Cards feature a detail of William Merritt Chase’s portrait of Lydia Field Emmett, with instructions.

In preparation, we discussed our learnings from previous themed tours and established a few small but important goals for the structure and promotion of this engagement activity. Specifically, we wanted to manage visitor expectations by specifying the tour location and keeping that area clearly defined (just one floor, in this case); indicating in advance what the format would be (i.e., texting/chatting); and offering the user a prompt word to send as their first message.

Our palm card for this new tour includes all the above information, succinctly stated, as well as a detail of a favorite painting from our American Art collections. For card handout, we’re concentrating on the fifth floor. Cards are displayed in a rack near the elevator that visitors are taking to reach that floor. The cards are also placed at the ticket check-in kiosk for Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion, where Visitor Experience ticketing staff can hand them out and explain them. Our ASK Ambassadors are also promoting the tour activity as they circulate around the Museum, of course!

Once a visitor begins the tour, the ten stops encompass works in a range of media from different locations and time periods, from a Chiriqui gold pendant (circa 1000-1500) to Luigi Lucioni’s portrait of artist Paul Cadmus (1927). For each one, the ASK team offers a few interesting facts, sometimes touching on past trends in cosmetics and grooming as well as costume history.

These women’s pant-suits were as edgy in the 1930s as Cardin’s unisex designs would be in the 1960s.

We can also make occasional parallels between historical clothing, jewelry, and accessories and Cardin’s designs, to complement users’ visits to that exhibition or to inspire them to check it out in the future.

So far, we’ve had some positive user response. One visitor thanked us by writing, “This has been terrific, a great interactive tour. Definitely encouraged me to look closer, which I do like and tend to do.” We’ll be tracking visitor use and reactions throughout the run of this exhibition, to be shared at a later date!

This was the message on palm cards that our ASK Ambassadors distributed to Museum visitors throughout June. As a special engagement activity for Pride Month, visitors could take an ASK-guided tour of our galleries and learn more about gender and queer identity in art. 

The card featured a detail of a work by Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, on view in the exhibition “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow.”

This tour could be taken as a complementary activity to the special exhibition Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall or as a standalone activity. And, as with all our ASK engagement offerings, we kept things responsive and personalized —every visitor could set their own pace and tone.

Visitors could begin their experience in the Museum lobby at a painting by Kehinde Wiley.

As we envisioned it, this app-guided tour would include a few very popular works from our collections (like Kehinde Wiley’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps) as well as some lesser-known works. They could be works by artists who identified as LGBTQ+, portraits of LGBTQ+ individuals, or works that touched on broader themes of gender identity.

The ASK Team collaborated to select ten works of art with a range of dates and media, from Donald Moffett’s Lot 043017 (Multiflora, Radiant Blue) to a coffin in the Ancient Egyptian collection, from Aaron Ben-Shmuel’s stone bust of Walt Whitman to Deborah Kass’s neon wall-piece After Louise Bourgeois. They compiled information about these works into a reference document and they strategized about giving directions to help the visitor navigate from stop to stop.

Elizabeth of the ASK Team tracked these tours (which accounted for about 22% of our app traffic) throughout June , and she noticed an interesting split. Visitors who began engaging with us on the Museum’s first floor were more likely to invest in the total tour experience, following our cues to visit works on the third, fourth, and fifth floors of the Museum. They often spent more than a half-hour with us for this itinerary.

Special labels with Pride flag icons were placed beside the “tour stops.”

Meanwhile, other visitors encountered individual works with our ASK Pride Month labels in the galleries and sent questions about them. These visitors were usually satisfied with learning about that particular work and might move one more stop nearby when we invited them to continue chatting. However, they were less interested in experiencing the complete tour.

The ASK Team also received a few requests from visitors who were ready to go even further. For example, when one visitor asked whether they could see anything by LGBTQ+ artists in the new special exhibition Rembrandt to Picasso: Five Centuries of European Works on Paper, we added a drawing by Rosa Bonheur to our list.

It’s been two years since we first tailored an ASK activity to a specific show or event, during Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, and we continue to learn from each iteration. Next up? An engagement option related to the special exhibition Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion. More about that soon!

The original cards for the ASK activity (right) had beautiful large images on the front that people wanted as souvenirs. We redesigned them (left) to be a little less appealing, with smaller images and more text.

