For nearly 60 years, the Docent Council of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has organized and led tours at the de Young and Legion of Honor. That collaboration will end in July, according to internal communications from the museums reviewed by Mission Local.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), which runs both museums, confirmed that its education department will take over the volunteer organization and rename the program “Museum Guides.” One immediate change is a restructuring of the training from a two-year program run and required by the Docent Council to an eight-week course that will now be overseen by FAMSF’s education department. The museums’ Director of Education Sheila Pressley wrote to Mission Local that she hopes the new course will “appeal to a wide range of potential volunteers.”
All 120 of the current volunteer docents have completed the new eight-week training course and signed up to become museum guides, a spokesperson for FAMSF said.
It’s too soon to tell if these decisions will add to or change the makeup of the volunteer group. Pressley wrote that a new training class for prospective museum guides will open in the fall. The positions will remain unpaid.
Pamela Reed, chair of the Docent Council, directed all questions to Pressley.
“We want our volunteer docents to be able to focus on working with visitors, which is what they excel at and what many have expressed to me is the most rewarding part of docenting,” Pressley wrote to Mission Local.
In written communications with the docents, Pressley identified 14 “leadership areas” for volunteer guides to fill, including scheduling and “liaising with museum staff.”
Until now, the Docent Council has run and scheduled the tours done by its cadre of volunteers. They have been assured by the museums that they are welcome to stay beyond July as volunteer museum guides, but at least some are unhappy with the changes.
Mission Local spoke with three docents, all of whom requested anonymity. They said they worry about the future of the education program, and some suspect that the goal of inclusivity is a thin veil to disguise revenue-seeking efforts.
“Without exception, every single docent thinks that this is a big mistake,” one docent said.
“The first thing to go is the free stuff that benefits the people who don’t have the resources to pay.”
In the case of the de Young exhibit “Monet and Venice,” which opened earlier this month, the volunteer docents have been sidelined from giving tours. Instead, docents stand in the rooms, available for questions.
Pressley cited crowded exhibition rooms and “strong demand for private tours” as reasons not to offer public tours for Monet. Private group exhibition tours (also led by volunteer docents) start at $250 plus ticket costs, according to the museum’s website. Free audio tours are also available for the exhibit.
“In making this decision, we focused on ensuring the highest-quality experience for the greatest number of visitors within the exhibition space,” Pressley wrote to Mission Local. She said that communications with the Brooklyn Museum (which hosted “Monet and Venice” from October to February) and crowding at the Legion’s recent “Manet and Morisot” exhibition also contributed to the decision.
The museums offer free admission for Bay Area residents on Saturdays, and docents still give guided tours through the permanent collection twice a day.
The new eight-week training changed walkthrough tours from sweeping guided lectures through the collections to “Gallery Conversations,” which focus on four to six pieces and involve activities like sketching and journaling.
“We know that visitors learn best when they are engaged in a discussion about art, rather than being passive recipients of information about art,” Pressley wrote. “The new training will stress the importance of visitor engagement as a tool to relay art history and appreciation. Our goal is to help empower visitors to make meaning from art, to enjoy art, and not be intimidated by art and museums.”
Docents are dubious. One called the new style of touring “contrived” and “stilted,” and said that cultural institutions in general are “under a lot of pressure… really fighting for visitation.”
“I feel kind of a lack of trust from the administration,” that docent said. “I guess the museum feels like they need to get more control over what is being said, or the experiences the guides are providing for people.”
Another said that withholding tours from the visiting public at a major visiting exhibit such as the Monet show was unprecedented. At last fall’s “Manet and Morisot” show, the docent said, they “were doing three free tours every single day and they were packed. The tours were really popular.”
This break with the council is part of a larger trend in museums across the country. Most famously, in 2021, The Art Institute of Chicago dropped 82 volunteer docents to develop a program that “allows community members of all income levels to participate.” The Oakland Museum discontinued its docent program in 2022 as part of an effort to “expand and diversify” its corps of volunteers. The Portland Art Museum did the same in 2023, “to meet the needs of the community.” At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art downtown, volunteer guides haven’t given tours to adults since before the pandemic, though they still lead children on school trips. (In all cases, the word “docent” appears decidedly out.)
At the FAMSF museums, paid “Interpretation Outreach Associates” lead school trips. Unpaid docents (soon to be museum guides) lead public and private tours for other visitors.
The two-year course was “quite both a challenge and kind of a delight too,” one docent said, “because you really felt you were getting an incredible education, both about the collections, but also about a way to be engaged with the art.”
At least for now, the volunteer guides will still be leading gallery conversations in the permanent collections up until and after the transition in July.
For the first week of the Monet exhibition, the de Young also offered a series of typewriters connected to “Claude,” the AI model developed by Anthropic.
Anthropic was one of three lead sponsors of the “Monet and Venice” show.
The docents did not entirely object to Claude. “Different things work for different people, and the museums try to reach out to a broad audience and I really appreciate that,” one docent said of the installation.
Your correspondent sat down to ask Claude a question.
“Tell me,” I wrote, “about how Monet and his contemporaries reacted to the technological advancements of their day.”
I thought Claude would write about the invention of the camera.
Instead, citing FAMSF research, Claude wrote that Monet was something of a Luddite, as evidenced by his nature paintings during the Industrial Revolution and his devotion to representation in the face of avant-garde abstraction.
“While the century raced toward steel and speed, he dug a pond,” Claude concluded.
The typewriters weren’t set up to answer follow-up questions. Later I asked a few art professionals I know the same question. They mentioned railroads, urban development, and new paint pigments.
It’s unclear what will happen to the Docent Council, which has operated as a semi-independent body — with its own bylaws, leadership structure and nonprofit status — since 1966. There has been some discussion of striking their own course, but, without the museum affiliation, there is no clear path to survival. A vote is scheduled for May, but one docent called the transition a “foregone conclusion.”
“We had been working to preserve the Docent Council as a separate entity,” reads one November letter to docents from council chair Pamela Reed, “but this is not the outcome.”
