Improving Museum Security and Visitor Experiences
Home to more than 65,000 artworks, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) in Michigan remains a popular destination for its community and beyond.
In 2019, Security Management spoke with the museum’s director of security, Eric Drewry, CPP, about surveillance upgrades that the museum had recently installed. With the need to protect not only the artwork and approximately 1,125 staff and volunteers, but also the thousands of visitors that patron the museum in Midtown Detroit, and the fact that the museum was originally built in the 1920s, by the time Drewry joined the DIA in 2015 the museum’s surveillance system needed an upgrade.
Prior to the upgrades, the 189 cameras still featured the surveillance styles of the 1980s and 1990s—big, boxy, and analog. “For a number of reasons, the system had not been kept up with. No maintenance, no continued investment. It was not in good shape,” says Drewry in a recent 2024 interview with Security Management. “189 camera locations, but about 40 percent of those actually worked correctly.”
The museum is a three-story building, occupies a full city block, and boasts more than 100 galleries, so Drewry knew that upgrading surveillance throughout the entire facility would be a lengthy process.
Drewry and the museum ultimately selected and installed Axis Communications IP cameras to provide coverage of the roughly 658,000-square foot building. The DIA’s use of multi-sensor cameras, AXIS F44 Main Units, and Art Sentry (at the time known as Acuity-vct’s Video Capture System) allowed the museum to create a unified platform during a long transition process—one that allowed the new video management system to work with both the new IP cameras and older analog units.
Since then, Drewry’s team has expanded the initial upgrades. Among the added components were new models of the newer units, including AXIS F34 Main Units, which support discrete sensors, and AXIS M30 Network Dome Cameras. Altogether, they generate a multi-stream solution that amplifies surveillance coverage throughout the museum without taking up chunks of space in the facility.
“We’ve never hit a point where we’ve said, ‘This camera is not doing what we intended for it to do,’” says Drewry. Instead, “we find areas that we want to add cameras, we want to replace, or just get a different view on.” While the initial deployment of the new systems resulted in approximately 500 IP cameras, the museum has added almost another 100 units since then.
The security team determines which areas require new cameras either through a maintenance cycle or by consulting a physical security design manual. The manual, relying on how each space in the museum is classified with a security designation, provides a determination on how many motion sensors and cameras, as well as other components, should cover the area.
Other opportunities to upgrade existing or nearly outdated components arise when the museum decides to renovate one of its galleries or other spaces. At the time of the interview, the museum was preparing to renovate one of its contemporary galleries. “We have an opportunity now to get in there and really make sure that we have the right cameras in the right places,” Drewry says. The project is “a great opportunity for us to just go in with the newest technology, the newest versions of the cameras that we love,” he adds.
Opting for installing additional cameras or sensors during a renovation is also less intrusive or disruptive to the museum’s visitors, employees, and departments.
Using the system allows the security team to monitor an “encyclopedic collection,” according to Drewry. “Our collection can span anywhere from our ancient Middle Eastern galleries, where you can look at artifacts that are dated back to 10,000 BCE. Then you can walk upstairs to the contemporary galleries,” Drewry says. It’s common for a featured artist to be giving a lecture on one of their pieces displayed in the contemporary gallery. “It’s all of that and everything in between,” Drewry adds.
However, these surveillance tools were initially selected and chosen again because they could go beyond just monitoring, offering a form of object protection. The system has also helped museum staff better understand which pieces were more popular—and therefore, potentially more vulnerable.
The surveillance system registers every time someone gets too close to an artwork, generating a heat map where the most popular items (and the ones where the protection zone around is most often violated) register as “hot.” By partnering with conservation and curatorial departments, the security team leveraged data from surveillance feeds to customize protection around certain works without sacrificing the visitor experience.
A Special Celebration
In 1922, the DIA was the first public museum in the United States to acquire a painting by impressionist master Vincent Van Gogh. The 1887 Self-Portrait of the Dutch artist normally resides in the central wing of the museum. However, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the acquisition, the DIA presented a special exhibition, Van Gogh in America.
The ample collection of the Dutch artist’s work was featured at the museum for four months, with 74 paintings, drawings, and prints. The pieces were loaned from various other museums, institutions, and private collections. “We had a very high concentration of Van Gogh artwork,” says Drewry, adding that Starry Night, on loan from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, was the highlight of the show as it rarely leaves the French museum.
“We were certainly able to leverage our standing as one of the top fine art museums in the country and also as the first public museum in the United States to have a Van Gogh painting in our collection,” says Drewry. “The whole idea was we were going to celebrate the centennial anniversary of that acquisition and really highlight Van Gogh as this revolutionary artist that probably didn’t get the recognition that he deserved at the time.”
Although the mood around the exhibition was one of celebration, from a security perspective “it was incredibly nerve-wracking,” says Drewry, given the concentration of well-known and high-value artwork. “…Those four months were probably some of the most gray hair-inducing months of my life.”
Drewry and his team were not the only ones experiencing anxiety. The institutions lending their artwork outlined various loan requirements that the DIA had to agree to before the pieces could be included in the exhibition, such as maintaining a direct line of sight and advanced analytics and protection.
For example, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam also asked the DIA to provide live camera footage, operating at 30 frames per second and continuously recorded during the entirety of the exhibition. “That presented a big challenge for us,” Drewry says.
Initially, the museum’s internal network could not support the request. Drewry again looked to Axis for solutions and found one: the AXIS Camera Station S2216 Appliance. The unit is an all-in-one recorder that supports high-definition surveillance, and for the museum it worked as a separate server that the cameras could stream back to. “It was a huge game changer, a lifesaver for us in terms of the ability to meet those loan requirements,” says Drewry.
Overall, the surveillance solutions deployed throughout the exhibit area and the museum meant that there was no need for the museum’s insurance provider to require an additional multi-billion dollar indemnity for the exhibition.
Overall, the exhibition was a tremendous success for the DIA, with Drewry estimating it to be the most well-attended exhibition in the history of the museum. “We had about 220,000 to 230,000 visitors go through that exhibition in four months,” he says. He notes that perhaps the only continent not represented by visitors to the show was Antarctica. “…There were people coming from all over the world to see this exhibition. I talked to visitors from Australia, from Europe, from Asia.”
The exhibition also represented a success for the museum’s security team. “We were able to have all of this come to the DIA and protect it and also make it accessible. That’s always the balance that we try to strike,” says Drewry.
Despite the enormous popularity of the show, Drewry felt that with their surveillance system, security maintained sight lines and protection of all the pieces without sacrificing visitors’ opportunity to have a personal experience with the artwork.
