Getty Foundation Puts US$2.7 Million Behind 11 Museums' Visitor Projects
The Los Angeles-based Getty Foundation has launched a US$2.7 million grant programme to support 11 museums in the United States and abroad. The money is aimed at changing how museums explain their collections to the people who walk through the doors.
The programme is called New Interpretations. "Interpretation" is the word museums use for the wall labels, guides, texts and displays that help visitors understand what they are looking at. The grants fund projects that rethink that language, make galleries easier for more people to use, and bring local communities into the work, according to The Art Newspaper.
The 11 grantees are spread across several continents. They are the Association for Art Museum Interpretation, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the First Americans Museum, the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, the Manchester Museum in England, the Queens Museum in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Leeum is working with M+ in Hong Kong on the programme.
Some of the projects already have clear shapes. The Walker Art Center will keep developing visitor guides and wall texts in Spanish, Hmong and Somali. It started that work in 2024.
The First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City will bring in a fellow, a researcher working on a set term, to survey visitors with a focus on Native American audiences. The fellow will also write a report on how Indigenous knowledge can shape what goes on display.
The Denver Art Museum plans something different. It will commission a research firm to study the rise of artificial intelligence and how it affects visitors. That work will sit alongside on-site surveys and panels.
The Leeum and M+ will host some of the first public-facing projects. M+ plans a major international gathering in December 2026 on interpretation and visitor engagement in Asia. Those who work on museum labels and tours from across the region are likely to be in the room.
For visitors, the results will show up in familiar places: on the walls, in the guides they pick up at the desk, and in the questions museums ask them afterwards. For the people who write those labels and train the staff who give tours, it adds a budget line for work that is often done on short deadlines.
