Intersections in an Art Museum: Where Art Meets Science

“Not a place for me” is often one of the main reasons people choose not to visit art museums.

Such perceptions of art museums call for institutions to create wider and more diverse entry points for visitors. At the Art Institute of Chicago—envisioned by our first president as a “museum of living thought”—we seek to continually expand art historical narratives by bringing together a plurality of perspectives and voices to processes of research, scientific and creative inquiry, and to increasingly varied modes of public engagement with art. To achieve these goals we developed a multifaceted strategy for engaging the public with intersections of art, conservation, and science. This strategy required us to revise our own areas of practice, establish institutional structures for cross-departmental work, and investigate how science can benefit visitors to an art museum.

We asked ourselves:

• What makes the engagement with both art and science special?
• How does foregrounding the intersections of art and science enhance the museum experience?
• How does this approach support interdisciplinarity and plurality of voices in the museum?

To explore how sharing conservation and science stories affects our visitors, we identified and developed two key aspects missing from both the wider body of literature and our own past outreach efforts: robust visitor evaluations and a broader theoretical framework anchored in pedagogical values that cut across individual case studies. Through interdepartmental collaboration among stakeholders from the Art Institute’s departments of Conservation and Science, Learning and Public Engagement, and Experience Design, we theorized two broad impacts of integrating art and science into the public face of an art museum:

1. Visitors will expand their set of perspectives and tools to engage with and see art anew; and
2. Visitors will more deeply value art objects as objects to be experienced in person and preserved for the future.

The results of our research revealed the importance of consistently engaging conservators and scientists in the educational work of museums and integrating science research and modes of inquiry across the many dimensions of public engagement at art museums. Across all of our experiments we found that engaging the public with art and science can significantly impact visitors and museums—providing audiences with new or deeper perspectives for understanding and valuing art objects, inspiring young people to consider careers in STEM through the emotionally and intellectually engaging power of art, and helping museums transform into spaces for inquiry and creative labs with many voices.

This toolkit contains reflections, case studies, recommendations, and resources that have both informed and resulted from our journey of approaching art through the lenses of conservation and science. We hope these materials enhance the work that you and/or your organization are already undertaking and provide new ways of thinking about interdisciplinarity in creating museum experiences that respond to the needs and curiosities of twenty-first-century audiences. 

If you would like to edit a resource, please email us to submit your request.