Museum Sage® is a guided experience that leads to insights on a personal, business, or social question through interacting with a work of art.

Visitors look closely at an artwork’s color, mood, iconography, and other attributes, and with the help of life coaching skills like asking powerful questions, deep listening and accessing intuition, they discover what the work might be “saying” to them. The result is insight with an immediacy that visual experience often produces.

They connect to their “inner Sage,” the people they’re with, “their” artwork, and the museum. 

Museum Sage sessions have encouraged Sages to pursue new jobs, find partners, change homes, and generally live more authentic lives.

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This is a free program, with materials available as a free app or as a PDF you can print out for your visitors. With Museum Sage you can promote visitors’ mental wellbeing and capacity for empathy by giving them a space to ask important questions about their lives. Here are two ways to do that: 

1. Offer easy engagement by putting a poster in your lobby that explains the Museum Sage experience and suggests using the free app Museum Sage or a printed guide available at your front desk. 

2. Host a special event or regular gathering where visitors bring a friend or family member. Have staff/docents model the experience, send pairs to guide each other, and reconvene to share insights about the experience. You may choose to charge for this experience.
   

BENEFITS 

• WELLBEING This whole-brain activity encourages intuition and empathy. And especially important in the wake of Covid-19, it supports the mental health and wellbeing of your visitors. 

• EMOTIONAL CONNECTION Museum Sage helps visitors connect with their romantic partners, kids, friends, colleagues, and other visitors. It helps your staff or volunteers connect with visitors. When people connect emotionally to art and museum personnel, they’re more likely to support the museum. 

• FLEXIBILITY Different parts of your collection and various personal topics—career, relationships, money, health, spirituality, social issues—can be highlighted in successive sessions to repeatedly draw visitors. Participants can come up with their own question or try the Random Question Generator to access popular life-coaching questions. You can offer special sessions focused on empathy-building, DEAI work, or other relevant themes. 

• REVENUE If you choose to charge a ticket fee for convening visitors, you can bring in annual revenue to your museum, let existing and potential members and donors know you’re there for them, and draw new visitors.

• TEAM BUILDING Museum Sage workshops can be offered to corporate groups to help team members appreciate each other’s differences and strengths, improve communication, solve business problems, re-energize, and have fun together. These businesses could begin or renew a financial commitment to your museum.

“By tying in personal questions, the art piece becomes intricately connected to the speaker’s internal dialog. The participant feels, ‘here is part of me, something I’ve been puzzling about, now it’s in concrete form.’ Forever more, they ‘own’ the discussed art object because of that direct, personal, connection.”

— Mary Lewis, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) Trainer

Museum Clients

• de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA

• Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

• High Museum, Atlanta, GA

• Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA

• Portland Museum, Portland, ME

• Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN

• Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, ME

• Museum of Russian Icons, Clinton, MA

• St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO

• Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, BC, Canada

“On the invitation of Beth Merritt at AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums, I was led at the Phillips Collection by the Guide collective, Museum Sage. These lovely Midwesterners have found a way to make museums personal. Astounding. I haven’t enjoyed myself more in a museum in a very long time.”

– Mary Case, Qm2 museum management consultants

Museum Sage, formerly called Art-o-mancy, was one of 20 organizations cited in the American Alliance of Museum's annual forecasting publication, TrendsWatch 2015.

“The Museum Sage experience offers a new, exciting, and eye-opening way to appreciate and connect with the artwork of a museum. Our patrons walked away with thoughtful answers and deeper connections to the collection.”

— Doneeca Thurston, Adult Programs Coordinator, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem MA