We like to say that our institution’s name contains three intimidating words: Harvard, Art, and Museums.

Many people don’t feel comfortable in any museum; this can be for several reasons, including the reputation of museums as spaces enjoyed historically by people who are white, wealthy, and highly educated. Some of that discomfort can also come from being unfamiliar with how museums work, what museum terminology means, and how a visitor can or should act in museum spaces. Here, we reflect on the practical applications of two concepts that inform our interactions with students when they visit the Harvard Art Museums: museum literacy and museum-going identity. We shape the museums’ curricular programs around these concepts so that students can build their comfort and confidence while they are here, while still focusing on the academic topic at hand. Their experiences with us can then empower them to have more fulfilling visits to any museum in the future.

What Do These Terms Mean?

Museum literacy is a working knowledge of what happens in museums.[1] For example, it includes an understanding of the broad array of activities a visitor can take part in; who a conservator is and what they do; what a special exhibition is; and why works on paper need to “rest” periodically in storage.[2] Having some understanding of how museums work can help people feel more confident when they visit and therefore more likely to return and engage in whatever ways feel comfortable to them.

A person’s museum-going identity is formed by positive experiences in museums. It’s when a person feels comfortable calling themselves a museumgoer, is aware of the many valid ways to engage with museums, and feels that such spaces are for them.[3] It seems to us that museum-going identity is partly the product of museum literacy: the more you understand about museums, the more likely you are to identify as a museumgoer.

In collaboration with the Division of Academic and Public Programs (DAPP), the museums’ curators, conservators, conservation scientists, postdoctoral fellows, exhibition designers, and other staff help students (and of course, members of the public, too) build their museum literacy and museum-going identity in many ways. These include opportunities to go “behind the scenes” in museum spaces to learn about our activities; to make connections between artwork and contemporary lives and concerns; and for students to openly contribute their own knowledge and opinions through lively discussions around art. Here we provide some examples of what that looks like for class visits to the Harvard Art Museums.

All Students Are Welcome

As a STEM concentrator, my experience with art is extremely limited, so it was really interesting to be exposed to these various artworks and get to hear my classmates’ opinions of them. I enjoyed being able to come up with my own interpretations of the emotions conveyed, and then also hear if my peers agreed or interpreted them differently.
—An undergraduate visitor to the museums

About 80 percent of our university-level teaching at the Harvard Art Museums is for interdisciplinary courses (those outside the Departments of History of Art and Architecture and Art, Film, and Visual Studies). Each semester, students studying subjects ranging from computer science to Spanish and from music to engineering visit the museums’ galleries, view objects from storage in the Art Study Center, explore course-related installations in the Marcus Rose Family University Study Gallery, and work on collections-based assignments. With such a broad spectrum of students visiting the museums, it’s important to ensure that all of them feel welcome—not just the self-identified “museum people” or “art people.” One way DAPP helps bring students in the door who might not otherwise come on their own is by collaborating with two Harvard initiatives: the First-Year Seminar and General Education programs.

The First-Year Seminar Program

First-Year Seminars are capped at 12 students and center on a variety of cross-disciplinary themes. They are ungraded and intended to support students as they explore their interests, all while providing a model for how to engage in college-level conversations. These seminars are offered by professors across the university, including faculty from the professional schools. First-Year Seminars are a key partner for the Harvard Art Museums because they create opportunities for new Harvard students to step inside our building. A First-Year Seminar visit often leads students to become regular visitors to the museums for the rest of their time at Harvard, whether that means visiting the galleries, participating in our Harvard Student After Hours event, or doing their homework at Jenny’s Cafe. In the 2023–24 academic year, 150 students from 16 First-Year Seminars visited the Harvard Art Museums—and most were first-time visitors to the museums.

Students in one of our favorite recent seminars, titled Race, Science, and the Law (taught by Sebastian Jackson from the Department of African and African American Studies), visited the Art Study Center to see a series of works on paper—the collective term for prints, drawings, and photographs. Using works on paper is a great opportunity to introduce students to some media-specific museum literacy concepts, such as how etchings are made, and why a photograph’s light sensitivity affects how long and how often it can be on view.

The class began their visit with a discussion about Carrie Mae Weems’s series of photographs From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. The students had just visited Harvard’s Peabody Museum the week before to view the Zealy daguerreotypes on which Weems’s work is based. Visiting these two Harvard museums gave students insight into different collection histories and the power of artists’ responses to historical materials. The group discussed how these works came to reside in two museums and wondered what it might be like to have them on view together, since Weems’s artistic intervention is a form of institutional critique.

We had similar conversations with students about Alexandra Bell’s portfolio of prints No Humans Involved: After Sylvia Wynter, in which the artist added her own highlights and redactions to reprints of the 1989 Daily News coverage of the Central Park Five case to underscore media bias.

These discussions empowered students to share their opinions not only about the artworks, but also about artists’ practice and museum practice. Following our close look at the works by Weems and Bell, the group split into three for a “choose your own adventure” prompt: students were asked to gravitate toward either LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Edgar Thomson Plant and the Bottom, Jacob Lawrence’s The 1920s . . . The Migrants Cast Their Ballots, or Fred Wilson’s 1863 and explore each work alongside their classmates before sharing their thoughts with the broader group. Introducing the element of choice can help students build confidence in their ability to navigate museums on their own and discover what interests them.

