Meant to Be Heard: Storytelling in the Art Museum for All Ages

This paper examines the roles of storytelling in museums and argues that something special happens when you tell stories in museums in front of original works of art. The Yale University Art Gallery’s storytelling programs provide evidence of this phenomenon. This paper offers an overview of the pedagogical uses of storytelling as an interpretive strategy for museum audiences of all ages, motivated by folklorists’ arguments that stories have multiple authors and multiple interpretations. Many museums use “storytelling” to describe a technique in exhibition design; we are using it to refer to the performance of stories.