The Kahlo exhibition opened on February 8 and ran for thirteen weeks. In mid-April, we made an adjustment to one of our engagement activities: we changed the palm cards that were being distributed to promote our Kahlo-related tours of the Museum’s collections. The new ones had smaller images with instructions on the front, and we hoped that visitors would use them to take the tours rather than see them just as free postcards.

Did it make a difference?

Yes and no. Visitors did realize more quickly that we were offering a gallery activity through these cards. And they did pause longer to read the explanatory wall text in connection with the cards. However, their awareness of the themed app tours didn’t necessarily translate into increased participation. We were busiest during the first three weeks of the show (with 20 to 30 tour-takers per week), but for the rest of its run, we averaged about 10 tour-takers per week. Many visitors still seemed more interested in collecting multiple cards as souvenirs than in taking an app-guided tour beyond the exhibition.

The “no photography” policy within the exhibition meant that visitors were looking for another way to remember their favorite works in the show. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado)

This particular problem is hard to analyze. Based on comments visitors made to our Ambassadors at the card rack, we have a sense that visitors sometimes saw the cards as compensation for the photography ban within the show and often came back to claim them when the exhibition shop was sold out of Kahlo postcards and greeting cards, due to high demand. Visitors wanted a takeaway image, any image, and our ASK palm cards’ potential as souvenirs far outweighed the potential appeal of their engagement content.

In the meantime, we were offering a second Kahlo engagement option! This was a hunt for Kahlo quotations posted throughout the Museum. To plan this game, the ASK team consulted our curators’ list of verified Kahlo quotes and chose fifteen, some of them humorous and some more introspective. They also gathered interesting, relevant facts about Kahlo to share for each quote.

Kahlo said, “The marvelous Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten, I imagine that besides having been extraordinarily beautiful, she must have been ‘a wild one’ and a most intelligent collaborator with her husband.”

These quotes were strategically placed on all five floors of the Museum, in public areas like elevators and in collection galleries where we juxtaposed them with works of art that had some kind of connection. For example, a quotation about painting flowers was placed near a panel of Ottoman tiles with a floral motif, and a short reflection on Nefertiti was placed near two depictions of the ancient Egyptian queen in our Amarna Period gallery.

Visitors learned about the quote hunt from our ASK Ambassadors or by encountering a quote with its instructions: “Text us snapshots of Kahlo quotes from around the Museum to win a special prize.” We asked visitors to locate 12 quotes, with the exception of Mondays and Tuesdays, when only the first floor of the Museum was open for the Kahlo exhibition. On those days, we asked visitors to find eight quotes on the first floor.

Some quotes were posted in public areas: in our cafe, in elevators, on glass exit doors.

Over the course of the exhibition, nearly 900 visitors started the quote tour and approximately 100 completed it. Many of them entered into the game with full enthusiasm, including selfies in front of the quotes they found and taking the opportunity to show off their own Kahlo t-shirts or tattoos. Every winner received a prize from our Shop, including mugs or colorful totes emblazoned with Kahlo’s likeness. Since the quotes were placed around the Museum rather than within the Kahlo exhibition itself, even visitors who didn’t have tickets to see Kahlo were able to participate.

Kahlo once said, “I have not regretted the things I have done.” While we might rethink our staging of the themed tour option for future exhibitions, we still think it’s a concept we should revisit, and we know that artist quotes (and games with prizes!) will continue to receive a positive response visitors.

We have more exhibitions to come soon, so I’ll be back in a couple of weeks to share some of our ASK engagement ideas for the summer!

We knew at the outset that we’d be working around one major restriction: photography is not permitted within this exhibition. We devised a pre-exhibition ASK activity (a trivia quiz) for David Bowie is last year, and this time we came up with a post-exhibition experience to prolong visitors’ post-Kahlo excitement.

With their usual flair and extensive knowledge of our collections, the ASK team collaborated on shaping four ASK-guided tours of the Museum. Each tour would direct the visitor to works that related to the main themes of Frida Kahlo, sharing interesting context and information at every “stop. The four tour themes would be Mexican identity, modernism, feminisms (works by women or works addressing themes of female identity), and “the art of the personal” (artist that draw upon autobiography in similar ways to Kahlo), and the visitor would pick their favorite card to get started. (We also assembled a tour limited to the Museum’s first floor, to offer on Mondays and Tuesdays when the rest of the building is closed.)

The four palm cards for our post-exhibition ASK experience offered a choice of four Kahlo images.

