Many US museums are offering substantial online resources for education and entertainment. Virtual tours, lectures and children’s activities can be found on their websites. They have also developed unique ways to connect with audiences through social media. Question and answer sessions and virtual happy hours with curators and librarians are taking place. Some also have contests encouraging audiences to recreate their favorite artworks using items, people or pets in their homes and then share those photos to their account. There have been some incredibly creative entries! This is the first in a series of posts about some of these initiatives from museums around the country. Many can be found on social media at #MuseumFromHome.
The National Gallery of Art
Website @ngadc (Instagram) @nationalgalleryofart (Facebook)
The National Gallery of Art is located in Washington DC. Its collection of more than 150,000 paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, photographs, prints, and drawings spans the history of Western art.
The Gallery offers virtual tours of three current exhibitions, “True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870”; “Degas at the Opéra”; and “Raphael and His Circle.” Related videos can be found here.
For children, they offer the NGA Kids iPad app which teaches art through fun activities.
Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art Department of Communications
Frequent virtual tours of their permanent collection are featured in their Instagram Stories @ngadc. Each begins with a panoramic view of the works in a room, followed by close-up photos combined with interesting information about each one. You can find previous tours in their highlights.
Videos featuring curators presenting works in the collection can be found on their Facebook account, @nationalgalleryofart.
Their newest initiative is “Look Slowly, Think Artfully: Museums Create Calm and Community Online.” The public are invited to join Gallery educators in looking slowly at a work of art and engage in discussion. These webinars will be held Thursday, April 30, at 11:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. (EDT). Their goal is to make art more accessible and build community around the world.
By Karen Jackson from Washington DC
