Over the Counter

A love letter to the museum gift shop

When I was 21, I started what would become my most important job in the museum and gallery sector as a museum gift shop attendant at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC Vancouver. It came with a comfortable amount of flexibility around my class schedule, as well as the very nice title of “Museum Assistant”, which I remember thinking looked impressive or promising on a resume. The shifts were usually no more than 4-6 hours long, and included what you would expect from retail job, like operating the cash register, restocking shelves, cleaning and organizing, and answering customer questions. On the surface, it was a practical student placement that allowed me to make a little bit of money a few days a week without cutting into the hours I needed to put into completing my degree but it was also the job that laid the foundation for many of the perspectives and values that continue to inform my relationships with collections, collecting habits, and institutions to this day.

What has always appealed to me about a museum or gallery gift shop is the tactile nature of the space in contrast to the galleries. Especially after an afternoon of self-monitoring and keeping a sterile distance from the art or belongings we have seen in glass cases, it always feels refreshing to pick up and flip through a book, rifle through posters and prints, or help a child pick out a soft toy. In a museum or gallery we are often seeing things through a lens of time, works of art or cultural belongings that often belong to eras other than our own. But a gift shop is immediate and contemporary, trinkets that we can touch and take home because they belong to and are made for our own moment in history. We cannot touch the antique ceramics guarded so carefully in the previous rooms, but we can handle the teacups in the gift shops and take them home in our tote bags if we like. We are meant to gaze up at the objects in a museum with reverence, but we can meet the objects in the shop with a much more casual, lateral approach, one that satisfies our impulses to collect or to surround ourselves in our own environments with beautiful or meaningful things.

It was through this role, and the thousands of tiny interactions I had with visitors passing through the gift shop looking to collect something for themselves or for others that taught me the most of how people actually engage with and experience a museum or gallery on a day to day basis, and it was these interactions that I missed the most when I worked in curatorial positions later in my career. In the majority of conventional museum careers, with the exception of educators, gallery guides, or other front line personnel, your spontaneous interactions with the public become few and far between. In the gift shop, you are the first person they encounter after they have spent anywhere from an hour to a full day looking at things they are likely seeing for the first time, and therefore the first person they tend to debrief with about it. Gift shops are often strategically placed near the exit (or even more strategically are the exit themselves) making browsing unavoidable. This is good for the bottom line of an institution of course, because if a visitor is compelled to “exit through the gift shop”, they are likely to spend a little more money on top of what they have already spent on admission, special passes, or coffee and pastries. But as a young person learning to have fascinating and sometimes challenging conversations in an institutional setting, putting me on the other side of an almost unavoidable gift shop counter was a surprisingly valuable learning experience.

Sometimes, it would be very simple things. We sold bars of chocolate right at the counter, and often a visitor would want a sweet treat to finish off their day. Other times, it was richer and more complex, and a wide eyed museum-goer would approach the counter having just learned about something completely new and was looking for whatever books or resources I had on the subject. Sometimes they would be so moved by seeing a Chilkat blanket they would want a small, woven necklace with a similar pattern, accompanied by a brochure explaining more about the weaving process. On more than one occasion, a visitor would come in having achieved a long held dream of seeing Bill Reid’s Raven and the First Men or standing in the iconic totem pole and house post atrium and would want to purchase a print or poster that commemorated that almost spiritual experience. And through it all, they would talk to me, telling me about what they had seen that day, what they had learned, what they liked or disliked. Sometimes they would be very blunt about what they had encountered that they found shocking or disturbing, as there was more than one conversation I had with visitors from out of the country that had no idea about Canada’s colonial history until they saw it contextualized in an exhibition. They asked me big questions, and then asked me to show them fridge magnets with an artist’s work that they had just seen for the first time.

