3 Ways Visual Storytelling Can Help Museums Drive More Visits

Museums have been telling visual stories through careful curation for many years. In this sense, visual storytelling is not a new concept. Think back to the last time you went to a museum—you likely passed through rooms that were each dedicated to a certain time period or geographic location.

However, we are no longer limited to telling stories by placing like objects next to each other. Multimedia experiences broaden the possibilities for storytelling, breaking apart the distinctions that traditional museums often place between artifacts, art, sculpture, music, oral storytelling and film.

We have gathered three inspiring case studies of museums and projects that are using visual storytelling in new ways to attract visitors and enliven the museum going experience.

Juxtaposition And Reimagining The Museum: The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, is building a nonprofit museum in Los Angeles that will be the first of its kind, designed to break apart divisions between fine art and popular art in order to show the universal power of narrative art.

Founding president Don Bacigalupi explains what narrative art is:

“Narrative art is visual art that tells a story. It manifests itself in every kind of medium, in every culture, in every form that you can imagine.”

In other words, narrative art isn't confined to one place or time, and neither are the galleries at the Lucas Museum. The museum aims to use visual storytelling to challenge the idea that art museums must be stuffy and sequential. To achieve this, the gallery spaces will bring together narrative painting, illustrations, photography, film, animation and digital art. The juxtaposition will be playful and evocative—you might encounter a 19th-century European painting next to a 21st-century Manga drawing.

The layout emphasizes the idea that art can powerfully reflect universal experiences. While a piece of art on its own might seem antiquated to present-day museumgoers, visual storytelling and careful curation can make the art more accessible and reveal its immediate relevance.

It will be a bit of a wait until you get to experience this innovative museum in person. Construction is set to begin in early 2019 and the museum is expected to open in 2021. In the meantime, Lucas’ vision for the museum can encourage us to be attentive our own methods of visual storytelling and consider new ways to put pieces in conversation with each other and with the visitor.

In your own museum, you could take inspiration from Lucas' dedication to visual storytelling by reconsidering how your collection layout functions. What are the most popular exhibits, and what makes them intriguing? Lucas' idea of juxtaposition in the museum – placing surprising and unexpected collections together – might be a great way to breath life into older exhibits which the public tends to pass by.

Making A Statement Through Art: Cornelia Parker’s Anti-Mass (2005) Making A Statement Through Art: Cornelia Parker’s Anti-Mass (2005)

Making A Statement Through Art: Cornelia Parker’s Anti-Mass (2005)

Cornelia Parker’s haunting installation piece at the de Young museum in San Francisco uses the power of physical objects to evoke memory and tell a story in a vastly different way than a painting, film or photograph could.

Anti-Mass, an entangled web of charcoal and wire, seems at first abstract and chaotic. The installation draws you in, inviting you to look closer and see that it is made from hundreds of fragments of burned wood, strung from wire and brought into order as a cube hanging in mid-air.

Anti-Mass consists of the charred remains of a Southern Baptist church in Alabama. The church was burned to the ground by a group of white nationalists who were targeting the predominantly African American congregation.

While Cornelia Parker is not African American, her work is usually politically charged and often takes on the topic of social justice. She frequently works in large-scale installations such as Anti-Mass. Parker explains her method for creating installations of “exploded” objects in this 2015 interview with Bloomberg":

The work’s physicality forces the viewer to reflect on the remains themselves—how these charred fragments were once a church where people gathered in community and supported one another—and the racism-fueled violence of the arsonists. It is also interesting to imagine Parker visiting the site and collecting the wood with her own hands, and to realize the ashes from a Southern church have traveled across the country to speak to people in San Francisco.

Anti-Mass demonstrates that museums can embrace visual experiences that tackle contemporary issues—even violent ones. Parker’s installation uses visual storytelling to explore the continued problem of racism in America, as well as the power of art to bring together what was broken apart by violence. Museums do not have to invest in installation pieces on such a large scale in order to tell powerful visual stories. Look around your own community for artists who are using unconventional methods of visual storytelling, and invite them to add their voices to your collection.

Turning A Marketing Campaign Into An Exhibit: #HowDoYouMuseum

The Natural History Museum in Los Angeles launched a highly successful marketing campaign in 2015 based on the hashtag #HowDoYouMuseum.

The museum wanted to generate visual content from visitors and museum staff to tell stories of how people interact with the exhibits, and what attracts people to museums.

The verbiage for the campaign is clever, changing the word “museum” from a noun (a place) to a verb that cues visitors to act. And descriptors like “co-create” suggest that a visitor’s museum experience is in itself a creative expression, a story worth sharing.

It may be a bit meta, but the museum’s project has been wildly successful because it is more than a marketing campaign. Sure, the hashtag encourages visitors to come to the museum, but it also gathers a community of museumgoers who are all eager to share what they find exciting about museums.

The hashtag acts like a living exhibit, telling the stories of visitors through Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and Facebook. The museum’s online exhibition shares stories from a range of Los Angeles personalities, from a chef to a science communicator to actor Will Ferrell.

Museums across the world have picked up the hashtag #HowDoYouMuseum to gather stories about what people find relevant in their collections. Even in Canada at the Coquitlam Heritage Museum in British Columbia, museum directors are picking up this hashtag to start conversations with the public about interesting pieces in their collections.

You can adopt this hashtag too—or you can find your own way to encourage visitors to share their museum stories in highly visible ways. Plus, collecting their experiences will help you get a sense of what people find interesting at your museum and how they interact with your exhibits.

Conclusion

While these three case studies are very particular to their own institutions, the ideas behind each project reveal opportunities that other museums can utilize to attract visitors. Museums have tremendous social influence, so it is important to continuously rethink how to remain relevant and inspire visitors new and old.

Visual storytelling projects are a creative and powerful way of reaching people across all demographics. If you’re interested in injecting visual storytelling into your museum, get in touch with us today or sign up and give Codex a try on your own. We’re making it easier for museums to share their story in a compelling way without a single line of code. Check it out!