We make a concerted effort to bring First-Year Seminars to the Art Study Center whenever possible: the space is exciting for first-time visitors because it has the feel of a behind-the-scenes experience. It shows students that our whole collection is accessible to them, and that we trust them to view original works of art without the intermediary boundary of a protective case. As one First-Year Seminar instructor put it, students were “surprised and charmed . . . that there was ‘no glass’—a fitting tribute, I thought, to the wonderful level of access that the study center and your teaching gave them!”

General Education Courses

Courses in the Program in General Education center on interdisciplinary themes that are broadly applicable to contemporary concerns and are designed to influence students’ worldviews as they embark on their post-college lives. They are open to all Harvard students in any class year. They often have large enrollments, so students usually visit the museums in their section groups of about 15 people. Like First-Year Seminars, Gen Eds (as these classes are known) give the museums a chance to welcome students who might not visit on their own and are a great avenue through which to support a museum-going identity among the broader undergraduate community.

In the 2023–24 academic year, 14 Gen Ed classes visited the Harvard Art Museums, with a total of 1,083 students enrolled across practically every area of study. One of our favorite Gen Ed courses to work with is Water and the Environment (taught by Professor Kaighin McColl from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences). We choose different objects for this class every year, because there is so much relevant material at our fingertips. In Spring 2024, students circulated between four stops that speak to human-environment relationships across time and place. Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım, the Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art, led students in a conversation about Islamic and South Asian objects, such as Krishna and Radha by the Bank of a River; Talitha Schepers, then the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow, walked students through an installation of Dutch landscape paintings highlighting the use and management of water, including Jan van Goyen’s View of Rhenen; Sarah Laursen, the Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art, designed worksheets to help students unpack the effects of a hydroelectric dam on Chinese communities, documented in Yun-Fei Ji’s artist book The Three Gorges Dam Migration; and associate director of academic engagement and campus partnerships Jen Thum engaged students in a discussion about human effects on the environment using Sharon Stewart’s photographic series Toxic Tour of Texas and Richard Misrach’s photograph Submerged Gas Pumps, Salton Sea. The beauty of Gen Ed courses and other interdisciplinary courses is that they allow us to present “case studies” on the theme of a course with works from across the collections. Unlimited by place, period, or medium, we can show these students that there are touchpoints for their learning in every corner of the museums.

Gen Ed faculty also often select objects for display in our University Study Gallery. These installations, created in partnership with Laura Muir, director of academic and public programs, can be visited any time the museums are open. This is a great option for courses with larger enrollments, when it might be harder for all students to gather in one gallery at the same time.

One student in the Gen Ed course titled Creativity, a psychology concentrator from the class of 2026, summarized the impact of their visit: “It is a really nice introduction to the Harvard Art Museums if you are a student who has never been there before. It is an awesome experience to hear professional individuals explain the stories and elaborate on some of the works in the museum.”

Fostering Museum Literacy and Museum-Going Identity for Everyone

Our mission to cultivate museum literacy and museum-going identity isn’t just for college students: these concepts have also become central to our work with high school students. In our Graduate Student Teacher (GST) Program, graduate students from across Harvard learn to teach interdisciplinary gallery lessons for students at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS), the only public high school in Cambridge. Every CRLS visit begins with a discussion about museum etiquette—and how to respectfully break it. The high school students learn that they don’t have to be quiet in the museums, that they can sit on the floor, and that there is no “right way” to look at art. Over the course of their class visits, GSTs walk CRLS students through museum literacy topics such as what an object number is, who designs the mounts that secure artwork to the walls, and the choices curators make to articulate a gallery’s theme.

GSTs, who are enrolled in a diverse range of graduate schools and programs, such as the law school and the Ph.D. program in organismic and evolutionary biology, build their own museum literacy by learning from museum staff during their weekly training sessions. They can then transfer that knowledge to the high school students, making the learning from this program intergenerational.

Recent public-facing and extracurricular offerings at the museums—such as the Art + Science Pathway and our By Teens, For Teens audio guide available on the Bloomberg Connects app—have also broadened the reach of our museum literacy and museum-going identity practices.

This work is for everyone. We hope that all visitors will feel comfortable and confident when they visit the Harvard Art Museums—and by extension, any museum—and empowered to enjoy these spaces however they like.

Jen Thum is Associate Director of Academic Engagement and Campus Partnerships and Research Curator, and Sarah Lieberman is the Cunningham Fellow in Academic and Public Programs at the Harvard Art Museums.

[1] This is how we define this term. For others’ definitions, see Carol B. Stapp, “Defining Museum Literacy,” Roundtable Reports 9 (1) (1984): 3–4; and Melinda M. Mayer, “A Postmodern Puzzle: Rewriting the Place of the Visitor in Art Museum Education,” Studies in Art Education 46 (4) (2005): 356–68.

[2] Did you know that a print, drawing, or photograph needs to “rest” in storage for several years after being on view for just a few months?!

[3] Jen Thum coined this term after “college-going identity,” an idea foundational to Project Teach, Harvard’s Official College and Career Awareness Program.