At Signature Program, Students Employed by College Museums Discuss Ways to Attract Wider Audiences
Students from colleges across the Northeast gathered at Vassar’s Institute for the Liberal Arts on November 15 to swap ideas on how to attract a wider spectrum of visitors to their museums. The 45 students from 10 colleges and universities were joined at the daylong Signature Program titled “The Students in Museums Summit” by top administrators at two large museums who are engaged in the same endeavor.
The consensus reached at the symposium: Museums should be a place where a wider spectrum of the college and surrounding communities can identify with the art and the programs inside their walls. “We need to figure out what people in our communities value instead of what we in the museum community value,” said Miki Garcia ’94, Director of the Arizona State University Art Museum, during her one-hour talk and discussion on the morning of the conference. “Making museums a place that’s inviting to most visitors is not something we’re traditionally good at.”
Garcia said she was attracting a more diverse audience to the ASU museum by identifying key populations at the university and in the greater Phoenix area that are traditionally underrepresented, commissioning works by Latinx and indigenous artists and creating programs that speak to those communities. “We can make decisions that make these populations feel comfortable in our space,” she said.
View Highlights of the Program
Prior to Garcia’s talk, the student museum workers swapped ideas on how to accomplish this goal at the museums on their campuses. Many of them said they are developing programs designed to attract school groups and others from their communities. Museum workers from Williams and Skidmore said their colleges allow students to borrow works of art from their museums and display them in their dormitory rooms. The practice is so popular, they said, that many students at both colleges camp out outside the museums the night before the works of art are available for borrowing.
The final speaker at the conference, Karen Vidangos, Senior Manager of Social Media at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, said she, too, was constantly looking for ways to broaden the spectrum of in-person and online visitors to the museum. Vidangos noted that The Met has 5.7 million in-person visitors a year, but 14 million who use the museum’s social media platforms. “We have followers from all over the world,” she said, “so we have to be mindful of what’s trending in France or Spain.”
Recently, Vidangos said she decided to use the annual Met Gala, one of the museum’s largest fundraisers, to have celebrities attending the event respond on social media to open-ended questions about their lives. She also used social media to promote an exhibition of works by a Met security guard. “One lesson I learned is to go beyond worrying about the metrics, worrying about how many followers you have,” she said. “What matters is telling human stories.”
In addition to her work at The Met, Vidangos is the founder of the Latinx Art Collective, which enables Latinx artists from the United States and the Caribbean to share their stories and promote their shows for a wider audience.
As the program came to a close, students who participated said they were inspired by the innovative ideas that were generated. “I’m just blown away by everything I experienced,” said Defne Olgun, who works at Tufts University’s art galleries. “The day provided us with the space to educate ourselves about what other college museums all over the Northeast are doing. I’ll have a lot to synthesize on my ride back to Boston.”
Vassar alum Betsy Subiros ’25 worked at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center all four years she was a student and is currently employed at the Loeb as a Collections and Registrarial Fellow. Subiros said the Signature Program was inspired by a planned gathering of student museum workers from several colleges in 2021 that had to be converted to a virtual event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We had to do that one via Zoom, so we were excited to finally host a live one,” she said.
Sara Shepherd ’26, a member of the Loeb’s Student Advisory Committee, whose members planned the event, said the ideas that were generated to attract more diverse audiences to museums resonated with her. “My main takeaway is we have to transcend the walls of the College and the museum and get into the community in more innovative ways,” Shepherd said. “I didn’t go to museums when I was young, but now I see the value of attracting young people and immersing them in what museums have to offer.”
Francine Brown, Coordinator of Membership, Events, and Visitors Services and the Loeb’s Student Advisory Committee Advisor, said she hoped the conference marked just the beginning of the dialogue. “I’m extremely proud of how the students put this program together,” Brown said. “Our goal is to make this an annual event, rotating it among all of the colleges that were involved in this one. Each school has so much to share.”
The 10 northeastern colleges and universities with students who attended the program are: Amherst College, Colby, Hamilton, Princeton University, Skidmore College, Smith College, Tufts University, Vassar, Wellesley and Williams.