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 question was whether the institution could meet it.
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.
Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and on loan for its West Coast debut, Radical Histories traced more than six decades of Chicano printmaking as a medium of resistance, from the Delano Grape Strike of the late 1960s to contemporary voices confronting migration, identity, and belonging.
The works spanned silkscreens, posters, and offset prints organized across five thematic sections. The Huntington's presentation added something new: a site-specific mural by Los Angeles–based artist Melissa Govea, created in collaboration with Self Help Graphics & Art, the pioneering East LA print studio that has supported Chicano and Latino artists since 1973.
The prints spoke for themselves. The challenge was audience.
It was audience. Specifically, 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. Not just who came, but how they experienced it.
We 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 to make 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 methods leaned into depth. Interviews and focus groups included Spanish-speaking visitors. Feedback forms were structured around specific installations, not just the exhibition overall. Artist talks and community programming were treated as core moments of engagement, not add-ons.
Quantitative data tracked attendance and demographics against baseline Huntington data, along with time spent across the five thematic sections. Not to optimize flow, but to understand where people stayed and where they moved through.
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, not added as accessibility supplements.
The goal was to leave the Huntington with a demographic dataset and qualitative evidence base that would inform not just this exhibition's legacy, but 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.
The commissioned mural by Melissa Govea is a good example of that shift. It wasn't added as programming. It was part of how the exhibition positioned itself in the present. A signal that the institution wasn't just presenting history, but stepping into an ongoing conversation.