The Bellwater Museum of Art is more than doubling its volunteer docent corps, from 12 to 25, ahead of what curator Priscilla Adeyemi expects to be its busiest mural tour season yet along the Kestrel River Greenway.
The Bellwater Museum of Art has finished training 13 new volunteer docents, bringing its total corps to 25, ahead of the second season of guided walking tours along the museum’s riverfront mural installation on the Kestrel River Greenway. Curator Priscilla Adeyemi, who oversees the docent program alongside her curatorial duties, said the expansion was a direct response to demand the museum badly underestimated when the murals first opened.
“We planned for steady interest and got something closer to a rush,” Adeyemi said. “Several Saturday tour slots filled within hours of being posted last season, and we had to turn away walk-up visitors more times than I’m comfortable with for a program that’s supposed to be a public benefit.” Museum records show weekend tour capacity was full for roughly two-thirds of the dates offered last season, with a waitlist that at times exceeded 40 names for a single Saturday morning slot.
Training a bigger corps
New docents completed an eight-week training program covering the murals’ individual histories, the artists behind each panel, and techniques for leading groups of up to 20 people along the greenway’s uneven trail sections. Adeyemi said the museum specifically recruited for a wider range of backgrounds this cycle, including several volunteers from Foundry Row and Riverside Heights who she said bring a different perspective than the museum’s traditionally downtown-heavy volunteer base.
Retired schoolteacher Harold Bienvenue, one of the incoming docents, said he applied after taking a mural tour himself last season and feeling frustrated that the guide couldn’t get to some of his questions about the industrial-history panels given the group’s size. “The tour was good, but you could tell the docent was rushing to cover everything for twenty people in ninety minutes,” Bienvenue said. “I wanted to be part of fixing that, and thirty-eight years in a classroom turned out to be decent preparation for keeping a walking group’s attention.”
What the bigger corps changes
With more docents available, Adeyemi said the museum plans to add a second weekday evening tour slot and reduce group sizes on the most popular Saturday morning tours from 20 people down to roughly 12, a change she said should improve the experience even as overall visitor capacity grows. The museum is also introducing a Spanish-language tour option for the first time, led by one of the new docents who is bilingual.
Adeyemi said the timing of the expansion is tied partly to her own planning for a possible second phase of murals extending into Riverside Heights, which remains pending a future council budget vote. “If that second phase happens, we’ll need an even bigger docent corps than the one we just built,” she said. “Better to grow into that gradually than to scramble again the way we did last year.”
We built this mural program to invite people down to the water. It would have been a strange kind of failure if the tours meant to welcome them in became the bottleneck instead.
Priscilla Adeyemi, curator, Bellwater Museum of Art
Not all of the growth has been smooth. Adeyemi acknowledged that scheduling 25 volunteers, most of whom have other jobs or retirement commitments, has proven more logistically complex than managing the original dozen, and the museum has had to build a more formal shift-scheduling system than it needed in the program’s first year. “Twelve people, you can coordinate over a group text,” she said. “Twenty-five people needs an actual system, and we built that system a little later than I’d have liked.”
The museum is also fielding early interest from several artists who worked on the original mural series about leading occasional specialty tours themselves, a feature Adeyemi said proved popular but logistically difficult to schedule regularly last season given most of the artists’ other commitments. She said the museum hopes to schedule at least one artist-led tour per month this season as availability allows.
- Docent corps grows from 12 to 25 ahead of this season’s mural tours
- Saturday tour group sizes will shrink from 20 to roughly 12 visitors
- A Spanish-language tour option launches for the first time this season
Tour registration for the new season opens later this month, with Adeyemi urging visitors who were shut out last year to book early. “We can’t promise every slot will be available whenever someone happens to check,” she said. “But we can promise there will be a lot more of them this time.”