Museum Sage® is a guided experience that invites museum visitors to ask a question about their lives and receive insight from an artwork in your collection.

Museum visitors can guide each other using the free app, but your trained staff or volunteers offer an extra benefit that visitors are willing to pay for:

• Art history knowledge that adds an extra dimension to the personal interpretation in a Museum Sage experience.

• Being able to meet like-minded visitors that your museum gathers together, creating community connection that doesn’t happen when visitors guide themselves.

We’ll train your staff or volunteers to become Museum Sage Guides so you can offer ticketed sessions to visitors, both in your galleries and online. 

• WELLBEING This whole-brain activity encourages intuition and empathy. And especially important in the wake of Covid-19, it supports the mental health and wellbeing of your visitors. 

• EMOTIONAL CONNECTION Museum Sage helps visitors connect with their romantic partners, kids, friends, colleagues, and other visitors. It helps your staff or volunteers connect with visitors. When people connect emotionally to art and museum personnel, they’re more likely to support the museum. 

• FLEXIBILITY Different parts of your collection and various personal topics—career, relationships, money, health, spirituality, social issues—can be highlighted in successive sessions to repeatedly draw visitors. Participants can come up with their own question or try the Random Question Generator to access popular life-coaching questions. You can offer special sessions focused on empathy-building, DEAI work, or other relevant themes. 

• REVENUE You can bring in annual revenue to your museum, let existing and potential members and donors know you’re there for them, and draw visitors in from around the world.

• TEAM BUILDING Museum Sage workshops can be offered to corporate groups to help team members appreciate each other’s differences and strengths, improve communication, solve business problems, re-energize, and have fun together. These businesses could begin or renew a financial commitment to your museum.

“By tying in personal questions, the art piece becomes intricately connected to the speaker’s internal dialog. The participant feels, ‘here is part of me, something I’ve been puzzling about, now it’s in concrete form.’ Forever more, they ‘own’ the discussed art object because of that direct, personal, connection.”

— Mary Lewis, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) Trainer

Museum Clients

• de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA

• Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

• High Museum, Atlanta, GA

• Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA

• Portland Museum, Portland, ME

• Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN

• Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, ME

• Museum of Russian Icons, Clinton, MA

• St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO

• Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, BC, Canada

“On the invitation of Beth Merritt at AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums, I was led at the Phillips Collection by the Guide collective, Museum Sage. These lovely Midwesterners have found a way to make museums personal. Astounding. I haven’t enjoyed myself more in a museum in a very long time.”

– Mary Case, Qm2 museum management consultants

Museum Sage, formerly called Art-o-mancy, was one of 20 organizations cited in the American Alliance of Museum's annual forecasting publication, TrendsWatch 2015.

“The Museum Sage experience offers a new, exciting, and eye-opening way to appreciate and connect with the artwork of a museum. Our patrons walked away with thoughtful answers and deeper connections to the collection.”

— Doneeca Thurston, Adult Programs Coordinator, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem MA