Skift Take
Museums can be powerful drivers of tourism and the newest Smithsonian, which quickly became a black American mecca, sets the bar high. Case in point -- how many museums have a line to get into the gift shop?
Today’s successful museum isn’t a stuffy old gallery fit for groups of bored schoolchildren — it’s a world-class attraction that visitors clamor to share on Instagram. A modern museum is expected to offer an acclaimed restaurant, a design-centric boutique with a lot more than branded pencils, and an immersive, photogenic experience in the galleries.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. sets the bar high. (The acronym NMAAHC is both clunky and unpronounceable, and doesn’t do the museum, which is the newest under the Smithsonian umbrella, any branding favors, so it's referred to here as “the African American museum.”)
The museum opened to great fanfare in September 2016 at the end of America’s first black presidency under Barack Obama, after 13 years of planning with $540 million in funding. The building’s bronze architecture recalls a Yoruba crown; the theater bears Oprah Winfrey’s name; the grand opening saw Stevie Wonder, Patti LaBelle, and Common; and crowds from around the country and world quickly spread about the new black America mecca.
A Powerful Tourist Attraction
The African American museum is well-positioned as an attraction, as well as a valuable piece of cultural heritage. The museum released a special app for the grand opening that included a trip-planner, which helped visitors find hotels and restaurants, and navigate the city by car, ride-share, or public transit. Hopefully the museum will incorporate these features into its regular app.
In a conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic’s Washington Ideas Forum last fall, the museum’s director, Lonnie Bunch, said that the strength of the Smithsonian brand raised public interest and vice versa. “The Smithsonian moved because the public got excited,” said Bunch, who previously worked with two other high-profile Smithsonians: the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of American History.
The African American museum’s central location on the National Mall couldn’t be more tourist-friendly, an easy five-to-10-minute cab ride from Union Station, and the fact that it’s America’s only national museum devoted to black history means that it has little competition. It can coexist with other big-name museums on the National Mall that have different audiences and focal points, the way that New York’s Museum of Modern Art coexists with the more traditional Metropolitan Museum of Art.
