Since opening the exhibition Visiting with the Ancestors: the Blackfoot Shirts Project in late
March, something very special has been happening at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Actually,
many special things have been happening.
Visitors are actually working their way all around the room,
reading all the exhibition texts and looking at the images and labels. (This is
not supposed to happen: museum visitors tend to look at labels for no more than
about 30 seconds, and they don’t generally read all of the text in an
exhibition.) They are also spending longer in the exhibition than is usual for
our temporary exhibitions.
They are also looking closely at the shirts themselves, and
at the other objects in the exhibition: the legging, the new shirt, the
students’ art work in response to the shirts, and the new quillwork.
Then they are also writing in the visitor comment book. I’m
going to have to get a second comment book, because the first one is nearly
full. The last panel of the exhibit asks, ‘what do you think about this
project?’ and visitors really are telling us. Comments range from ‘the shirts
are cool’ to ‘Please send them home.’ People are writing entire pages of
comments, and leaving their email addresses. This week, a visitor added
suggested readings in her comments, and also inserted a page in the book with
reading suggestions. Visitors are responding to earlier visitor comments: there
is dialogue going on in the book.
In my experience this is unusual. I am also surprised by the
level of support voiced for the project, for Blackfoot people and heritage, and
for the idea of visits of important objects home. I’ll transcribe some of the
comments here soon, and we are now doing some serious visitor experience
analysis, and interviews with visitors. What we’ve seen so far has been both
intriguing and heart-warming.