To create special materials for this exhibition activity, we selected four images of Kahlo from the exhibition checklist, and our Design colleagues crafted four palm cards to share with visitors. Each card featured a different image on the front, and the backs all included the same basic information (including our ASK texting number), in both English and Spanish.

Cards are prominently racked beside the exhibition exit, with instructional wall signage above.

Starting on the first day of the exhibition, the cards were displayed in a rack in the show’s exit space, near our “Frida selfie spot” and just below some ASK wall signage. An ASK Ambassador was stationed nearby to explain the activity, to assist with any technical issues, and to restock the cards when needed. We all agreed that the cards looked fantastic.

As it turned out, however, we’d created something a little too appealing. As visitors moved from the last gallery of the exhibition into the exit space, they spotted the cards from a distance and made a beeline for them. They were so focused on the cards, and on the goal of taking them as souvenirs, that they weren’t paying much attention to the accompanying wall signage or to the Ambassadors’ pitches. When the Ambassadors gently encouraged them to “choose your favorite card” (rather than multiples or all four designs), visitors wanted to know whether they could also buy the cards in our museum shop.

Redesigned palm cards feature smaller images and give more weight to promotional copy and instructions.

Back to the proverbial drawing board! I discussed a few options with our Design colleagues, and they came up with an alternative card design that presents a different overall appearance and foregrounds our engagement angle. The front of each card has a significantly smaller image with introductory text below it. The reverse of the card continues the instructions and offers the texting number.

Our Ambassadors found that visitors were more likely to read signage and listen to pitches after the cards were updated.

About a week ago, the Ambassadors began pitching with the new cards. Based on early feedback, there are still some pros and cons, but the cards’ purpose is now clearer. Visitors are quickly identifying them as “educational material” of some kind rather than apparent souvenirs. Gina, one of our Ambassadors, has noted, “Visitors aren’t approaching as aggressively with these new cards, which is great! They are instead reading a lot more as they approach—both the cards and the wall text. It seems like they are getting the idea that this is something to do rather than something to take.” She added, “The number of ‘Do you sell these in the gift shop’ inquiries have decreased a lot!”

Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving runs through May 12, so we we’ll be tracking our engagement rates for the final month of the show. We’ll report back on the results of the card switch as well as overall success of the two ASK-related activities associated with the exhibition.

The waiting area for the exhibition was never this empty.

From March through July 2018, the Brooklyn Museum was the home of the multimedia exhibition David Bowie is. It was the twelfth and final stop for this show, which originated at the Victoria & Albert in London five years earlier, and our curator Matthew Yokobosky expanded and reshaped it for its grand finale here.

Two specific things made this exhibition different for ASK. First, all visitors had to turn off their phones when they entered in order to eliminate signal interference with the immersive audio they’d be experiencing through headphones. (Furthermore, photography was not allowed.) Second, this exhibition had ticketed and timed entry.

Working around that first limitation—no app chats within the show itself —we figured that we’d make the most of the “captive audience” in the entry waiting area. We’d turn things around and ask visitors the questions by offering a Bowie trivia quiz.

The wall in in the waiting area featured this friendly challenge. How many Bowie fans would take us up on it?

This offering would be promoted through stanchion signs near the show entrance and by a prompt on the wall of the waiting space, where people would queue until their entry times. We limited it to our SMS/texting option to keep things simple.

Meanwhile, the ASK team compiled a trivia quiz with two levels, one for beginners and one for super-fans. (The initial two questions were the same, and acted as a “filter” to help us steer the user into one of those categories.) The questions ranged from mainstream (“Bowie acted throughout his career. Can you name a movie he appeared in?”) through more obscure (“Bowie performed in several bands before striking out on his own as a solo act. Can you name one?”). For each question, the team also prepared an extra fun fact or bit of “edutainment” to share after the correct answer.

As the exhibition began to sell out day after day, the waits to enter the galleries increased, and lines lengthened, we found that the number of chats was becoming too large for our team to handle. They received anywhere from 50 to 150 chats per day, and usually only two people were running the dashboard. Moreover, we’d guessed that most visitors would drop out after a few questions, but that wasn’t the case. Many of them were following the quiz to the end, through all nineteen questions. (Some of them would stop and then attempt to finish the quiz later, from home! However, we didn’t reply to those after-hours chats.)

Lines of visitors extended into the galleries for Arts of the Americas.

