Open Forum

Last Call!

Exhibition's call for papers for the Spring 2027 issue closes on June 3 (that's only a week away). Exhibtion, the journal of exhibition theory and practice published by American Alliance of Museums, is currently seeking proposals for "Between the Lines: Language in Exhibtions."

There are few issues facing exhibition-makers as evergreen as how we use language to communicate with visitors. There are also few issues as divisive. After well over a century of visitor research into the effectiveness of in-gallery communication and countless books, articles, guidelines, tips, and tricks for writing more effectively, standards still vary widely across institutions-and even across exhibitions staged by the SAME institution. Add to this the failures of language itself, from its gendered, racist, cultural, and classist assumptions to its (in)accessibility for large numbers of people, and one might be forgiven for asking why the written word is still such a ubiquitous communication strategy in museums.

Exhibition last broached this topic specifically in its Spring 2016 issue, "The Power of Words: Written, Spoken, Designed." With all that has happened in the intervening decade, from a pronounced rightward drift in Western politics that has made language as hotly contested as ever to the rise of ChatGPT and other large language models capable of writing for us, we want to check in to see how practitioners are shaping the present and future of exhibition communication.

Read the full call and get useful tips for how to write a winning proposal here: Call for Papers for Exhibition journal

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