Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown. I'm here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience and bring art objects and ideas to life. So let's dive into this week's show. Hello and welcome back to the Art Engager podcast. I'm Claire Bown, and today we're exploring what it takes to design and lead guided experiences in places shaped by powerful and complex figures from the past.
I'm joined by Brandon Dillard, director of historic interpretation and audience engagement at Monticello in Virginia. And Kelsie Paul, director of Learning and Visitor Experience at the Frick Pittsburgh. Monticello is the historic home of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and principal author of The Declaration of Independence. It is also a site where hundreds of people were enslaved during his lifetime.
Clayton at the Frick Pittsburgh was the home of industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, whose wealth was built in coal and steel and whose name, particularly in Pittsburgh, remains closely associated with a violent labor conflict in the late 19th century. In our conversation, we look at how both institutions have reimagined their guided experiences in response to those complicated legacies.
Brandon traces the long evolution of interpretation at Monticello, including how the history of slavery and Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemmings moved from the margins of their tour to the center of it. Kelsie shares the redesign of Clayton's longstanding house tour into what is now called 'Gilded, Not Golden'.
I also had the chance to experience this tour for myself when I was in Pittsburgh last year, and she talks about the process, one that involved research advisory, input, community response, and a great deal of conversation within the organization.
We talk about moving from lecture style guiding to facilitating dialogue and conversations about hiring for empathy and investing seriously in guide training about supporting guides to navigate disagreement, and about what it means to hold space for complexity when visitors sometimes with sharply opposing perspectives, share the same room. Brandon and Kelsie also speak honestly about what it took to make those changes.
The many long internal conversations, the resistance they encountered, the restructuring of teams, and the recognition that this work is never finished. Finally, we also reflect on how this work sits within the present moment. In 2026, the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and institutions like Monticello are thinking carefully about what that milestone asks of them.
So if you are working with complicated histories, thinking about redesigning a tour or reflecting on the civic role of museums in times of polarization, I think you'll find lots and lots of useful insights in this episode. Enjoy. Hi, Kelsie and Brandon, welcome to The Art Engager Podcast.
Thank you for having us.
So I wonder if you could both briefly introduce yourselves and where you are working. Let's start with Brandon, and then we'll move to Kelsie.
Sure. My, my name is Brandon Dillard and I am the director of Historic Interpretation and Audience Engagement at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, which is in Central Virginia. It's a historic house museum and plantation. And Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States and the author of the American Declaration of Independence.
I've been here for 16 years and I've done all kinds of jobs over those 16 years, but my role now is to really help the institution think about how we talk about the past. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about audiences and how people think about public memory and how people think about history. I'm also, from the American South, from a long line of American southern storytellers.
I'm a enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation, so my whole life has been spent thinking about identity and memory and race and what that means, and just to really, uh, prove that I actually mean that I'm interested in all that stuff, i'm also back in school yet again. I took two gap decades over my educational career, but I'm working on a PhD at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in American Studies with a focus on indigenous memory and public history.
I am Kelsie Paul. I am the Director of Learning and Visitor Experience at the Frick Pittsburgh. We are a museum campus on the east end of, Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Uh, we have a lot going on over there. We're about a 10 acre campus. We have three museums.
Um, we have an art museum, a car and carriage museum, and then our Historic House Museum, which is Clayton, which was the historic home of Henry Clay Frick, who was a well-known industrialist in Pittsburgh during the gilded age of the second half of the 19th century. And so we interpret a lot of different things. But for the purpose of our conversation today, I'll primarily be talking about our work in Clayton. As the director of Learning at the Frick.
I oversee all of the educational programming and initiatives on our site. I have an incredible team that helps me do that. Um, we program for learners all the way from the teeny tiny pre-K all the way up to senior adults. And that also includes our interpretation program. So. I'm fairly new to my role as the department head, but I've been in the education department for the full eight and a half years that I've been at the Frick.
And before this I was, our manager of interpretation, which meant that I directly oversaw our, oversaw our interpretive programs and initiatives. I trained and hired all of our guides, our front facing interpreters, and I was the program lead for the project that created our current public tour offering in Clayton, which we call 'Gilded, Not Golden'. And you'll probably hear me talk a lot about today.
Um, and, uh, you know, like Brandon, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about how we make the past accessible to the people of the present, um, how we make that feel relevant to our current lives. And how we just have more honest conversations about the complexities of the past. Um, and that is a big part of what we do in Clayton and guides a lot of our thinking across our campus.
Thank you both for introducing yourselves so wonderfully there. I have to say that I met you both last year, May, 2025 at the American Alliance Museums Conference. You did a fantastic presentation there, um, called In the Shadow of Imperfect Men. I seem to recall. And the theme of that conference was about trust. So you know, the ideas that museums are these amazingly trusted institutions and how we can kind of continue to grow that trust or get it back when it's lost.
And I think for your presentation you talked about how you kind of engender that trust with your audience, your public. And especially when the name of your institution and the subjects of your interpretation have a bit of a complicated legacy. Now. I'd love to talk about that today in terms of your guided programs. So maybe we could start by talking about and giving a little bit of an introduction to the individuals at your respective sites. So Brandon, would you like to go first?
