The de Young and Legion of Honor museums are the latest in a string of museums across the country making changes to their docent programs.
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.The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco , 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.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.“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 toIn 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.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.“The first thing to go is the free stuff that benefits the people who don’t have the resources to pay.”,” which opened earlier this month, the volunteer docents have been sidelined from giving tours. Instead, docents stand in the rooms, available for questions. Claude Monet, “The Grand Canal, Venice,” 1908. Photo by Randy Dodson, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Pressley cited crowded exhibition rooms and “strong demand for private tours” as reasons not to offer public tours for Monet. Private group exhibition tours 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 toShe said that communications with the Brooklyn Museum and crowding at the Legion’s recent “ 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.” “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.”its docent program in 2022 as part of an effort to “expand and diversify” its corps of volunteers. The Portland Art MuseumAt 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. At the FAMSF museums, paid “Interpretation Outreach Associates” lead school trips. Unpaid docents 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.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.Two typewriters equipped with “Claude,” Anthropic’s AI language model, were set up next door to the de Young Museum’s “Monet and Venice” show for its opening week. Photo by Nicholas David. “Tell me,” I wrote, “about how Monet and his contemporaries reacted to the technological advancements of their day.”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.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.”Join the 3,300 readers who keep Mission Local free for all!All we can say is thank you. Thank you for choosing to invest in a local newsroom rooted in San Francisco’s communities — one that listens first and reports deeply. Your contribution today helps sustain the reporting our city relies on all year long.nicholas.david@missionlocal.com Nicholas was born and raised in San Francisco, and has been tracking the city's changes and idiosyncrasies ever since. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature, and has written for local outlets since 2024.That’s not possible, any more than it’s possible for me to ask my vacuum cleaner to deal with the dust, or ask a calculator the answer to 8 x 4. Please keep your comments short and civil. Do not leave multiple comments under multiple names on one article. We will zap comments that fail to adhere to these short and easy-to-follow rules.Sign up for Mission Local's daily newsletter: The latest San Francisco news in your inbox, no more than once a day, for free.
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