The Cross Currents tour was developed to allow more flexibility to museum visitors on the weekend. This tour is a melding of an Ask Me and a Spotlight tour assignment, and visitors are able to choose their own Mia adventure, traveling to as many tour stops as they like. As an added bonus, the Cross Currents format provides guides with a touring option that offered more engagement with visitors.
Each month, we use a different theme for the tour. The themes are broad, allowing plenty of options for selecting a key artwork or gallery to present throughout the museum.
For the tour, six to eight guides select a gallery and pick one object or a small group of objects to present around a general theme. For example, “Come to Your Senses” is a tour that explores how our senses help to tell the story of art. Guides would be stationed in their gallery for two hours and receive two credits.
The day of the tour, visitors are given a museum map with the locations of the stationed guides. Visitors move through the gallery stops in any rotation. Guides present on their object/s for about 10 minutes and then encourage visitors to move on to another stop. Additional tour maps will be available at each stop. Guides wear an “Ask Me” button and are encouraged to invite visitors to participate in the tours.
Here is a sample of the handout available to visitors on the weekends. Note this is a template that we adapt to each tour, depending on the theme and choices of the guides:
The Fall 2020 CIFocus newsletter also included a great article by guide Bryan Peffer, outlining his experience of giving a Cross Currents tour: