Museum report·Global
$2.7M Getty fund asks 11 museums to rethink labels, access and who exhibitions speak to
The Getty Foundation has launched New Interpretations, a $2.7 million programme backing 11 museums in the US and abroad to redesign how visitors encounter exhibitions, from multilingual wall texts to research into artificial intelligence and accessibility.
The Getty Foundation has announced a $2.7 million funding programme that asks museums to rethink one of their most basic tools: the words on the wall. Called New Interpretations, the initiative will support 11 museums in the United States and elsewhere as they experiment with language, accessibility and community engagement, moving beyond conventional labels toward approaches grounded in visitor research.
The participating institutions span several countries and kinds of museum. They include the Association for Art Museum Interpretation, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the First Americans Museum, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Leeum Museum of Art in partnership with M+, the Manchester Museum, the Queens Museum and the Walker Art Center.
The Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul and M+ in Hong Kong are planning an international gathering at M+ in December 2026, bringing museum professionals together to discuss interpretation and visitor engagement across the region. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, meanwhile, will continue work it began in 2024 on visitor guides and wall texts in Spanish, Hmong and Somali, developed with communities in the Twin Cities so that the language of exhibitions reflects the people reading it.
Other projects turn to research and reporting. The First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City will work with a fellow on visitor surveys with a strong focus on Native American audiences, producing a report on how Indigenous knowledge and authority should shape exhibitions. That work will also feed into an exhibition planned for 2030, marking the bicentenary of the Indian Removal Act with historical and contemporary perspectives. The Denver Art Museum will commission research into the rise of artificial intelligence and its effect on visitors, alongside on-site surveys and panels.
Heather E. MacDonald, a senior programme officer at the foundation, framed the programme as an attempt to treat visitor-centred work as a serious field of practice rather than an afterthought. She said the foundation wanted the funded projects to serve as case studies for other museums..