I think there's probably, uh, no one in the lexicon of American letters or the historic figures of the United States who gets people to be more involved in a conversation about contested history than Thomas Jefferson. Uh, obviously I'm biased about that because I've worked here for such a long time, but Thomas Jefferson, he was the author of the American Declaration of Independence.
He wrote the National Creed for the United States, and he is so well known and largely regarded for his political messaging. You know, this man, his rhetoric said that government should be representative. It should be for the people, and it should be based on human rights, and that that is a rhetoric that is laudable and that we have aspired towards for 250 years. Thomas Jefferson was also an enslaver. He kept more than 600 human beings captive throughout the course of his life.
Monticello itself was a place where those enslaved people were forced to labor for the benefit of his white family. And Jefferson wrote about slavery. He called it wrong, but Jefferson also wrote about the differences of people based on the colors of their skin. He wrote about his suspicions about a racial hierarchy, and of course, Jefferson was also responsible for some of the first early musings about legal policy in the United States that would dispossess native peoples of their land.
So it's really complicated. Um, people have a lot of different ideas about who Jefferson was and who they want Jefferson to be. And so people come here and on the same tour, we will have people who are there because they adore Thomas Jefferson, love Thomas Jefferson, and they, they want to hear this story about what a great hero he was. At the same time, we'll have people who hate Thomas Jefferson and they're not there to hear about him.
They're there to hear about the lives of the people who were held in bondage on the plantation. And we've spent the last several decades making sure that we elevate the stories of enslaved people. We talk about the Hemmings family, the Hubbard family, the herns, the faucets, and more. And then there's a whole host of people who are like Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, he was important. He did something. I'm not sure what, maybe he invented the light bulb. Maybe he wrote the Constitution. I don't know.
I got dragged here and I'm here. Uh, and that's, that's okay too, right? We wanna make sure that everybody who's there gets something outta the experience. And we've been doing a lot of survey work for a long time. And one of the things that we also know about the people who visit our site is that on any given program, about half the people will self-identify as liberal, and half of them will self-identify as conservative.
And in a moment of intensely divisive politics in the United States of America, where the algorithm of our online lives is increasingly putting us in echo chambers. This kind of in-person activity with people who you disagree with fundamentally politically, is increasingly rare. And so not only is it about the ideas of the past and the public memory, and I would argue this is always true, it is also about. The world in which we live and the world that we hope to create for the future.
And we are trying to make sure that when people come with all those different ideas, we can have a fruitful conversation together that is honest, complicated, and nuanced.
And Kelsie, would you like to talk a little bit about, the Frick and, uh, about the complicated individuals associated with it?
Yes. We have our own complicated man, who is kind of at the center of our story. So, but a man that I think is more regionally recognized than perhaps nationally recognized. You know, Henry Clay Frick. Some people might recognize him as an art collector. If you've been to the Frick Collection in New York City, you might recognize him in that context. Um, but in Pittsburgh, Frick's name is synonymous with industry.
He was one of many leading industrialists who made their home and made their start in Pittsburgh in the second half of the 19th century. He made his fortune primarily in Coke, which is a byproduct of coal. Um, and then segued that into the steel industry. Worked with Andrew Carnegie, and the complexity of his legacy in Pittsburgh really relates to his relationship to labor. Pittsburgh is still largely a blue collar town and steel is still synonymous with our city's identity.
There's a reason our football team is called the Steelers, right? And so even though the steel making landscape looks quite different in Pittsburgh than it did at its height, during the Gilded Age Frick's name is still synonymous with that, and in particular, a particularly violent and bloody and contentious labor dispute that took place in the summer of 1892.
And so in previous iterations of our tours of Clayton Frick's family home, which we ran for about 30 years, somewhat unchanged, that was part of the story, but it was certainly not the center of the story. The idea with previous tours of Clayton was that, hey, this is this guy's family home. We're gonna interpret this as a family home. We're gonna talk about him as a family man and the lives of his family here. Um. It was not a focus on his professional life.
When we redid our Clayton tour, we realized that had to change. And partially why that had to change was because we got very valid. You wanna call it critique, you wanna call it just response from primarily folks in our community and in Pittsburgh at large that said, I'm not interested in hearing what Henry Clay Frick's fancy life was like, right? I am, I'm not interested in that. I wanna understand why this guy did what he did, and I wanna understand what that means for us more at large.
And so we realized that we needed to be taking that head on. And so, our tour now, which we call 'Gilded, Not Golden'. Really seeks to contextualize frick, right? We're trying to understand who Henry Clay Frick was, but also who he was within the industrial capitalist system that was growing and being born at the end of the 19th century, which we're all still living in now and is very relevant to our lives now.
And so, we have reworked the way that we interpret Frick to have more of those honest conversations with our visitors to say yes, let's talk about Frick as a family man. Let's talk about what was happening with inside the walls of this family's home in the summer of 1892. But let's make sure that we're also talking about what was happening publicly. Let's talk about the decisions that Henry Clay Frick made and the ripple effect of those decisions all the way to the present day.
And then we sort of give our visitors the space to say, you get to feel however you want to feel about that. It's not our responsibility to force you to make a moral judgment on Frick or on the people of the past in general. Our responsibility is to tell you as complete of a story as we can, um, and then you decide how you wanna make meaning of that and how you wanna sort of bring that into your understanding of the past. And that, that was a big shift for us over the last four to five years.
