Indianapolis Museum of Art (Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion)
Remember the kerfuffle over the Los Angeles County Museum’s failure to provide bilingual labels for its 2007 exhibition (organized by the Philadelphia Museum), The Arts in Latin America: 1492-1820?
It appears Indianapolis has learned from LA’s mistake.
Already up on the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s website for its upcoming Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World (Oct. 11-Jan. 3) is a Spanish-language description of the show. The press release for the exhibition (which will feature some 70 works from 17th-century Spain) is also translated into Spanish. The exhibition labels will be bilingual.
I knew that Los Angeles has a substantial Latino population. But Indianapolis?
Katie Zarich, the museum’s director of public affairs, fills us in:
Indianapolis does have a substantial Spanish-speaking population, which
has grown rapidly over the past several years.
This raises another question: Should labels for the Metropolitan Museum’s Vermeer’s Masterpiece: “The Milkmaid” be translated into Dutch?
Just kidding. But there is a serious issue here: How far should museums go with this? I think that if there’s a major foreign-speaking concentration of immigrants in a museum’s locale, outreach efforts should include speaking that audience’s language in wall texts or translated handouts, educational materials and audio guides.
UPDATE: Indianapolis will not only have a Spanish-language audio guide; it will be debuting TAP, a new iPod Touch/iPhone delivery system that provides “expert interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, on-location shoots, musical selections, x-ray imagery and other surprises” (brewing Spanish coffee?), with rentals available for those of us benighted low-techies without our own devices.