PHIL: You’re furrowing your brow. MONIQUE: I need a working title and a catchy organizing principle for this little civics exhibition I’m doing. PHIL: Try the Rule of Three. You might solve both. MONIQUE: Rule of what? …

I was once given a tour of a new exhibition by the curator. Among hundreds of objects was a large item, very damaged, behind all the others. When I learned what it was, it was the damage that made it the most interesting object there for me. …

Exhibitions, like movies, are primarily visual. You can watch good movies with the sound off. Some films have no words at all. But you can’t have a movie with the reverse: only words. Exhibitions are the same. Let’s test that. Which of these would you rather visit? …

If you’ve been around here a minute, you know the L.A.T.C.H. framework for the five ways of organizing any information. To brush up, those are Location, Alphabetical, Time, Categorical, and Hierarchical (aka continuum). But are we missing one? …

Every movie has a music soundtrack, or “score”. And every video game. And every Broadway show. And every streaming series, dance performance, cooking show, and circus. So why don’t more of our exhibitions have one? …

Sometimes it seems like the world wants us all to make vanilla exhibitions. It seems to demand that we make them unoriginal, overstuffed, long-winded, tech for tech’s sake, and generic. But is that what the world wants? Or just what it seems to want? …

Time for some visual inspiration. Awareness art, or protest art, is art that exists primarily to draw attention to an issue, or to object to a situation. I’m obsessed, because many exhibition planning and design projects have awareness-building as the main point. …

Today, the Top Ten most popular posts related to content, as determined by web traffic at makingthemuseum.com, where every daily post gets gathered. (This time, the #1 spot came as no surprise. I didn’t expect #2, but Phil & Monique fans might have.) …

Thank you! Thanks to your reading, your comments, and your feedback, Making the Museum (the newsletter) just turned … [drum roll] … 1. A year ago, the first email went out. And it wouldn’t be an anniversary if we didn’t do some Top Ten lists …

PHIL: Look at this script. Is this too much text? MONIQUE: Yes. [Sips matcha.] PHIL: But you didn’t even look! MONIQUE: Don’t have to. PHIL: Why not? MONIQUE: It’s always too much. PHIL: True. MONIQUE: Why do we always start by assuming every exhibition needs text? …

A little pro-visitor devotional. We forget. We forget every day, and need reminding. We forget that we are experts. Therefore we can’t unlearn our subject. We forget we can’t instinctively empathize with our visitors’ level of knowledge, so we have to discipline ourselves …

What if there were a high-quality, peer-reviewed journal for the whole exhibition community? What if it featured the leading organizations, practitioners and ideas that shape the whole industry? What if back issues available for free to see online?

What’s a trope? Trope (noun): In art or literature, something such as an idea, phrase, or image that is often used in a particular artist’s work, in a particular type of art, in the media, etc. Example: “Human-like robots are a classic trope of science fiction.” Tropes from exhibitions …

Mille grazie to everyone who wrote in about Telling a Story with Things, this week’s piece on the Museum on Main Street (MOMS) definition of an exhibition. The question: Do all exhibitions “tell a story with things”? Reader MK wrote in about “real things” …

What one thing, or two — Ten? Sigh. — do you want your visitors to leave thinking? Your takeaways are the purpose of your project. And so, you are in one of three camps right now. Which? If you don’t know your main takeaways, you might be wasting 100% of your resources …

Do all exhibitions “tell a story with things”? Discuss. In my podcast interview with Carol Bossert, she mentions the excellent Museum on Main Street (MOMS) program of Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) …

Organizing content by location is a common approach in exhibitions. An ancient art show organized by region, a hall of fame organized by state, a World’s Fair organized by country. But that’s just the start. Here are seven more …

Large Language Models use massive amounts of pre-existing text to generate the text we ask them for. So they’re not so good at having new ideas. But all that pre-existing text was made by humans, which means certain questions can be revealing…

What is this thing we call a traveling exhibition? Carol Bossert (Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service / Smithsonian Affiliations) joins host Jonathan Alger (C&G Partners) to reveal the “8 Principles of Traveling Exhibitions”.

Past podcast guest and friend of MtM Matt Kirchman teaches a principle called “first fish.” He picked it up planning aquarium experiences. If you have a lot of something visitors are excited to see, give them a taste of it as soon as they arrive …