Um, but it's a shift that has largely been very welcomed. We have seen our audience and Clayton grow as a result of it. And by and large, we have people who are telling us, Hey, thank you for having these more honest conversations and helping me to understand him. We still have some people who say, you're being really harsh on the guy whose name is on the front of your building. And to that we say we're not trying to be harsh.
We're trying to be honest, and we're trying to have a more complex conversation about the totality of who he was as a person rather than just one aspect of it.
And given the complex and complicated histories of both of those individuals and the fact that you've mentioned Brandon, you were mentioning that, you know, you can have people in your guided tours who have very opposing views on the same subject. And Kelsie, you were talking about the fact that you wanted to move away from a certain kind of content delivery of a certain view, a certain perspective of Frick's life.
And I'd really love to kind of dig into the process behind re-imagining your guided experiences, because I'm sure some of the things you're talking about will resonate with lots of people listening . So can you tell me a little bit about the process? What were the sort of questions that were guiding you early on?
We are about, I would say at this point we're about five years into this process. The real watershed moment for us was 2020, and that's for a couple of different reasons. Certainly it had to do with the pandemic. The fact that we had, you know, we had to shut our doors like everyone else did. It gave us a moment to kind of pause and reflect on the work that we had been doing.
But 2020 was also an interesting reflective point for us as an institution because it was the 30th anniversary year of Clayton being open to the public. And so it was a natural time for us to just sort of be looking back at what we had done and thinking about what we wanted to do in the next 30.
Um, but really what it came down to was as the pandemic was starting to wind down and we were starting to think about what reopening our campus was going to look like, and particularly what reopening Clayton to the public was gonna look like. It felt impossible to us to just open the house back up and just go back to the way that we had been doing things for 30 years.
And when I, what I mean by that is that it felt disingenuine given all of the conversations that, you know, people were having about social justice and reform and the way we talk about race and the way that we talk about our past and our country and all of these things. It felt disingenuous to us to open that house back up and just go back to talking about the fancy furniture in this house. And to be talking about this rich family in the 19th century.
We felt like we weren't, we couldn't do that. And so we actually kept Clayton closed longer than the rest of the campus. The rest of the campus opened up and we kept Clayton closed. And it gave us the opportunity to start having these conversations. And so the decision was made to sort of take our previous iteration, our original iteration of the Clayton Public Tour and basically throw it out the window and start from scratch. Um, and, we started the process.
We eventually were lucky and lucky enough to get some grant funding to help us kind of take that work to the next level, which allowed us to hire, um, two incredible interpretive consultants Michelle Moon and Rainey Tisdale to come in and help us guide our thinking because as a staff, we had never done something like that before. Um, we assembled an advisory board of, I think. 12 to 14 scholars, historians, artists, writers, museum professionals, to help us with our thinking.
And then we just started going out into the museum community and reaching out to people who were working at sites that we admired for their interpretation. Brandon is included in that group. And we just started talking about what was possible. And alongside that, we had some really difficult but honest conversations with our staff internally, particularly the people who were, giving our tours, about why this was necessary and why this change needed to happen.
That was a difficult process, and those conversations happened over the course of about two years over and over and over again. And that was probably the hardest part of the process. Um, and to give some extra context, at the time that we started this, we had about 40 part-time tour guides who were giving tours in Clayton, some of whom had been there for 10, 15, 20 years. And so we were asking them to suddenly do something fundamentally different than what they had been hired to do.
And of course, we couldn't tell them what the end was gonna look like, right? We were in the middle of it. I couldn't tell them what the end result was going to be. And so it was a leap of faith on their part that I fully feel I have to recognize. As the process developed, some of those folks recognized that where we were going was not. For them and they chose to leave. Um, others stuck around and had had to relearn how to be a tour guide.
Giving a tour, um, now in Clayton is a totally different experience than it what it was before. They had to learn, not only new content and new ways of telling stories, but they had to learn how to be facilitators, not just lecturers. And that was probably the hardest part of this process. Um, but yeah, it took us about two years to get the tour to where we wanted it to go.
We launched it in May of 2023, and then really considered it in a prototype phase for about a year where we were still trying things out. We were still adjusting things. Yeah, I mean the work is never done. Also we're always reevaluating it and we're always checking in to make sure that it's still resonating. Um, but it was a long process, but worth it in the end.
Brandon, do you wanna jump in there and tell us about your experiences?
Sure. And I wanna begin with a couple of caveats. The first is that there is never a moment of my professional career that I do not understand the great privilege of the size of the organization where I work, and the funding for that organization. And, our longevity is, uh, for a historic house museum. You know, we've been here since 1923. We've been offering tours for more than a century, so obviously over a hundred years. That has changed quite a bit.
And, uh, the second is just to say that I stand on the shoulders of giants. Like there is no way that I would have been able to fall into the great work that I get to do if it hadn't been for literally generations of people prior to me ever coming here who have been dedicating their lives to making sure that this story was told in a way that was engaging and complex. So that being said I want to underscore something that Kelsie just said, which is that the work is never done.
