Galleries as Sites of Connection: Visitor Experience in Her Brush
- Karuna Srikureja
Her Brush opens with these questions: “How do we leave our mark?” “How is art a reflection of our personhood?”
These are not questions that one might find on a pop quiz—they are deeply personal and belie a straightforward answer. The inclusive pronoun “we” collapses the distance between the questioner and the questioned, humanizing the museum voice and offering some authority back to the visitor. These questions prime visitors to enter Her Brush not to simply absorb information but to reflect, feel, and be an active participant in their experience. The exhibition design makes use of dramatic lighting, creative object display, and multiple textures and materials to create an immersive, evocative space that engages the senses and imagination. The invitation to participate is reinforced throughout the exhibition. Visitors are encouraged to open tanzaku boxes and collect artists’ biographical slips stored within them, make their own tanzaku, and even leave trails of digital ink on the exhibition walls through an interactive projection.
This approach is characteristic of the Denver Art Museum (DAM), which has been at the forefront of the movement toward visitor-centered museums for decades. Since the early 1990s, the DAM has employed a team-based approach to exhibition design built on the partnership between a curator and an educator (originally called a master teacher, now an interpretive specialist), championed by the then-director of education, Patterson Williams. This marriage of pedagogical and visitor-centered expertise with art-historical scholarship results in exhibitions that consistently push the boundaries of what it means to be a welcoming and accessible resource to the public.
With this institutional inheritance in mind, curator Einor Cervone and I were presented with a challenge in Her Brush. This exhibition had the potential to be incredibly alienating to a general audience: it explores a large swath of Japanese history (1600s–1900s) across varied genres and social realms, often diving into the cultural nuances that allowed women to pursue artistic careers. Despite this, the story we hoped to tell is an exceedingly human one. It is a story about resilience, self-actualization, and the universal drive to create. But how to tell this story when these artworks have become so far removed from the conditions that created them? This is the central challenge of art interpretation, which the noted philosopher and educator John Dewey articulated in his seminal Art as Experience (1934). To Dewey, “[The] task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.”1
The interpretive elements we created present art-historical detail in the service of personal connection. Biographical focus moments, for example, bring together an artist’s words, work, signature, and story and encourage visitors to see each artist as an individual with unique experience instead of the nebulous notion of the invisible hand.
While we wanted to privilege the artists’ experiences, we recognized the limitations of our own familiarity with their circumstances. Several of the highlighted artists in the exhibition dealt with challenges related to trauma, gender, and national and religious identity. While the exhibition team approached these artists’ experiences through a historical lens, many visitors face related challenges today and would bring their own vulnerabilities and preconceived notions to the exhibition. To help us navigate these key issues, we convened a group of local stakeholders. This group of community consultants included people from a range of backgrounds, including a disability rights lawyer, a Zen-based psychotherapist, Denver-based Japanese nationals, and Japanese American artists. The goal was not co-curation but rather gaining a nuanced understanding of the priorities and concerns of vulnerable communities represented in the exhibition. We sought to craft an approach that framed these historical stories in a way that was sensitive to our twenty-first-century cultural climate.
This sense of personal connection, to be sure, must be made available to audiences of all backgrounds and circumstances. Like all exhibitions at the DAM, Her Brush is almost fully bilingual, with texts in both English and Spanish. Cognizant of the large variety of ways in which individuals process information, we strove to create an embodied, sensory exhibition experience. An interactive activity in the final gallery translates visitors’ motions into ink strokes projected onto the wall, inviting them to literally embody an artist (fig. 1). The goal was for visitors to understand the connection between the body, artmaking, and self-expression and to experience the intimacy, joy, and physicality of creating and sharing art with others.
We made special effort to welcome kids and families into Her Brush. Denver-based artist Sarah Fukami developed five collectable “artist slips” placed in tanzaku boxes around the exhibition (figs. 2–6). On the back is a brief account of the artist, written in the first person, and a prompt leading to the next slip. A take-home folding screen bears six slots: five for the collectable artist slips and one for a slip produced by the visitor. An artmaking corner midway through the exhibition allows everyone to place themselves within this artistic lineage.
Ultimately, art museums exist at the nexus of learning and leisure; visitors therefore generally do not view the museum-going experience with the same goals of mastering content as one would expect from, say, a lecture or a book. It is with this conviction that we approached the exhibition interpretation and visitor experience for Her Brush. By adding emotional relevance to historical content, by enhancing narrativity, we allow information—otherwise inaccessible, intimidating, even—to ring salient and memorable.
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John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934), 2. ↩︎