For several years now, Seattle Art Museum has quietly been doing My Favorite Things tours. I'm not sure whose idea they were; maybe Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the former head of education at SAM, now at the Met; they started under her watch, if I remember right.

For My Favorite Things tours, SAM invites one person to pick one object and to talk about it in whatever way makes sense to them. There are no restrictions and no guidelines. I've done them, which I've loved, and I watch them from time to time on SAM's YouTube channel, though I wish far more were videotaped.

Jackson-Dumont's own MFT tour, on Mickalene Thomas's Hair Portrait #20, is here. "When I walk in here," she says, "I see myself." That's the subtext of every MFT tour.

The one above is a perfect example. Art is personal. Always personal. Jakob Dwight was the only one who saw a version of his own brain tumor, from when he was 12 years old—after having declined the opportunity to look at his actual brain tumor when the doctors asked—in Martin Lipofsky's glass sculpture in a case at the top of the first set of escalators at SAM. Now I will always see Jakob Dwight's imagined brain tumor in Martin Lipofsky's glass. There are so many secrets between people and art, and they only get out occasionally. If you see a sign for a My Favorite Things tour happening at SAM next time you're there, join it.