Sticky situation: MFAH dumps its familiar labels
After years of vandalism, museum will switch to plastic admission tags
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s stickers were never meant to be material for street art, but they had become just that.
The little, round admission stickers of various colors that museum visitors have received as their proof of entry since the early 1990s had been piling up like bad polka dots on structures in the area, discarded as sticky flotsam around the neighborhood. Adhered to sculpture, traffic control boxes and street signs, the colorful collages had become a familiar sight in the city’s Museum District, even smothering at least one tree trunk.
But no more. Last week, museum officials replaced the stickers with plastic tags.
Mary Haus, the museum’s head of marketing and communications, said the sticker defacement had been “pretty consistent” for years, and removing them had become a routine job of the campus’ maintenance staff. But the issue intensified with the opening of the new Glassell School of Art building last May, which also increased foot traffic through the museum’s Cullen Sculpture Garden.
While the school was under construction, many visitors created collective art by placing their spent stickers on the plywood walls of a temporary walkway leading to a new subterranean parking garage. That seemed like a harm-
less creative act, because the walls were temporary. But when the walkways came down last spring, the habit, uh, stuck.
People have put stickers on the new building itself, Haus said, damaging its raw concrete surface, as well as on sculptures in the new Brown Foundation Plaza and the adjacent sculpture garden.
Cleaning the sculpture required calling in the museum’s conservation department. It also necessitated the plastic tags, which patrons are encouraged to place in recycling bins as they exit the museum.
“It will probably pick up once people get used to it,” Haus said, noting that the MFAH issued 7,990 tags during the first week of its new process, and 2,141 were left in the recycling bins at the exits — about a 27 percent return rate.
The museum plans to reuse the tags, which are color-coded to signify the day of admission — except for silver tags, which denote members, and black tags, which are issued on Thursdays, when general admission is free.
Artist Laura Spector said she visited the MFAH twice in the past week and forgot to deposit her silver tags. She also realized people could just keep them to avoid ticket lines in the future.
“The MFAH clearly didn’t think this part of the system all the way through,” she said. “What’s to stop anyone from handing off a plastic tag to someone waiting in line to get in?”
Spector saw that happen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where “there would always be a ton of artists outside on the stairs waiting for someone to drop their tin tag,” she said.
She also liked the sticker street art. “It kind of made Houston a bit more hip to see those furry-looking, sticker-covered street signs.”
The stickers were reusable, too. Haus said she did not believe repeat admissions were a major issue at the MFAH, which distributed metal tags prior to using the stickers.
Nor is it the first museum to adopt plastic tags. The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum also use them.
The American Alliance of Museums does not keep data on its members’ admission methods, said Sarah Cohn, who chairs that group’s committee for audience research and evaluation. But nationally, the methods vary.
While the San Antonio Museum of Art utilizes stickers, other large art institutions around Texas distribute paper receipts or tickets. Some don’t deal with the expense or issue at all. At the Dallas Museum of Art and Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum, for example, general admission is free every day; printed tickets are issued only for special exhibitions and scanned at gallery entrances.
The MFAH charges $7.50 to $15 for admission on most days, and Haus said the campus is too porous, with numerous entrances, to make paper tickets feasible for anything but special exhibitions.
At least one new museum — the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York — has gone high tech with its admissions. Visitors there receive microchip-enabled wristbands that allow them to interact with a kiosk and learn where to find the exhibitions that match their interests.
Dominique de Menil, the founder of the Menil Collection and an iconic Houston philanthropist, would not have approved: She wanted visitors to explore and discover art throughout her museum with open eyes and minds.
The Menil has been closed for an eight-month renovation, but when it reopens Sept. 22, admission to all of its exhibitions, as always, will be free. It’s never issued stickers.