monitor that sort of give people a sense of hope, and that’s something that’s been really successful. I’m also going to talk about Fact or Forgery? This is a forensic analysis of Calvin Frye’s diary. Calvin Frye is the gentleman you see before you with the absolutely fantastic facial hair.

Now, Mary Baker Eddy was a very well covered figure during her lifetime. She was all over the newspapers. Since her lifetime, we’ve had a wide variety of biographies about her that have really spanned the gamut from, I’ll go so far as to say, completely sycophantic to borderline slanderous and libelous. And one of the issues that has come up is people believe that she had taken morphine rather than sort of just relying on Christian science healing. And there were some people that went so far as to accuse her of being a morphine addict and some people who said, “Oh, she would’ve never touched that, that wasn’t sort of the kind of person that she was.”

And the sourcing for this is a nightmare when it comes to Providence. It’s the diaries of Calvin Frye where he accounts for times that they had a doctor come to her home to give her morphine injections for kidney stones. And these, there were pages cut out, the copies that we have are photo stats. They are the kind of things that really lend to a whole conspiracy theory, which is the kind of thing that makes people nervous. And so, what we actually did was we hired a forensic handwriting expert. This is a guy who goes into courtrooms and analyzes handwriting. And so, he went through all of these diary entries, and he was able to say that these were written by Calvin Frye, they were written at the time, and they do account for the fact that Mary Baker Eddy did pay to have morphine injections on a few occasions.

It does not in any way say that she was a morphine addict, but it also, and we put this stuff up front, and these are things that a lot of people wish we had not done. We have had people come into job interviews and say, “I’m really just not comfortable with this.” This is something that doesn’t work for them. And we had to put it up anyway because if we are going to be an authoritative resource on Mary Baker Eddy and her life, we have to be able to talk about this stuff authentically. Let’s see through here as quickly as I can. I’m really sorry.

The other one that I wanted to talk about was Christian scientists and military chaplaincy. We have a wonderful oral history interview here from Terri Erickson. She was a military chaplain. And when we were putting this exhibit together, it was a bunch of young women working on it. And for those whoever worked with military history records, with all due respect, there are white men, there are white men, and then there are more white men. And we were like, “Oh yes, we’ve gotten to the 1990s. There are women.” We were so excited. And we brought Terri Erickson actually in to look at the exhibit before it went up. And we sort of told her the oral history clips that we were using and she kind of sighed and put her head down a little bit because all anyone ever wanted to talk about was the fact that she was a woman in military chaplaincy. And she ended up giving us some really great insights that allowed us to make changes in the exhibit and it’s considerably stronger for it.

And I think the last thing I’m going to mention really briefly is naming Mary Baker Eddy. Because we are a department of the church, there are other departments of the church that refer to her as Mrs. Eddy rather than Mary Baker Eddy or just Eddy. And this is the example that I had before of putting stuff on your website. I have gotten multi-page long letters ripping me for saying Eddy instead of Mrs. Eddy. People get really upset about this. And we’ve made this conscientious decision to do this in a way that it is accessible to everyone. Now, that being said, there are times that we do programming, or we do exhibits that are specifically directed at members of the Christian Science Church. In those cases, maybe we just don’t put that kind of conversation front and center so that we’re not kind of alienating people immediately as they walk in the door. So that’s kind of where we are with that. And I will let, I think Steph… Amalia is next.

Amalia Kozloff:

Hey, okay, I’ll be super quick, I promise. No, you’re all good. So, we’ve also had to make a lot of difficult decisions regarding controversial topics. As I talked about, pop culture is really messy and the people who create it can be really messy as well, but we get mixed reactions. So, for instance, the first example for Keith Haring:

 A Radiant Legacy. We did our formative evaluations, and most respondents wanted a content warning on explicit material, which we did. And we were convinced people are going to be upset or somebody was going to be upset one way or another about this, that we put a content warning. We got nothing. Nobody said anything after all that 300 respondents for the evaluation wanted a content warning.

