Radical Histories
MaryLou and George Boone Gallery · The Huntington · 2025
Sixty prints. More than fifty years of resistance. The West Coast debut of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's landmark survey of Chicano printmaking arrived at The Huntington carrying something most exhibitions don’t: a living community whose history it told.
The real question was whether the institution could meet the work.
My role was to design the evaluation and audience engagement framework early, while decisions were still being made. The goal was to make sure planning reflected real community context, that the right audiences could find themselves in the show, and that the institution would leave with something it could actually use.
The prints spoke for themselves. The central challenge was audience: whether the Huntington could meaningfully reach and serve the Chicanx communities represented in the work.
The framework was designed to answer that in a concrete way, weighing how people experienced the exhibition as much as who came through the door.
The framework organized visitor goals across three areas: personal connection to themes of activism and identity, deeper understanding of the Chicanx graphics movement, and behaviors like time spent, return intent, and recommendation
Institutional goals were just as explicit: expand beyond the Huntington’s typical audience, build credibility as a site for socially engaged contemporary work, and form partnerships with Spanish-speaking and Latinx communities that would extend beyond the exhibition.
The goal was making sure the right audiences felt they belonged there.
The framework focused on something specific to this exhibition: whether the institution actually expanded its reach, and how that experience landed for the people most connected to the work.
Qualitative and quantitative methods worked together, tracking not just who came through the door, but how the experience actually landed once they did.
Measurement methods · Radical Histories · MaryLou and George Boone Gallery, The Huntington, 2025
This exhibition arrived as part of America at 250, a moment when institutions across the country were being asked to tell a more complete story of American history. For the Huntington, Radical Histories was an opportunity to position itself as a site where that story could include Chicanx voices, labor history, and the art of social justice movements.
The evaluation framework was designed to support that positioning with evidence. Multilingual materials and programming, audio guides and gallery labels in both English and Spanish, community-facing partnerships with La Opinión and the Latinx Arts Alliance, were embedded in the visitor goals from the start, treated as core to the experience.
The goal was to leave the Huntington with a demographic dataset and qualitative evidence base that would inform this exhibition's legacy and the institution's next programming cycle.
The framework gave the Huntington a way to understand what this exhibition was doing beyond attendance. Who it reached, how it landed, and where it created real connection.
Because audience development, community partnership, and multilingual access were built in from the start, the impact didn’t end when the show closed. It created a foundation the institution could build on.
Audience strategy is most valuable before audiences arrive.