Now that we were victims of our own success, we tried to scale back somehow. We created a stanchion sign without any mention of the trivia quiz to use during peak hours, in order to minimize promotion, but visitors still noticed the wall prompt. Since the use rate showed no sign of dropping, we decided that the quiz process needed to be retooled behind the scenes. Our developer Jacki sat down with the ASK team and took a close look at our situation. She came up with a new feature to streamline the process of asking and answering questions (the same ones, over and over!) and, we hoped, make the process smoother and quicker.

Our developer created a dashboard that allowed the team to ask and answer questions by clicking “tiles.”

Although ASK normally avoids cutting-and-pasting text into our chats, in order to keep things feeling personal and fresh, we’d been making an exception for Bowie trivia—after all, it it was a straightforward quiz. The team members had been cutting-and-pasting questions, answers, and extra facts from their trivia spreadsheet. Now, instead of working from a separate document, they were able to stay within the ASK dashboard and conduct the quiz from an in-dashboard panel of buttons or “tiles.” These tiles could be clicked to populate the chat automatically with their text. Jacki even created an extra set of tiles with phrases like “Great answer!” and “That’s not quite right, would you like to try again?” to use as transitions.

With this feature, the pressure of handling such a large volume of quiz chats at such a high speed was eased a bit. Visitors expressed their enjoyment of the quiz and were often witty as well as knowledgeable in their answers. It was still a very busy time, but we’re glad we made those changes when we did, and we’ll be able to utilize the tiles feature for any future games or contests we might plan. And since an estimated 4,700 people participated in the Bowie trivia quiz (not counting the ones who attempted to play from home!), there’s a good chance we’ll do something similar in the future if a good opportunity presents itself!

The Brooklyn Museum has a large audience of school-age visitors and their accompanying adults. Scavenger hunts have turned out to be an easy and dynamic way to engage them.

Last June, our colleagues in the Education Division invited ASK to participate in the annual “Bring the Cool” Family Festival, a day-long event organized in collaboration with local non-profit Cool Culture. The festival includes art-making activities and creative play for young children and their families, and it’s always a lot of fun, so we were happy to join in.

Since this year’s festival theme was “Color My World,” we put together a scavenger hunt with eight stops around our American Art galleries. We wrote a set of eight simple color-themed clues for eight varied works in the collection, from a Coclé gold disk embossed with a face to a nineteenth-century Brooklyn landscape painting. When users downloaded the app at the hunt’s starting point, we could guide them exclusively through our ASK exchange in either English or Spanish. We invited them to send photos of the works and to share personal answers to related questions.

The kids who tried the scavenger hunt seemed to enjoy it so much that we thought it was something we should try again. Meanwhile, as we moved into the summer and schools let out for vacation, our ASK Ambassadors reported an increasing number of museum visitors asking for “something to do with children” during their visit.  Responding quickly to this seasonal shift in attendance, the ASK team invited younger children to try the American hunt but also started compiling clues for favorite objects around the rest of the Museum.

Attendance was high in “Georgia O’Keeffe: Modern Living” during the summer and the ASK team came up with rhyming clues to interest young visitors in the show.

These family- and child-oriented chats turned out to be really popular. We chatted frequently with young museumgoers in the special exhibitions “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” and “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Woman 1965-85” as well as the permanent galleries for Ancient Egyptian Art, Decorative Arts, and more.

As the opening date for the fall exhibition “Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt” approached, we were hearing more and more conversation around the Museum about ways to engage families and children with this show. We offered to create a hunt itinerary specifically for “Soulful Creatures,” focusing even more on providing interesting educational facts as follow-ups to the clues.

Several children of staff members took time from a summer afternoon to test an early version of our “Soulful Creatures” hunt in the Egyptian galleries.

Since “Soulful Creatures” wasn’t installed yet, we decided to “beta-test” our script in the permanent Egyptian galleries, with the valuable assistance of several staff members’ children. These young volunteers did a run-through of the hunt and chatted with us afterwards. They gave extremely helpful feedback about the instructions they’d received, the difficulty level of the questions, and the choice and spacing of the objects. They also had some great questions about ASK in general, and we took notes for any future project involving younger visitors.

Each object has a clue as well as facts to share once the user locates it.

When “Soulful Creatures” opened on September 29, we were ready to go. The ASK team had selected ten objects in the show and written a script with two sets of clues, one for beginner readers (about ages 4-7) and one for more advanced learners (ages 8-11), as well as entertaining facts to share about each object once the user had located it. Our ASK Ambassadors were prepared to pitch the hunt to visitors entering the show and to provide assistance with downloads and getting started.