And then I also, again, going really fast. So, for our Hendrix exhibit, there is a word used in there that was very commonly used having to do with Romani and Sinti representation. And nobody ever said anything one way or another, but I went in there one day and I was like, “I am not comfortable with this, and I want to put something on the wall that says…” And basically, entitled it Words Can Hurt, non-judgmental, but just saying, “Hey, this can be seen as a derogatory slur.” I have gotten both of the extremes of the reaction, people saying, “Oh my gosh, this is my ethnicity, this is my community. Thank you for doing this.” And other people being like, “I’m going to use that word if I want to.” The point being, you’re never going to please everyone, as we all know. I’m sure there are a lot of nodding heads.

I also wanted to mention in our Contact High exhibition, we had Kanye West up there. Yay. So anyways. But when we first had him in there, and of course there’s lots of problematic people, as I said, pop culture is messy. But after one of his tirades, I worked with our director of equity and inclusion to actually write, again, just something to contextualize why he’s in the exhibit, but also acknowledging his anti-Semitism and his anti-Blackness and making sure that people understood that was important.

And then the last example, which I did a much longer talk on this morning, was our Gone Too Soon exhibit, which it’s a part of our guest curator program, so it was a guest curator. And they used internet slang, which got people pretty upset. And not for the reasons you think. They weren’t necessarily angry at the museum; they were angry about the use of the word. And it created this online conversation about how do we use this language? How does language change? We’re a museum, we’re an educational institution, how do we talk about those things? Do we use them? So those are my quick examples.

Erica Frazier:

I’m going to be super brief and really focus on two. You’ll see the food on the bottom left corner. That was a town hall that was held in person to get feedback around a rooftop garden that we opened two years ago. But I think some of the more prescient moments are the ones… There’s a video in one theater that has Arab Americans being filmed. We had a family come through during an Eid party, a Muslim holiday party, and they were engaging in the exhibits and then they left, I think it was an email to our deputy director expressing their frustrations and how could we allow this in our space, especially given that it was a holiday party.

But then we did a little bit more research. The person had never engaged with us before. They were not a member. To our knowledge, they had never visited before, so that was one of those instances where we see you, we understand that there’s this tension around your tradition, your culture, your religious observance, and there’s something incongruent here in our content that you may or may not care for, but at the end of the day, these are still people who are part of our community who we feel need to be included in the conversation.

And one of the first things I did when I started at the museum was, I was involved in a team of some folks to develop a series of animated maps. There are four and maps are problematic. And so, one has religious diversity in the Arab world, the other one illustrates the different terms, MENA, SWANA, the Middle East, etc., and how they reflect parts of this part of the world. And then the other one has immigration and migration, and the other one was about borders. And so, we had a lot of conversations about when and where we are using and acknowledging the State of Israel and when and where we are acknowledging occupied Palestine. And that was one of those situations where we had a lunch and learn to go back over the topic to give our team strength as they would be handling those conversations in person with people. And so that was the one I initially thought about when Dorothy had reached out.

And then the last one here is a Santa suit. Again, we are representing people who come from the three Abrahamic religions, but also other faith, Druze, Mandaeans, things like that, that are probably lesser. And so, we had a holiday party a couple of years ago that included a scavenger hunt and people said, “Well, why would you include a Santa suit? This is not reflective of my religion.” Well, it’s reflective of some people’s religion within the community. But then the conversation was, “Well, if you’re going to have something referencing Christianity, then why is there not something on the scavenger hunt?” So that was a moment where we were like, “Yes, we can use that feedback. That is helpful.” And it’s very easy to enact change, but of course people have a lot of comments about didactic labels, chat labels, and exhibitry that are much more difficult to make change to and much more expensive.

Stephanie Rayburn:

So just to wrap up, a word that I think is really important to this entire talk is intention. We have to be intentional about how we collect feedback and what we do with feedback. And that intention has to happen from the frontline staff all the way up through museum leadership.

