Inside the Complex (and Pricey) Business of Museum Rebranding

For the past several years, the board of trustees and senior staff at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, have been working to make the museum—founded in 1842 and one of the oldest continuously operating art museums in the country—more user-friendly. The institution’s website and gallery labels “are less jargony, more the way people actually talk,” April Swieconek, a spokesperson for the museum, told Observer. Security guards in the galleries have been replaced by “gallery assistants,” whose role is to help visitors navigate the museum and locate what they’re looking for. Staff and outside consultants have organized listening sessions to better understand how people in the Hartford area perceive the museum’s collections, exhibitions and programs. Curators still lead the exhibition planning, but members of the public are now invited to participate in selecting what will be shown and how it will be presented.

The institution also decided to stop using the word “Atheneum” in public-facing materials because, as Swieconek put it, “people don’t know what an atheneum is” or how to pronounce it, and the term struck many as “elite, exclusive, too clubby, which is the opposite of what we’re trying to project.” The museum didn’t actually eliminate the word Atheneum from its name, which remains part of its legal nomenclature as registered with the Connecticut Attorney General’s office, but it did, in December 2025, rebrand as The Wadsworth. At the listening sessions, “we found that the word ‘atheneum’ really did bother people,” Swieconek added.

Institutional name changes are not unusual, though they can be exceedingly contentious. In October 2025, the Philadelphia Museum of Art became the Philadelphia Art Museum, and the rebrand—which included a new logo that the museum’s Board of Trustees claimed they did not approve—was widely mocked, with critics referring to the institution as “PhArt.” Some renamings, however, go off without a hitch. In 2024, for example, the New-York Historical Society removed the hyphen and the word “society” to become New York Historical. Like “atheneum,” the word “society” seemed to suggest exclusivity, and its removal, a spokesperson told Observer, signaled “that the institution is welcoming to all.” The new name came with a new logo—the letter H—which she said “reflects the history of New York state and Indigenous cultures of the United States, and has a prominent crossbar that nods to the legacy of the hyphen and the history of New York City as a bridge of peoples and cultures.” As New York Historical’s president and chief executive officer Louise Mirrer put it, “with our new name and look, we are embracing our responsibility not simply as stewards and storytellers of history but… as a contemporary leader in ensuring democracy’s future.”

Other name changes are on the horizon. Once renovations are finished, the Daytona Beach Museum of Arts & Sciences in Florida will become The Brown—short for The Cici and Hyatt Brown Museum of Art, Science & History, named for the couple who donated $150 million to fund the new building. Indeed, money often plays a decisive role in renaming. It cost billionaire real estate developer and art collector Jorge M. Pérez $35 million in 2013 to rename the Miami Art Museum the Pérez Art Museum Miami. (Other cultural institutions play the name game, too. In 2014, film and music producer David Geffen paid $100 million to put his name on what had been Avery Fisher Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center; Avery Fisher himself had donated $10.5 million back in 1973.)

Museum name changes aren’t always about money. They can reflect clarity, convenience or a shift in mission. According to a spokesperson, many visitors had already referred to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as the Philadelphia Art Museum. That said, when and why institutions rename themselves isn’t always obvious. Locals may say Philadelphia Art Museum, but the Federal Reserve is still known as the Fed without any move to change its name. Italy’s Uffizi—“the offices”—remains the Uffizi because there’s no confusion in Florence over why a museum isn’t called a museum.

In San Diego, the Museum of Man faced decades of pressure to change its name. “There had been community pushback about the name for decades,” James Haddan, senior director of development for what became the Museum of Us, told Observer. “Anthropologically, the name ‘man’ means ‘mankind,’ but that’s not the way the word is used in everyday language. People would ask us if this was a museum about men. There was constant confusion.”

Beginning in 2017, museum staff held focus groups with community members, “shopping a number of names” to understand public preferences. Top choices included Museum of Cultural Connections, Museum of Humankind, Museum of We, The Human Experience, The Culture Project, Museum of Everyone and the eventual winner: the Museum of Us. “We didn’t want the museum to be seen as a stuffy place but a place for all of us,” he said, adding there was even discussion about dropping the word “Museum” altogether, though they ultimately kept it instead of “Center.”

In November, the Hockaday Museum in Kalispell, Montana—named for local graphic artist Hugh Hockaday, who gave art lessons in the area—was renamed Glacier Art Museum. “We’re located just outside of Glacier National Park,” executive director Alyssa Cordova told Observer. “People just thought of us as the Glacier Art Museum. Over time, it became more and more challenging to explain the name Hockaday to people who had never heard of him.” Kalispell has since become Montana’s fastest-growing city and a popular tourist destination. “When people look us up online, they search for Glacier, art and museum, so a lightbulb went off,” Cordova said. “It made a lot of sense to rename ourselves Glacier Art Museum.”

These changes don’t happen quickly—or cheaply. New logos, signage and business cards must be created. Letterhead and websites must be redesigned. Trademarks must be filed. Designers and consultants are hired. “We spent tens of thousands of dollars,” Haddan said of the Museum of Us rebrand. There was also a transitional period with a sign that crossed out “Man” and wrote “Us” underneath before final signage was installed.

According to Cordova, “we didn’t throw out our old letterhead. I still use it,” noting that the Glacier Art Museum’s relatively slow identity rollout helped spread costs over multiple years and budgets. The Wadsworth was less forthcoming; Swieconek declined to say what dropping “Atheneum” cost, but the museum did hire Saffron Consultants—an international branding firm with offices in London, Madrid, Tokyo and Vienna—for a 10-month engagement that included listening sessions and a strategic report.

The Philadelphia Art Museum rebrand project spent $250,000 “on discovery, strategy and visual labs,” according to a spokesperson, with additional funds from the general operating budget covering “wayfinding and paid media.” The museum’s existing branding, it’s worth noting, wasn’t even particularly old; PAM, then PMA, rebranded with Pentagram in 2014.

Museum name changes can be so pricey because they often reflect not just an identity update but also a mission update. In 2016, Seattle’s Experience Music Project (EMP) became the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) after several interim identities, including the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (EMPSFM). Founded in 2000 by billionaire Paul Allen, the institution had changed names five times.

Michele Y. Smith, chief executive officer of MoPOP, told Observer that the most recent change reflected the museum’s “expanding mission, programs and impact and ultimately celebrating a much broader swath of creativity beyond music and science fiction, so it was a natural evolution toward pop culture.” The update required legal filings, a logo and website redesign, a trademark search and a wide-ranging communications strategy. “A lawyer for legal guidance on the name change and to ensure compliance with local laws and regulations” was also involved—proof that sometimes a new name is a big megillah.

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