Getty's New Interpretations Opens Global Museum Interpretation Grants: Three Tiers Up to $200,000, Inquiries Due February 18, 2027

Most museum funding follows the objects. Conservation grants restore paintings, acquisition funds buy them, and capital campaigns build the galleries that hold them. The work of helping a visitor understand what they are looking at gets far less: wall text, gallery guides, multilingual access, audio description, visitor research. In most institutions it competes for scraps in the education budget.

On October 28, 2026, the Getty Foundation announced a dedicated funding stream for that work. New Interpretations opens with $2.7 million for 11 pilot projects worldwide. More importantly for most institutions, it comes with a commitment to at least three annual open funding cycles starting in 2027, open to museums and exhibiting arts nonprofits of any size, in any country.

The first deadline is February 18, 2027, for a short inquiry form. That is close enough that institutions planning 2027–2028 exhibitions should decide this month whether to apply.

What Getty funded in the pilot round

Getty's project page describes the pilot as 10 international projects plus a field-wide survey. They were chosen to "demonstrate the range of activities that will be eligible for support," which makes them the best available guide to what the review committee wants to see. Individual award amounts were not disclosed.

Three patterns stand out. Language access appears more than once, at the Walker and at ACMI. Visitor research with a public deliverable is at the center of the Denver and First Americans grants. And network building is funded as a category in its own right. "We want to support work that is creative and experimental, but also rigorous and based in research," senior program officer Heather E. MacDonald told The Art Newspaper. She added that Getty hopes projects will "create a ripple effect" among peer institutions.

Why Getty is doing this now

This is a return, not a new interest. From 1986 through the early 2000s, Getty's collection-interpretation grants paid for reinstallations at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Cooper Hewitt, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and others, often pairing the technology of the day with formal visitor research. Getty describes interpretation as having since "coalesced into a distinct field" and calls it "an exciting but often underfunded part of museums."

The timing also fits federal conditions. US museums have faced a turbulent two years in federal cultural funding. IMLS and NEA programs that once supported interpretive planning and access work have been cut, frozen, or reshaped. A private funder offering up to $200,000 for multi-year interpretive experiments, with no citizenship or US-location requirement, is now one of the more significant sources in this niche. It also funds work that rarely gets earmarked support from donors, because visitor research has no naming opportunity.

The three funding categories

From 2027, grants will be awarded each summer in three categories.

Project Completion: up to $75,000. This funds the implementation and evaluation phase of a project that will finish within 15 months of the application date. It can support temporary exhibitions or permanent-collection projects, but they must be "shovel-ready" and involve significant interpretation components. For a February 2027 application, the project should finish by about May 2028. This is the tier for an exhibition already on the calendar whose interpretive layer is underfunded.

New Practices: $75,000 to $200,000, up to three years. This tier funds experimentation and risk-taking, with time for formative research and summative evaluation. It can cover every stage from research and planning through implementation and evaluation. The Walker's multilingual model and Denver's AI-era visitor study are the clearest pilot examples. Getty specifically rewards risk here, so a proposal that only scales up a proven tactic will read as a Project Completion request in the wrong category.

Professional Networks: up to $150,000. This tier funds training, convenings, professional development and other network-building. The Leeum–M+ convenings and the AAMI field survey are the models. It suits consortia, regional museum associations, and service organizations, as well as a single institution willing to act as a hub.

Eligibility, and what is out of scope

Eligible applicants are museums and exhibiting arts nonprofits of all sizes and types, including non-collecting institutions, from the US or abroad. Kunsthalles, artist-run exhibition spaces, and university galleries without permanent collections qualify.

Two hard limits:

1. Projects must focus on visual artworks. History museums, science centers, and natural history collections are not the target unless the project centers on visual art.
2. Projects must focus on unguided interpretation in gallery settings. Getty explicitly excludes structured gallery teaching, art education, formal curriculum development, and learning programs designed for school-age audiences.

The second limit will catch the most applicants. Many museums run interpretation out of the education department, and education staff naturally lean toward docent programs, school tours and teacher resources. None of those qualify. The test is what a visitor meets on their own, in the gallery: labels, digital guides, multisensory stations, multilingual text, captioning, audio description, co-authored community labels, wayfinding through difficult subject matter.

How the selection works

Applications follow two stages:

1. Inquiry form (opens on Getty's New Interpretations page by mid-January 2027, due February 18, 2027). Getty Foundation staff screen for eligibility and fit with the selection criteria.
2. Invited full application, reviewed by an external advisory panel of museum professionals with expertise in interpretation, research and evaluation.

Award notifications are expected before the end of summer 2027. Questions go to newinterpretations@getty.edu.

Getty says preference goes to projects that:

• show institutional commitment to visitor-centered interpretation;
• foster experimentation and interdepartmental collaboration;
• expand rigorous visitor-centered research with broad dissemination to the field;
• build regional and national networks;
• offer pragmatic solutions to known problems such as access barriers, or push the boundaries of museum practice.

How to write a competitive inquiry

Prove institutional commitment. This is the first criterion, and it is about the institution, not the project. Getty sought pilot partners that had "shown a commitment to visitor-centred research." Show a track record: past visitor studies, an interpretation plan, an evaluation position, a board-approved accessibility plan, or a prior project that changed course based on visitor data. If you have no track record, build the project so it creates one. A New Practices proposal that sets up an institution's first formal evaluation process is a credible case.

Name the curator and the interpreter in the same paragraph. "Interdepartmental collaboration" is a scoring preference because interpretation projects usually fail at the handoff between curatorial and education or engagement teams. Make the shared ownership concrete: name a curatorial co-lead, define who has final say over label text, and explain how visitor research will feed back into curatorial decisions.

Budget for evaluation and dissemination from the start. Getty "encourages" dissemination activities in proposals. In practice that means expecting them. Budget for a public report, a conference presentation, open-sourced tools (as ACMI is doing with its captioning software), or a convening. A proposal without a dissemination line suggests the lessons will stay in-house.

Pick the category honestly. If your exhibition opens in fall 2027 and you need label translation and audio description, that is Project Completion. Don't stretch it into New Practices to reach a higher ceiling. If you want to test whether co-authored labels change how long visitors stay with difficult works, and you need a year of baseline research first, that is New Practices. Reviewers will notice a mismatch between your ambition and your category.

Lead with access, but go past compliance. Access barriers are named in the selection criteria, but ADA-baseline work such as large-print labels or a wheelchair-height case is unlikely to stand out. The pilots point to access as research: how language shapes belonging, how captioning works for time-based media, how Native audiences experience exhibitions about their own histories.

Small institutions should not self-select out. Getty says the program is open to institutions "of all sizes and types," and the pilot cohort deliberately mixed scales. A small exhibiting nonprofit with a sharp question and a credible evaluation partner, such as a university museum studies program or an independent evaluator, can compete in Project Completion or a modest New Practices request.

The calendar

The work to do before January is mostly internal. Pick the project, agree on the curatorial and interpretation co-leads, line up an evaluator, and write a one-paragraph research question. When the form opens, the inquiry should take a few hours, not weeks.

Find more arts, culture and museum funders, including private foundations with international eligibility, in the Granted grants database.