And I think even though Monticello has been doing this for a hundred years, and we have changed our programming quite a bit, especially over the last three, four decades, it never stops. And one of the pillars of our strategic plan, one of our organizational values is continuous improvement, right? That's built into who we are as an institution. So it's constant. And you know, I mentioned survey work earlier. I believe evaluation is a big piece of that.
But to, to tell the, the key changes in monticello's interpretive history. Some of it started way before I was even born. Uh, the first tour guides at Monticello, they were African American men. They worked for gratuities.
And there's a long, complicated history that you can put together through the pieces of the archive and through community engagement and talking with people who, uh, their families remember when, you know, their grandfathers worked here at Monticello and it's obvious that the tours that were led in the twenties, thirties, and forties by they were called hosts were really engaging.
And the reason I know this is because in the 1950s, Monticello followed the field of public history throughout the United States broadly, and, um, began to quote 'professionalizing' unquote, right? Which means that they started to focus on a more decorative arts themed material culture theme. And they switched the way that, uh, interpretation was done, and they switched from a staff of tour guides made up of African American men to a staff of tour guides made up of white women.
And you can see where this is actually written into some of the archives very explicitly. Like we're talking about race and gender directly and some of the makeup of the people. This is 75 years ago. Obviously this would never be done today. But my favorite part about this shift is that there are a lot of complaints that you can also see from visitors who thought that the tours were boring, uh, because they focused on, you know, art and furniture.
Now, and if anyone is listening to this and you're a curator, you're somebody who works in material culture, please understand that. I love stuff, okay? I am not making fun of stuff. But I do think there's a way to talk about the past and there's a way to talk about material culture. And I think that the 1950s to the 1970s way of doing that is a way that that dominated how house museums worked for a long time.
And I think a lot of people can remember being on one of those tours that just seemed to never, ever end where they heard about every detail of every doilie in the house. And I'm not making fun of the people who were the tour guides in the fifties to the seventies either. Uh, I think that it's important to note that everybody who's ever been a tour guide at Monticello does it because they love history, every generation, right. They do it because they love history.
They can make more money doing something else, right? And that's just a reality of the field is that even those who pay the best don't pay as well as other jobs. Over time, that began to shift and it began to shift more, more, uh, of a natural attrition.
More men began to take on the job, and by the late 20th century, it was mostly a group of retired people who were working for an hourly wage, and they did it because they were interested in history and, and many of them were incredible tour guides, which is true all the way back and some probably were not, which is also true. Right? That's just a piece of it. But the biggest piece I think of the narrative history at Monticello has been the way that we interpret slavery.
I share all that back history because I think it's really important for us to imagine how those black men talked about slavery with white visitors in the 1920s and thirties in Virginia. I can find very little evidence of this in the archives, but I can find that conversations about the quote 'servants' took place. It was part of their narrative. So it, it did happen.
And what I wouldn't give to know the kinds of innuendo and nonverbal communication within this milieu of lost cause southern public memory, which is this time period when after the Civil War, white Southerners are trying to rewrite the past as though slavery wasn't that bad, and it became the dominant way that people thought about the past. And so a plantation like Monticello would become influenced by that. And so much the same throughout the 20th century. Thomas Jefferson as an enslaver.
Always known, never debated. Thomas Jefferson also fathered children with a woman he held in bondage. Her name was Sally Hemmings. She had, uh, six children that we know of at least, and those children were fathered by Jefferson. And that is something that goes back in the historical record to 1802 when the man was present in the United States. But Monticello as an institution did not talk about that until the late 1990s.
As a matter of policy, A DNA test in 1998 showed that there is a genetic link between the descendants of Sally Hemings and the descendants of the male Jefferson line. That in conjunction with all of the statistical evidence and the fact that Thomas Jefferson wrote down where he was every single day, and we know he was the only male, Jefferson definitively with Sally Hemmings exactly nine months before she gave birth to all of her known children.
It means that most historians would say Jefferson was the father of those children. And that's been a requirement for us to discuss on tour since the year 2000. So for 26 years, this has been a piece of what we talk about, and that's the big public piece that people know about. And it was a sea change in our interpretation, but I would say an even more important piece happened some years prior.
In 1993, when two scholars at Monticello, Diane Swan Wright, and Cinder Stanton began the Getting Word African American oral history project, where they began searching out descendants of people who descended from those who were enslaved here, so that they could record their oral histories so that we would have a better archive of those things, that the enslave would not write down the daily lives of enslaved people. Incidentally, the archive didn't actually fill that out for us.
And, uh, the Vice President of research here at Monticello today himself a descendant, Andrew Davenport, says that it's more an archive of freedom than an archive of slavery. 'cause the descendants of people who were enslaved here would share stories of their lives after slavery and their families and generations after generations fighting to achieve those very ideals that Jefferson espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
Uh, the Getting Word project has since developed from an oral history project into the Getting Word African-American History Department, and it's a huge part of our research here, which informs our interpretation and research-Backed interpretation is key to what we do. We have an archeology department, we have a papers department, we have historians on site, and all of this works in tandem to try and tell a more nuanced story. , Became conversations that people were having on the street.