I’m going to give you a few examples of how we have approached this with intention in our museum at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. One is this Community Collaboration project. Started off with our last strategic plan. Our leadership identified a strategic audience that they wanted to prioritize. And that audience was the Latinx community within the neighborhoods surrounding our museum. They recognized that our Latinx visitorship on site at the museum was a smaller percentage of our total visitorship than the actual representation of the Latinx population in the community. And so, the museum leadership identified this as a priority, and we began to collect data with this in mind.

So as we were collecting feedback, we were elevating prioritizing feedback from our Latina audiences and making sure that that was always broken out in our data so that as leadership was making decisions, they could see, “Okay, what does the general community like, but also what does the strategic audience want or need here? And what are some ways that we can meet those needs?” And that has been really successful. In the last few years, we’ve seen our on-site visitorship shift. That demographic has shifted to be representative of the wider Latina population in the Denver community.

We also, our Gems and Minerals exhibit is undergoing a redesign right now. If you happen to come to Denver in the next eight months, you can see it. And then after about December, you won’t be able to until they have opened up the new one. But we have been very intentional about collecting data from the community throughout this design process. Over the last year and a half, we have gone through multiple phases of design in which we have sought feedback from on-site, off-site visitors, members, staff, and been really intentional about how we’re waiting that feedback, how we’re breaking that out as the design team is considering what do people really want in this new exhibit?

And as you might imagine with exhibits that have been around for a long time, people, they can be emotional about them. There’s often nostalgia attached to those. And so, we have to then be thoughtful about, “Okay, the people who maybe are most emotional, is that really our target audience with this new exhibit? Are those the people that we wanted to design the exhibit for? Or are we trying to shift the primary audience for the exhibit maybe to somebody who has not had their preferences met in the current exhibit?”

And then my last example is a Building Bridges project. This was a grant-funded project. I mentioned at the beginning that we house Indigenous belongings within our collections. And this was a project in which we intentionally sought to bring members from five different Indigenous communities into the museum to see their belongings, interact with them, to engage in conversations with our collection staff and our leadership around what happens to those belongings, what is the most appropriate way to care for those belongings, and where our belongings needed to be repatriated.

This has not always been easy. Sometimes a member of one Indigenous community would claim a belonging as belonging to their community, and a member of another Indigenous community would claim that belonging is belonging to their community. And so, it’s not always cut and dry. But one thing that we found that was really important is asking them outside of… Having people who are not responsible for those collections, holding these conversations. The power dynamics really inhibit what people are willing to share, and so the members of these communities needed to have these conversations with people who were not directly responsible for those collections. And we facilitated spaces where they could do that, they could go more in-depth with their feedback, and then our evaluation team could then take that feedback back to leadership and collections managers in a way that they could make best use of that.

Erica Frazier:

I think that’s a really good point just really quickly about if you can have an unbiased person be a moderator for focus groups and things like that, if that’s within your budget and your capacity, I 10 out of 10 recommend that because you’ll get obviously more honesty out of stakeholders than if responsible parties are in the room.

Dorothy Rivera:

Yeah. And I will say that despite our best ambitions, I know that we’re coming sort of right up against the clock here, and I know people have other sessions to get to. If you wander out of the room, we will not be remotely offended. But if people do want to sort of ask questions of the group, you’re welcome to come up to the microphone. If you feel like you don’t have time to do that, we’ll all be around here for a little bit and we’re happy to talk to you a little bit more about our process. Yeah, that’s right. It’s right up there, but there are some materials for it. Wait, nope.

No, I’m afraid we don’t have our contacts up there, but we also have business cards if anyone wants to come up and talk to us, you’re welcome to. But thank you all for coming today. We’re so grateful to have a chance to speak with you. Yeah, [inaudible 00:56:53].

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This recording is generously supported by The Wallace Foundation.