So far, we’ve guided young “mummy-hunters” ranging in age from four through twelve years old, and almost half the hunts have included two or more children together. Some users completed all ten clues, while others (depending on available time or attention span) were satisfied after finding four or five works. Our Visitor Services department is also offering a family packet for this exhibition, so various options are available for kids—we’ve just asked our ASK Ambassadors to pitch the ASK hunt only to families who haven’t already taken advantage of the packet.

We’re often happily surprised when our young users include themselves in their  “I found it!” photos.

Like all our work, this process of shaping and expanding ASK scavenger hunts has been a team project, and it’s turned out to be a team favorite as well as a popular option with visitors. We’ll be thinking about new hunt ideas for the new year as we continue to connect with some of our youngest museum visitors.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” was immediately well-attended, but not many visitors were using ASK in the show.

When we realized that we weren’t reaching as many visitors to Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern as we’d like to, we thought about ways to pique their interest about the app. One solution? A contest.

We tested this concept in early May and began running it on a weekly basis after our recent pilot testing.

We promoted our app contest with these cards featuring the cover of the exhibition publication.

The ASK Ambassadors have been handing out dedicated flyers explaining the contest: visitors are encouraged to make their own “creative connections” within the exhibition, by choosing pairs of objects that share an idea or a visual motif. They send photos of the two objects, with a brief explanation for their choice (and their email address, in case they win and we need to contact them!). The prize is a free copy of the Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern publication, an incentive that seems to entice visitors to give the contest a try.

Behind the scenes, the ASK Team compiles the entries and chooses a weekly winner. To guide the process, we’ve established a set of criteria. A winning entry should do several of the following things:

1. Connect works in different media (e.g., a photograph and a garment)
2. Connect works from different galleries
3. Connect works from different decades or eras in O’Keeffe’s life
4. Go beyond the pairs already staged in the exhibition by our curators
5. Offer a thoughtful or even humorous explanation.

Some contest entries were straightforward visual comparisons, like this early fashion illustration by O’Keeffe paired with a late photograph of the artist.

So far, we’ve had an average of 25 entrants per week. Even though we’re very familiar with the exhibition at this point, some of the object pairs have truly surprised us! Entrants have made comparisons that are formal, biographical, or thematic—or more than one of the above.

This contest entry made a more subtle analogy between two objects created by O’Keeffe, the ruffled decoration on a blouse and the forms of a painted flower: “The pin tucks in her blouse and the tonal shadings so elegantly reflect the painting.”

We’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s clever and enthusiastic entries, and it’s always fun to notify a person that they’ve been chosen as the week’s top pick. So far, our winners have come from California, New Jersey, Vermont, Manhattan, and our own borough of Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, the first week of the contest doubled our app traffic in this exhibition, and as the contest has continued, there are weeks when more than half our total chats are coming from the O’Keeffe galleries.

This visitor wrote, “These two both have a living flower next to something *not* living that O’Keeffe could see from her window.”

Even in everyday app chats, we like hearing what our users have to say about art, and this contest has offered a more focused situation for them to share their ideas—while once again proving the appeal of contests, games, and creative challenges.

Before last April, chats in the American art galleries tended to cluster around a few key artworks. Any of the ASK team members could have recited a list of the most “frequently asked about” works: Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie and the adjacent contemporary painting, Valerie Hegarty’s Fallen Bierstadt; Gilbert Stuart’s full-length portrait of George Washington; Francis Guy’s Winter Scene in Brooklyn; John Koch’s The Sculptor; and Aaron Gilbert’s The New One.

Sara recently blogged about ASK gallery labels and their ability to spark app usership, and some of those objects were indeed labeled with ASK prompts: the Bierstadt and the Koch, for example. And as I discussed in my own recent post, large works often catch ASK users’ eyes. Bierstadt’s spectacular landscape is large, and so is Francis Guy’s quieter Brooklyn view.

Koch’s The Sculptor is not only a large-scale canvas, it also features a nude male figure and an enigmatic narrative. Aaron Gilbert’s The New One isn’t particularly imposing in size, nor did it have an ASK label, but its slightly surreal imagery consistently raised questions in visitors’ minds.

Last April, the overall number of paintings and sculptures in the American art galleries was pared down, so that works are given more room to “breathe,” and the galleries were painted off-white or a single, muted color rather than combinations of colors. Various decorative elements and multimedia interpretive materials were also removed.

