Gallery Interpretation Spaces

Photo by JKA Photography

Gallery Interpretation

Gallery Interpretation Spaces

Answering the questions that visitors have while visiting art museums is one of the biggest challenges for any museum. The sheer number of visitors who range widely in age, cultural background and level of expertise results in millions of possible questions each year. SJMA’s solution is to build environments that are maximally responsive to the ways that we learn. By designing interpretive strategies that engage the visitor and by ensuring that the necessary components to facilitate learning are in place, we create space where visitors have the opportunity to answer their own questions. Through the creative use of technology, interpretation stations, and in-person contact with docents and museum experience representatives, the MEE Department implements a constructivist approach to learning.

SJMA is committed to creating meaningful and relevant experiences for all its visitors.

We achieve this by: • increasing the choices for what visitors experience and learn in the galleries to ensure that our visitors never feel intimidated, alienated, or out of place; • creating environments and conditions for engagement and inquiry, in which adults and children naturally enjoy learning; • increasing the variety and accessibility of information available to visitors to accommodate different learning styles; • creating vehicles for a continuous dialogue between the Museum and its visitors in order to let visitors reflect on and share their ideas about the art; • designing gallery environments and convocation spaces that are based on current audience research and feedback in order to ensure that the Museum accommodates visitor needs; • designing gallery environments that foster looking and first-hand experience of original art objects, regardless of familiarity with the subject matter; • recognizing that the content and context of the exhibition influences the design of the gallery environment in order to ensure that the visitors form connections among the artists, images, ideas, processes, and creative experiences; • recognizing that our Museum exists because artists have experiences that inspire them to make works of art and visitors have the opportunity to share in that experience.

Share Your Journey

Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return September 14, 2018–April 7, 2019

Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return highlighted the artist’s ongoing experimentation in narrative and storytelling, focusing on multimedia documentary video and found photography installations that capture stories seemingly on the verge of being erased from historical memory. In this space we honored memory, history, and identity and invited vistiors to share their stories in our community journal. We asked, "What are the moments or memories in your life that shaped who you are today? We all have a story to tell, what’s yours?"

Viet Stories

Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return September 14, 2018–April 7, 2019

Oral histories teach us about past events through the first-hand experiences of people who have lived through them. This space includes interview quotes and videos produced by Viet Stories: Vietnamese Oral History Project at the University of California, Irvine. The project captures oral histories of first-generation Vietnamese Americans who have memories of life in Vietnam, the Vietnam War, and the displacement and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam.

Take a walk. Leave a walk

Other Walks, Other Lines November 2, 2018–March 10, 2019

Visitors added descriptions, drawings, and/or GPS coordinates of their favorite meaningful/ cathartic/exciting/purposeful walk to the map of the Bay Area Ridge Trail and grew the crowdsourced walks. Visitors could review pinned walks left by others and take one to experience themselves. The crowdsourced walks were provided inspiration for exploring Other Walks, Other Lines in one’s own life.

Rina Banerjee Art Learning Lab

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World April 9, 2019–October 6, 2019

Artist Rina Banerjee's unusally long and poetic titles are an important part of her work. SJMA collaborated with the New York-based design studio Dome on an interactive sound experience that used RFID technology. Inspired by Banerjee's titles, visitors built their own sequence of words into an audio version of magnetic poetry, translated in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Visitors also explored Banerjee’s use of material (materials wall, video viewer and materials shelf) and played with language using magnetic words based on titles in the exhibition. In the Koret Learning Lab, visitors are encouraged to make observations, ask questions, and participate in creative experimentation.