Which means that people would come and take a tour and they would, they would demand that we connect this legacy of race-based slavery to a legacy of racism in the United States today. And so we had those conversations and we would encourage people to have those conversations. And just like Kelsie said, we're not providing any kind of moral guidance on this. We are sharing facts so that people can then develop their own. Opinions about how they feel that these histories inform who we are today.
We just share the histories and we try to share them as honestly as possible. We began offering a facilitated dialogue program around that same time. We worked with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, which we are a member site to have training. We did much exactly what Kelsie outlined for their programming, and we continue to do it today.
We worked with external experts, we worked with internal experts, and the one thing I'll say that is a real echo of what, uh, happened at the Frick is we closed too in 2020. Uh, the pandemic was catastrophic for tourist sites, and we used that time to restructure our guide team. And prior to the pandemic, we had some five or six full-time guides, and then like 70 part-time guides. Uh, after the pandemic we began to focus on full-time. Guides who do this as a profession.
And so now we have 17 full-time guides. We have some 40 part-time guides 'cause it's still a lot of seasonal hours. But those full-time guides are people with graduate level degrees, often in public history or museology. And these are people who dedicate their lives to studying this work. That doesn't mean that they're automatically better than the part-time guides who do it.
And as retired people, there are great guides who come from all walks of life, but it does mean that they are constantly working on that improvement professionally. It's their life, it's what they do. And I think that creates a level of nuance at our site that is hard to find elsewhere. And it's something of which I think we're all really proud.
And you're both talking there about navigating these changes. With your guide teams, knowing that guided experiences in both of your locations can probably surface powerful responses from people from time to time. So how do you support guides in navigating these moments? Now, we know, I was just reading some research today that we tend to overestimate how badly contentious conversations will go in our heads.
So how do we support the guides who are there facilitating these conversations in your historic spaces?
Oh boy. Well, it starts from the hiring process for us. I feel like it's important to note in our case, you know, the ways in which. 'Gilded Not Golden' as an experience, necessitates a different type of skillset as a guide. And it's, to Brandon's point, it's not about one being better than the other. It's just that I have very honest conversations at the interview phase with folks.
You know, I'll say that, we have all paid guides, we don't have any volunteers, so, um, that does change the nature of who we can, you know, get to do this work. But I, at the interview phase, I have very honest conversations with prospective guides about what this tour is. I'm very honest with them that it's not easy, it's not an easy job. First of all, being a tour guide, one of the hardest jobs in the world I've done it is it doesn't get enough credit as a difficult job.
Um, and so that's baseline, you know, if you're gonna get into it. But I have honest conversations about the fact that these tours are mentally and sometimes emotionally and physically exhausting to give. Our tour guides give usually at minimum, three tours a day. And 'Gilded, Not Golden' Tours are scheduled to be 75 minutes long. Like that. They are long tours. Um, so we have those honest conversations up front, but we've also changed what we look for in potential candidates.
Um, we really are looking for people at this point. Who are naturally gifted communicators. We look for people who, yes, if they are interested in history and if maybe they know a little bit about Pittsburgh history, that's a plus for us. Um, but what I've always said when hiring guides is I can teach you the content. I can teach anybody the content. I can't teach you to have an innate ability to craft a story for someone. Um, I can give you tips and tricks.
I can, you know, I can sort of help mold you as a storyteller. Um, but there are a lot of people in this world who just innately have that ability. Um, and we also look honestly for less people who necessarily have experience doing this already. That's not like an end all, be all for us. Like, if you've never given a tour in a historic house, I'm not automatically throwing your resume out, right? Um, we wanna talk to you, we wanna understand how you look at the past.
We wanna understand how you might talk about it with people. Um, so that's first and foremost. But then as far as you know, the support that we give them. It's integrated all through their training. They shadow tours, they talk to other veteran guides. They watch them happen. We give them very concrete strategies around, how to craft a good question, how to respond to that question. And we give them a lot of guidance around, when to shut the conversation down, to be totally honest.
And I will say, like to your point, Claire, it doesn't happen as often as, you know, we prepare for it to happen. It's very rare. Um, but we give them a lot of tips and tricks and tools in their toolbox for, um, how to move a conversation along.
And we empower our guides to truly be the facilitators, which means that they are empowered to understand that it is their responsibility to guide this entire experience for their entire group, not just for the loudest or the most contentious or whatever it is. And then of course, you know, we do have. Like a built-in procedure around it, when it does happen that you've got someone who is very loudly and very perhaps angrily or negatively sort of impacting the tour experience.
We have procedures around that. And it kind of comes down to like, the door is always open for you to exit. Um, you know, and so empowering guides to invite folks to leave if they're not interested. I think that has hap, I can count on one hand like the number of times that has happened. Um, but I think it really does come to down to empowerment and support.
And I really try to make it clear to my guides, you know, even in my role as a, as the department head, you know, to kind of two steps removed from them, um, of saying like, I wanna hear anytime something like this happens and I wanna talk to you about it, and I wanna check in with you afterwards and if you wanna talk about it, because it can be a really, like emotionally charged, like off-putting, feeling like even if you just wanna download to me what happened
because it was, you know, intense. That's fine. Um, and so it always comes from a place of, we are here to support you through that. And we also we don't subscribe to the idea of like, the customer is always right. We believe that there is a level of like decorum and respect that needs to happen from the guide to the visitors, to the staff, to whatever. Um, and so, we try to, to give our staff the sort of support that they need if they need it.
