"Talk to the Visitor": Making Decorative Arts Relevant by Beth Twiss-Garrity, Tracey Rae Beck, and Amber Auld Combs To survive in today's highly competitive cultural leisure market, museums have begun to study visitor expectations and satisfaction levels. This presentation will begin by introducing some of the trends across the country as museums struggle to be relevant both to their current visitors and to potential new audiences. The speakers then will discuss how the Visitor Research Team (VRT) at Winterthur, three of whose members are WPEAC graduates, has sought to understand why and how people learn from the decorative arts. Museums struggle with their mixed identities as storehouses of cultural treasures, centers for scholarship, places for community gatherings, institutions of education, and sites for recreational activities. Their staffs wonder if they must choose among these associations in order to attract the public. Decorative arts museums, as evidenced at a conference at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in 1999, struggle even more with these questions. Does the public consider decorative arts relevant to their lives? Do they even know what "decorative arts" are? At Winterthur, a staff committee began to explore these questions in 1988 with a NEH self-study grant to create a Handbook for Interpreters. While the handbook was published in 1992, staff have continued the work by moving into active, on-going visitor research. Why do people visit a decorative arts museum like Winterthur? How do people learn from such collections? VRT discovered that there are at least seven motivations for why people visit museums like Winterthur, the most common ones being recreation and learning. People spend time in a museum, rather than at some other leisure time activity, because they know they will leave feeling refreshed and inspired to return to their daily lives. In particular with decorative arts collections, they utilize four thinking strategies that help them understand decorative arts within the realm of their everyday lives. While museums can alter and hone these motivations and thinking strategies, museum interpretation needs to begin with this sort of precise knowledge about the visiting public to be successful at attracting and holding visitors. With its reliance on understanding visitors, the VRT has created a new way of training guides, has changed how programs are promoted and tours are conceived, and has become an active partner in exhibition development and implementation. Its work not only has changed how Winterthur approaches exhibitions and tours, but also has influenced other museums. Members of the VRT speak and write about their research and its conclusions, hoping to inspire other museums to undertake this important work connecting collections and audiences. VRT takes its "Excellence in Interpretation" course on the road to museums and historic houses both to share its conclusions, but also to help other museum staff and volunteers think critically about who their visitors are and might be. Perhaps the boldest affirmation of the need to "talk to visitors" came in 2000 with the creation of a Division of Research and Interpretation as part of Winterthur's staff reorganization, thus formalizing visitor research as essential to museum operations. Back to conference agenda