“Atheneum” remains part of The Wadsworth’s legal nomenclature as registered with the Connecticut Attorney General’s office. Courtesy of the Wadsworth

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 Security guards in the galleries have been replaced by “gallery assistants,” whose role is to help visitors navigate the museum and locate what they’re looking for.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.

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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........

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