But it doesn't happen very often, but it does have to be built in from the beginning, um, when you are hiring them.
Kelsie, I, I find myself nodding along as usual to everything that you're saying. And a little personal background before I just echo everything you said is I'm a first generation college student with a degree in philosophy, so that means I was a bartender for about 20 years. Uh, I spent a lot of time in the service industry and, uh, over the years, I, I learned the ethos of service that I think guides my career today.
And so one of the things that you mentioned is just because you have done this work before doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna be the person that I hire. Uh, sometimes yeah. But, but it's really more about performance in the interview and I find that often the people who make the best guides are people who come from service, people who come from teaching, uh, classroom teaching, K 12. You know, there's this sense of engagement that is key to all of this.
And so to, to underscore that, some of the stuff that you said, again, uh, during the hiring process, the key thing we look for is empathy. Can you show that you have empathy for people who disagree with you? Can you show that you have empathy for people who don't have the same level of education that you do, who come from a different part of the world, or who lived in a different time and whose lives were very different. The, how can we have those kinds of conversations?
And I think empathy is key to all of that. Uh, and it's much harder to have empathy for someone who you very much disagree with than it is to have empathy for someone who you do agree with. Uh, you also noted that all your guides are paid, so are ours.
I think that that is a very important piece of interpretation and I listen to a lot of museum professionals talk about how, uh, there are challenges with getting varied groups of people, you know, people with, uh, different kinds of backgrounds, uh, people with different racial identities, different socioeconomic backgrounds.
Of course there are if we are seeking only volunteers, uh, and that doesn't really say anything about, the institution as much as it is a reflection of the long economic processes and the intersections of race and power, right? Which, uh, like is obvious. So of course if you pay your guides, you're gonna attract different kinds of people, and I think that's really important.
Uh, our training program is, it's really one of a kind and I feel good gushing about it because I didn't create it, so I don't feel like I'm bragging. Uh, but I will talk briefly about the people who did, who are no longer at Monticello, but our training program was created by, Gary Sandling and Lanaya Grim. And they created this training program that invests in our guides in a way that I've never heard of at another institution.
We require a hundred hours of training before a guide ever leads a tour. It's equally split between technique and content. People think that it's just gonna be constant lecturing on the historical figures. It's really not. We recommend what books you should read. We recommend, conversations about how to determine what books you should read. And we, we have conversations about what does it mean in this digital age to find truth. That's one of our interview questions.
So you read something online and you wanna find out if it's true or not. What do you do? And this teaches us about historical literacy and it teaches us about the kinds of, curiosity that underscore the work of a great tour guide, right? If you are not a curious person who likes people, this is not the right job for you. You could still find a job in a museum.
There's plenty of museum jobs where you can do other work that you don't have to be, you know, working with everybody from eight to 80 from all over the world. But if that sounds like it's not fun to you, you shouldn't be a tour guide. Uh, and then finally, you know, to really get to your point, Claire, the, the conversation about support, those are the foundations upon which the support is built right. And if those foundations are not in place, then the support can't be there.
But our support is ongoing. And a good example of this is we just had a couple of round tables last week where we invited the entire interpretive staff to come together and we facilitated a dialogue. We used the arc of dialogue model, and we were working through some of the national dialogues in the United States right now about the interpretation of the past. And that's not all, right. We were also just talking about the politically divisive times in which we lived.
And we do this in a way that we recognize it's political, but it is never partisan. We are quite clear that we don't want to have contemporary partisan conversations, but we have to have conversations that involve the ways that people feel about politics. And so allowing our guides to get together and process some of that stuff with each other makes them better at hearing whatever might come from any group at any time. And Charlottesville, Virginia, uh, this is where Monticello is located.
People probably know like this is a place that that has had a, a troubled few years. You know, in 2017 there was a, a white supremacist attack in Charlottesville that was hurt around the world and our guides processed that, right? They had feelings about that. And there was the need to have a conversation about what does it mean when something that was supposedly, you know, set off by a conversation about public memory, because it was about the removal of historical statues.
Uh, what does that mean for people? And you know, we had to have conversations about what is the difference between a monument and a historic site? And they're very different things, right? And what is our obligation as a historic site searching truth? So those kinds of conversations between guides, I think are the most important support from the top down. Our president was at that round table. Jen Kaminsky was there, vice President Steve White was there.
And at the same time, knowing that even from the highest levels of the hierarchy, the people who are actually gonna say the most useful and supportive things are the other people who do the same work. , Claire Bown: Great reflections there, I think, which will be really useful for anyone listening. Uh, you mentioned, I think both of you at the start, that this work is never done it's never finished. Are there some things that you've learned along the way?
Are there some things that you would've done differently? Can you reflect back now and sort of think about the process and what you might have done in a different way?
Oh gosh. How much time do you have? I think. That one of the things that we talked about early on after we had launched the new tour and we were kind of in that immediate reflective moment of looking back at the previous two years and, and talking about how we did things.