These changes have affected our app traffic for certain objects. For example, an Edward Hopper cityscape titled Macomb’s Dam Bridge that was previously hung above two other works in an alcove-like space (left image) is now installed at eye level (right image). We rarely received any questions about it before April 2016, but now it appears in chats more regularly.

In fact, the ASK team used to say amongst themselves that visitors just didn’t have any questions about still lifes and quiet landscapes, but this theory no longer holds. Our beautiful examples of mid-1800s still life painting used to hang on an angled freestanding wall in a dark area. Now that they’re installed on a longer wall with a lighter paint color and better lighting, they’re frequent subjects of app chats. Were they just overlooked in their previous location?

The Luminist landscapes (top row before and after) and still lifes (bottom row, before and after) now get a chance to shine.

The same thing happened with a grouping of nineteenth-century Luminist landscapes. They used to hang in a small gallery with multiple wall colors, next to a doorway that offered a sight line to the Bierstadt landscape. No one ever asked about these tranquil small-scale landscapes before, but now they regularly appear in app chats. Are they easier to spot now that they’re no longer competing with Mt. Rosalie? One of them, Francis Silva’s The Hudson at the Tappan Zee, also has an ASK label, which probably boosts interest for that particular painting.

Speaking of competition, we have a hunch that the absence of video monitors and sound effects in the galleries also gives more visitors more mental space to focus on smaller or less dramatic works and to use the app. There are just fewer sensory attractions—or distractions, depending on your point of view.

And what about old favorites The Sculptor and The New One? Well, The New One is currently off view, but The Sculptor is hanging in our restaurant, The Norm, where people frequently ask to be seated near it. So it’s still popular in its new context; some things never change!

The ASK team spent several weeks preparing for this show using our regular methods. We got our hands on an advance copy of the catalogue; we watched a documentary about the artist; we built a wiki around the exhibition checklist, adding further information about many objects so that we could go “beyond the label” in our chats. Within a week or so, we’d already noticed certain patterns in app use in this exhibition. 

Patterns in the ways visitors are using the app in the exhibition emerged pretty quickly including using the prompt questions (left), sending photos only (center), and savvy questions relating to the themes of the show (right).

We’d written several ASK “prompt questions” to be placed on labels throughout the show (about one per gallery), to serve as starting points for broader discussion about major themes of the exhibition. Some visitors immediately notice those questions and type them out for us, ready for answers. (Sara discussed this phenomenon in her last post.)

Conversely, some visitors have been shaping their own experience of the show by using ASK as a self-guided tour. They send photos of works that interest them, usually without questions, and an ASK Team member provides relevant information.

Some visitors are ready to jump into sophisticated discussion of the exhibition’s key themes, as conveyed by the didactics and object groupings: the unified modernist aesthetic of O’Keeffe’s art and life (and attire!), her deliberate self-presentation as a rejection of gendered readings that were imposed on her work, and her careful control of her public identity through the many portraits that she posed for.

We were surprised by the number of basic questions about O’Keeffe we receive. We were expecting more O’Keeffe aficionados.

We had expected O’Keeffe fans to show up and dig deeper into this material, but we were more surprised by the number of visitors who showed up without any specific knowledge of the artist—for a show that requires a special ticket, no less.

Within a day or two of the show’s opening, the ASK Team was fielding questions like “What is she known for?” or “Why is she famous?” These very basic inquiries encouraged us all to step back and use our own preparation to introduce them to the artist and her work.

Biographical questions have continued to roll in:

• “Where exactly was she born?”
• “What was her childhood like?”
• “How tall was she?”
• “Did she have kids?”
• “Was she a spiritual person?”
• “Did she have a lot of dogs?” (Yes, incidentally!)

And, of course, everyone loves a little gossip.

Visitors really connect with O’Keeffe as a independent woman and artist.

One of the most satisfying aspects of chatting about “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” has been the personal responses to O’Keeffe’s self-created image as an independent woman and artist. Newcomers and O’Keeffe aficionados alike seem to identify with this issue. For example, when one ASK team member sent a quote from O’Keeffe—““The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters”—the visitor replied with her own experience:

Another visitor closed a chat by texting, “I feel like I’m getting such a clear sense of what kind of person she was.” For the ASK Team, this kind of remark is particularly rewarding. It means that they’re successfully conveying the curator’s thesis for this exhibition in a way that is specific and meaningful for the visitors. O’Keeffe herself would likely approve!