I was on my hands and knees next to Mona Hatoum’s Prayer Mat at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) when I noticed, in my periphery, a museum guard walking toward me. When I’m taken by a piece of art, I often get as close to it as I possibly can while still respecting the museum’s policies about viewing distance. The guards, of course, don’t know this about me, so they sometimes circle to make sure I’m not a completely unhinged person who has come to lick all the artwork.

Prayer Mat is exhibited on the floor and is made up of thousands of nickel-plated pin nails sticking up from a canvas backing to give the impression of a thick, solid rug. So I was on the floor, too, trying to figure out how Hatoum had managed to make the piece, when the guard approached. I was waiting for the gentle request—or the sharp reprimand—to move away from the work, but instead she leaned down and said, “Isn’t it amazing?” We marveled at Hatoum’s craftsmanship, exchanging our thoughts about how she might have created it, and then stood together in stunned appreciative silence.

A year later, I walked into the Gagosian Gallery in NYC to see a show by sculptor Richard Serra. In the main room, Serra had installed a series of 40-foot-long, 8” thick grey-blue steel slabs, zig zagging through the space. As with many of Serra’s installations, the scale of it was overwhelming, and it was impossible not to feel humbled by it.

Perhaps because I was poring over the exhibition catalog like it was a dessert menu, or maybe because I said, “Holy shit!” louder than I should have when I entered the gallery, a guard walked over to me, overflowing with enthusiasm. “It weighs 350 tons!” he exclaimed. My jaw dropped. “What?!?!” He showed me the wall that they removed to bring in the slabs. He told me about the structural engineer who had to come in every five days to make sure that the building wasn’t sinking. We gushed. Then, gesturing to enormous blocks of steel in front of us, he whispered, “You can touch them.” I couldn’t tell if that was the policy for the show or if he was doing a kindness for an art lover at a time when the gallery was nearly empty and no one would see. I didn’t question it. I just discretely and reverently ran my fingers over the planes and corners of the piece as I walked through it, the experience so much richer for the care and information he chose to share with me.

Museum and gallery guards often spend more time with the art than the curators do. And they get to witness something that neither the curators nor the artists do: how people interact with the work over time, how they respond to it and are moved by it. These staff members have perhaps the greatest insight of anyone in the art world into the direct connection between maker and viewer. (And they hold a lot of inside-track information about the way shows come together.)

So, it seems an inspired idea that the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has just opened an exhibition curated by members of their security staff. Over the course of the past year, seventeen members of the security staff were led through the exhibition process by Chief Curator Dr. Asma Naeem, with mentorship provided by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, a former curator for the Met as well as the former Executive Director and President of the Studio Museum in Harlem. The staff members were paid for their time and talents in addition to their regular salary, tasked with selecting pieces that were meaningful to them from the museum’s collection.

Because security staff at most art institutions tends to be more representative of the community than the curatorial staff, and because the guards are dramatically underpaid and undervalued, I’m imagining what it would look like ore museums adopted this type of programming. I, for one, am more interested in learning about the art that calls to the arts workers who inhabit the museum than in seeing another pet exhibition funded by a wealthy donor.

I’m not suggesting that this would solve the systemic problems of the art world—the staff members would still be selecting works from collections plagued by decades of gatekeeping, colonialism, and a failure to rematriate objects to their rightful homes; and the highest paying and most influential positions are still predominantly held by white men—but it would be one small way in which institutions could put more time and resources into their arts workers who would each come away from the experience with a line item on their resume from having co-curated a major exhibition.

It would also serve as an important reminder to everyone else that you don’t need to have a degree in art history or museum studies in order to have an opinion about art or to be worthy of providing a lens through which other people view it.