We had a lot of conversations about the fact that we actually wish that we had been or we look back and think we should have been perhaps like a little firmer with our part-time guide staff about where this direction was headed. You know, I mentioned that we had some really intentional conversations, about why, and we brought our seats, we brought our data about the ways in which, historic house museums are a dime a dozen.
It is a struggling industry, um, from a business sustainability standpoint. Historic house museums like Clayton are drains on institutions if they can't support themselves with their own, you know, visitorship and things like that.
We tried to make the argument that this was as much of a sort of like socio-cultural tradition in terms of a decision in terms of making sure that we were staying relevant, um, in sort of our current moment, but it was also a business decision and we tried to have these conversations with our guide staff about that.
But I think in our effort to be empathetic with them in terms of like what we were asking them to do and like our understanding that, hey, like change is hard always, you know, like it is always hard. And again, like I, I said it earlier, like recognizing that we were really asking them to kind of jump into the unknown with us. We had a lot of empathy around that. But I do think that there was probably a point where we needed to draw the hard line in the sand and say like.
The train is leaving the station, you are invited to get on the train with us, or you are welcome to get off. And so I, I think we look back at that as just saying, you know, I think that was probably like a lack of confidence on our end as a staff, as a leadership staff of just not, you know, having gone through this process ourselves. So we look back on that and kind of think like maybe we could have been a little bit more decisive in that respect.
But as far as the whole process goes, there's very little that we would change. Um. We are incredibly grateful for all of the people who helped guide us along the way, who were willing to give us their time and their expertise and their energy, um, to help us kinda shape what this became. And as far as like what we're thinking about next 'Gilded Not Golden' was designed as part of an interpretive plan for Clayton.
So it is our sort of guiding interpretive principle that we now apply to our other museums and across our site. Um, but it is designed to be a living document, which means that, it is never, it's not really set in stone. It's designed to be flexible to allow us to meet the moment. Um, and so, you know, 'Gilded, Not Golden' in particular, we will always be watching it closely and we're always paying attention to what conversations our guides are having as part of the tour.
What is resonating with people. And what that means is that we are constantly on our toes a little bit to make sure that we are shaping the tour, but also preparing the guides to have those conversations. Um, you know, Brandon touched on this just a minute ago, this idea that, you sort of have to be able to anticipate what the current moment is gonna necessitate and then you have to keep training the guides and you have to keep giving them the resources and the tools that they need.
So a specific example that I have you know, is that part of what happens to Frick in 1892 as a part, as like fallout from this labor dispute that he's involved in, is that there is an assassination attempt on his life, um, that summer that he survives.
I. Quite frankly, didn't think that I was going to have to give a lot of resource and time to my guides about how to talk about political killings in this country, um, until about two years ago when we started having them happen, like fairly regularly. Um, both political figures and private citizens, business people, you know, like very close ties to what happened to Frick.
And so, we have to be prepared at any moment to bring the guides together and have conversations and give them tools to talk about it because if we don't, the visitors will, like, the visitors will bring it up. Um, and I never wanna send my guides into a situation where they feel like they are kind of on their heels and can't meet that moment. Um, and so that is a challenge, but it has to happen. As sort of like a quality control feature on the tour itself.
Like we're really proud of the tour and, and what it does and what it stands for and what it's done for our institution. You know, we've won some awards for it. All of that stuff is great, right? But it means nothing if we can't maintain the quality and we can't maintain the relevance. And so that is what I mean when I say that. Like the work will never be done with 'Gilded, Not Golden', and we will always have to be reevaluating it.
And then of course we'd like to sort of do something similar in our other spaces and, and make sure that we're bringing aspects of that tour experience into our other spaces as well, which is an ongoing effort for us for the future.
Y you know, I've been sitting here racking my brains about trying to find something, uh, that's useful to say for other people because of course there, there's so much that I wish I had done differently. Uh, there's so many things that I've seen the institution do that now, in retrospect, I would say, oh, I wish we'd done that a little differently. Um. But I think, you know, Monticello is a place where it's big, which is a privilege. It's also big, which has its disadvantages.
Uh, you know, we're not nimble, we don't make quick decisions, and sometimes that's really good. Um, but I think that. To something Kelsie just said, you know, this ongoing support is necessary. You know those round tables, they're scheduled at Monticello, like every month. We get people together constantly. We have to, but what does that actually mean for our interpretation? What does it mean for our exhibit space?
In 2026, this is the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, which just to remind all of the listeners means that it's the 250th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Like that is the moment that the United States of America begins. And so at Monticello, we've been thinking about this moment for a very long time, a very long time, years and years, and I think that we have some really exciting programming focused on this.
And one of the things that I'm really proud of is that we've been planning this programming for years, which means that it's not a response to the political moment, but it turns out to fit really well to the contemporary political moment where we have a tour right now called Founding Friends, Founding Foes.
That is a tour that focuses on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the third and second presidents who were, uh, famously friends and famously political not friends is a nice way of putting it. Uh, they disagreed on a lot of points, but they have this beautiful correspondence that we can read today and get insights into the ways that both men thought and the ways that both men eloquently and civilly disagreed with one another.
