For my Ignite Talk at MCN 2024, I imagined museums as places that invited their communities to practice feeling their feelings with curiosity and compassion.

Visitors already come to museums to have a pocket of time dedicated experience, whether social, contemplative, educational, or awe-inspiring. Museums are uniquely positioned to be community laboratories where visitors can experiment with playing with new ways of paying attention to their embodied experience — including their emotions. As a scholar and storyteller, the heart of my work is centered around facilitating these kinds of spaces through essays, talks, and workshops.

If you’d like to continue the conversation, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Here are some of the researchers, practitioners, writers, and artists who directly and indirectly informed my talk:

• Hillary L. McBride PhD, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living (especially the chapters: “The Body Overwhelmed: Healing the Body from Stress and Trauma” and “Feeling Feelings: Getting to Know the Emotional Body”)

• Diana Fosha, The AEDP Institute (the phrase from Fosha quoted in my talk was cited in McBride’s The Wisdom of Your Body and comes from: Diana Fosha, Daniel Siegel, and Marion Solomon, The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice)

• Jessi Rado, “Museum of Healing Attention” in MoMA Magazine (an illustrated tour through a fictional museum aimed at healing in the real world)

• Claire Bown, "Slow Looking Approaches for Vulnerable Audiences” and “Using art and objects to learn wellbeing skills and improve mental health” on The Art Engager Podcast

• Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

• Anne-Sophie Grassin, “Entretien autour de la médiation sensible” (in French, an overview of ‘sensory interpretation’)

• Juliette Verga Laliberté, “Cluny tranquille” (in French, sensory visits of the musée de Cluny)

• Museum Prescriptions (museum visits prescribed by doctors to their patients), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

• Kiersten Latham and Brenda Cowan, Flourishing in Museums: Towards a Positive Museology

• Stefano Mastandrea, Sabrina Fagioli, and Valeria Biasi, “Art and Psychological Well-Being: Linking the Brain to the Aesthetic Emotion”

• Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

• Katherine May, Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times

• Immersive audio tours of the Hôtel de la Marine, “The monument to go back in time: an immersive experience” (the headset with binaural sound technology that was described in the talk)

About Marina

Marina Gross-Hoy (she/her/elle) is a writer, Museum Studies PhD candidate, and speaker. She takes playing in museums very seriously.

Originally from Michigan, Marina moved to museum-saturated Paris to complete a master's in muséologie at the École du Louvre and work in the education department of the Agence France-Muséums. She moved back to North America for a PhD program in Museum Studies at the Université de Québec à Montréal, researching collaborations between museums and technology companies to develop engaging digital interpretation experiences for visitors. She also serves on the board of the Committee for Education and Cultural Action within the International Council of Museums (ICOM).

Marina writes about playing with new ways of paying attention to embodied experience. In The Museum Gaze, she explores how observing ordinary life with the same gaze we use with art in a museum can open us up to wonder, compassion, and empowerment. Her writing has appeared in Khôra, Mothering Spirit, and Anthrow Circus.

She currently lives in the Eastern Townships of Québec.