Study Context

This study examined the Dallas Museum of Art's (DMA) framework for understanding visitors' engagement with art, called Levels of Engagement with Art (LOEA) ^SM. The DMA conceived of LOEA^SM as an overarching institutional strategy to strengthen staff collaborations for programming, marketing, and exhibition development that would, in turn, promote innovative museum program design and increase visitation. LOEA^SM fundamentally changed the Museum's organizational culture, way of working, and relationships between the Museum and Dallas communities.

In addition to being a systemic institutional strategy, LOEA^SM is a hypothesis regarding how the Museum's visitors are segmented. The DMA originally identified three Levels of Engagement with Art—Awareness, Curious, and Commitment—based on visitors' prior art knowledge, art consumer behavior, and quality of participation in art experiences.

Approach

RK&A and DMA collaboratively designed a unique questionnaire to explore DMA's visitors and LOEA^SM and applied cluster analysis to the data.

Findings

The study's results validated the museum's hypothesis and identified four audience clusters within the three levels. These four clusters describe visitors in the Levels of Engagement and are based on visitors' preferences for types of interpretation and programming, comfort level with looking at and talking about art, and enthusiasm and passion for art. The four visitor clusters—Tentative Observers, Curious Participants, Discerning Independents, and Committed Enthusiasts—exist within the three Levels of Engagement noted above; two clusters—Discerning Independents and Committed Enthusiasts—are at the Commitment Level.

Conclusion

The LOEA^SM framework transcends demographics and provides the DMA a structure to think about visitors, the kinds of experiences the DMA would like to offer, and the kinds of experiences that are possible for visitors—given each person's personality traits. The information in RK&A's study, while complex, is remarkably concrete and specific, and DMA staff members are using it to design gallery programs. The challenge for the DMA (and other art museums) is to be sensitive to visitors' distinctions, as each visitor has the ability to create his or her own unique museum experience. These experiences are determined by individual works of art, what the museum offers, visitors' personality traits, passion toward a particular work of art, intellectual curiosity, and art background. When all these variables, in their varying degrees, merge, the possibilities are endless and extraordinarily rich.

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