And in a moment when our politics has become rancorous to a point that there is no civil discourse, it's just moral certainty and screaming at one another, usually in all caps from behind the safety of a computer screen, it seems that, uh, people really want this kind of conversation and they need to be reminded of this civic virtue and this value that democracy requires discourse. All that is to say. I think that over the years we've all been pretty guilty of that.
I think a lot of people are really upset and mad and have been for a long time. And I think that, whether that's a combination of social media or political divisiveness, or the aftermath of a pandemic or any number of things that you want to talk about in a world that is constantly changing.
And we're dealing with things like climate change while we're watching you know, children grow up as digital natives who don't know the difference between fact and fiction, although they're better at it than like older people. I, I think that it's a moment for us to remember the importance of just, we do this work because we love this work. And sometimes I wish that we would focus on that more. That the love of this work comes from the need to be inspired by the things that happened before.
The need to remember that calamity is a part of being human. And this is not to downplay the the challenges of our times, which are great. I wouldn't want to downplay the challenges of the late 18th century in the United States, either nor would I want to downplay the challenges of the mid 19th century and for Native American people in this country.
Those challenges have been ongoing for five centuries and for black people those challenges have been ongoing since the dawn of the transatlantic slave trade. Right? These conversations are integral to who we are, but can we take inspiration from 'em in a way that. Will lead us to really create a better future. And I think, yes, I wish that over the years I've been able to lean into that a little bit more.
Sometimes, uh, sometimes it gets me down, but I think that it has to necessarily get everybody down. If it's not, you're not really paying attention. But I think that we can use that as a real strength. And I would like to see us do that more because I think people need it. And I think that when people go to a historic site, they say they go to learn, but there's all kinds of research that shows us no, they don't. They go 'cause they wanna be affirmed in something that they already believe.
And is there a way that we can still deliver that nuanced truth, that we can still talk about this complicated version of a fraught past that nonetheless meets that need and that affirmation and that can do both of those things at the same time. And again, I think the answer is yes, people are far more complex than pundits would want us to believe and.
When people come to Monticello and I see people who will openly identify one way politically or the other and then completely latch onto the part of the narrative that should contradict what they want to hear about. I'm reminded time and time again that people have capacity within them and that each one of us, my boss, is fond of saying, can be a founder. And I think that's right, and I think we have to remember that, and I hope Monticello does that more in the future.
I think that's, uh, some very wise words to end on. I'd love to tell people, we'll put some links in the show notes for everyone, but how can people find out more about you and your work? Kelsie, would you like to start?
Oh gosh. Well, you can certainly find out, everything you would wanna know about our work at the Frick and with Clayton, on our website, you know, frick pittsburgh.org. And honestly, the best way to get ahold of me is I am happy to talk to anyone, who wants to about this type of work. And, can reach me via email. My contact information is on our website. Because I, I consider that a sort of a way to pay it forward.
I mentioned the fact that, you know, this work that we've done at the Frick that we're very proud of, it didn't happen in a silo and it didn't happen alone. There were so many people, Brandon included, who, were willing to chat with us. And so, I take that very seriously to just be a sounding board or to be able to give advice. So I'm happy to talk to anybody who wants to about this type of work. I am on LinkedIn. I'm not as good at LinkedIn as Brandon is, but I am there.
Uh, thank you for that. Kelsie. I look like I'm good at LinkedIn. I'm not actually, so, uh, if you do find me on LinkedIn and send me a message, please don't be offended if I don't respond for a while. I'm not all that good at technology in general, but I do try to keep some updates on LinkedIn about our ongoing work. I would echo the same thing, uh, that Kelsie said. monticello.org is the best place to find out information about our ongoing programs.
We have a social media presence that's pretty strong, Monticello. You can follow us on Facebook or Instagram. And, uh, I will plug this one personal thing that I'm very excited about. The 250th anniversary is a time that people are just interested in the past in a different way. And for Native American. People, that's a really complicated conversation. How do we commemorate the two 50th of a country that's built on lands that were taken from, uh, native people?
And so one of the projects that I'm really honored to have been working on is I played a small part in the development of an exhibit that will be opening soon at the Museum of the Cherokee people in, uh, Cherokee, North Carolina. So if anyone is interested in learning about a Cherokee perspective on the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, uh, go check out that exhibit and you can, uh, find the Museum of the Cherokee people online at motcp.org.
And again to echo Kelsie, like I'll talk to anybody. I think the best thing we do at Monticello is collaborative work, and I think it's really important. So, uh, yeah, LinkedIn and, and, shoot me an email. I'm easy to find.
Brilliant. Um, that just leaves me time to thank you both for coming on the podcast today.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you. It was a pleasure.
So a huge thank you to Brandon and Kelsie for being on the show today. You can find out more about their work, Monticello, the Frick Pittsburgh, and the 'Gilded, Not Golden' Tour via the links in the show notes. If you've enjoyed this episode or if any previous episodes of The Art Engager have supported your practice, please consider supporting the podcast.
You can become a friend of the podcast on Patreon, or you can pick up a copy of my book, The Art Engager Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums Available now, wherever you buy your books. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.
You can find more art engagement resources by visiting my website, thinking museum.com, and you can also find me on Instagram at Thinking Museum, where I regularly share tips and tools on how to bring art to life and engage your audience. If you've enjoyed this episode, please share with others and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.