These are not conversations that have been a regular part of my life for a long time. When you work as a curator, your time is organized by appointment, not by chance encounter. The questions come to you in Q&A sessions following a lecture or panel discussion, and when you are doing front-facing work in the gallery such as giving tours, it’s more likely to be for donors, special interest groups, or the occasional dignitary. This is where I always felt my work could keep me unbalanced — while a museum does not survive without its devoted patrons and their (often decades) of consistent support, it also does not survive without the much larger demographic of individuals, students, families, and other one-off visitors that fill the halls day in and day out, but my direct attention could be so rarely allocated to being face to face and communicating with the latter.

My time in the gift shop encouraged me to be curious about the experiences of the people that passed through the museum on a daily basis, and about the things of beauty they noticed during their visit that I might have overlooked. It was also the role in which my formative thinking developed surrounding the human compulsion to collect things, and would inform my understanding and critiques of the distinctions between concepts of belongings as being “assets” and “heirlooms”, versus what might just be considered to be “kitsch” or “souvenirs”. In the museum and gallery world, we love to talk about “great collections”, not only institutionally but also in private collections, and we celebrate and honour the legacies of “great collectors” who have dedicated their lives to the arts and the pursuit of building outstanding, museum-worthy private holdings of art. Their collecting habits are often informed by any manner of factors, such as true and deep connections to the artists they collect, to a refined aesthetic sense, to an interest in a particular school, style, or era. Over time, these collections come to be considered assets as they accrue cultural and dollar value and are carefully insured and loaned out to or donated to institutions with significant fanfare, or resold on the secondary market with high profile provenance.

However, it is not only the builders of great private collections that possess exquisite taste, and often the difference between a collection of art objects that are donated or resold for substantial profit and a collection of beautiful things that becomes a family heirloom or “just a souvenir” is often simply a matter of access to resources. Working at a museum gift shop, I always considered art sales to be a part of my job description, even though it looked different from a commercial gallery or an auction house. A customer might agonize over two Bill Reid prints, or between a Maxine Noel mug versus a Kenojuak Ashevak mug. Perhaps a couple might come in to purchase their wedding rings from a carefully curated cabinet of gold and silver jewelry handmade by local artists. A graduation or retirement present might be selected from a collection of licensed silverware designed by master carvers. All of these things to me are art objects, but they are accessible at any price point.

Years later, I would hold up one of my coffee mugs with a design on it by a young Inuk artist as an example of a beautiful art object in my collection that I valued only to be scoffed at. Whether the reaction was due to it being mass produced, or because the artist was relatively unknown in the fine art world, or even because the idea of something as ordinary and practical as a mug being considered “art” is not something I can be certain of, but I am certain of its value to me. Having worked in fine art my entire career and yet never having a fine art budget to buy from commercial galleries or auction houses has never stopped me from enjoying, and desiring to collect, beautiful things. Whether it is mugs, print runs from young artists, earrings, or fridge magnets, I know the stories and intention of the art objects in my collection. However, my collection as it stands now is not one that would ever be considered an asset, would never be insured, and if I were to make a move to donate it to a museum or gallery it would not even be considered.

I look back fondly on my time working in a gift shop, because I got to work with people that had big, beautiful questions fresh from what they had just seen in the galleries which taught me how to have an hold these conversations, but also because I got to work with collectors that were like me — collectors looking to curate their lives and homes with art objects that are frequently confused for being little souvenirs or nothing more than kitsch. Just like many of the great collectors that have shaped the arts landscape or made landmark contributions to museum and gallery collections, a customer in a museum or gallery gift shop is often also making a meaningful purchase of an artist’s work whom they admire, have a connection to, or are from a particular school, style, or era that they find interesting. They can have Van Gogh on a teapot, Rembrandt on a tote bag, or Monet on an umbrella. Even though the original works may be distant from us through the lens of space or time, the objects representing them belong to our moment and we can touch them, take them home, and incorporate them into our daily lives, where they accumulate value to us through the years and hold the stories and memories of what was learned and experienced on the day we picked them out.