Times Union:
Rockwell Museum launches free, virtual field trip program
Rockwell Museum launches free, virtual field trip program
The immersive program explores social justice through 250 works, multilingual narration and more
by Katherine Kiessling
December 26, 2024
When the Norman Rockwell Museum sent its “Imagining Freedom” exhibition on its international tour in 2018, something unusual accompanied artist Norman Rockwell’s famous Civil Rights images: a virtual reality experience.
By sliding on headsets, 50,000 adventurous — and mostly younger — visitors connected “with almost every object in the exhibition through virtual reality,” said Rich Bradway, the museum’s digital innovation officer, and they interacted with how the art “connected to the culture and society.”
From that experiment six years ago came a new one built around the same exhibition. Now, with a few clicks of a mouse, classrooms across the globe can dive into art through a new virtual field trip program launched by Norman Rockwell Museum earlier this month. And through the support of donors, the program is available for schools and teachers at no cost.
The virtual field trip uses 250 pieces of art — including Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series and contemporary artists’ works — to explore freedom in a modern-day context. The immersive platform uses a mix of historical background, videos, Rockwell’s research materials, lesson plans aligned with National Education Standards and narrations recorded in English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic to explore themes of social justice, the Civil Rights Movement, storytelling and the creative process. Interested educators can gain access by submitting an online form at nrm.org/learn.
“We wanted to really get people into the whole concept of: this is the art, this is what the art means, but this is how the art was made, how people researched,” Bradway said. “Illustration is more than just simply drawing a picture or making an image that you then sell commercially. There’s a lot of research involved in composing an image to tell a story.”
The museum began digitizing its collection in 2004, Bradway said, and about a decade ago, the museum began exploring ways to better connect this archive to audiences through various online resources. Over those 10 years, Bradway watched the online audience grow from 200,000 annually, with 80% there to look up hours of operation or ticket information, to now 2 million visitors a year, with about 63% coming to the website for the museum’s online educational content.
“Google provides this great utility for making your content accessible, but they don’t really give you a good utility for connecting that experience back to the institution,” Bradway said. “We wanted to try to figure out how to capture that lightning in a bottle but connect it directly to the museum.”
Enter the virtual field trips and exhibits built in-house. These programs allowed the museum to make its collection more broadly accessible, reaching people beyond the United States, and a wider demographic, Bradway said, including younger audiences. For its innovativeness, the virtual field trip won an Anthem Award, an off-shoot of The Webby Awards honoring mission-driven work.
“It goes back to how do we give people the opportunity to jump into the museum and interact with the art,” Bradway said. “That really was the germ of what we were trying to do, both with the virtual reality and now with the virtual exhibits and the virtual field trips.”
The Norman Rockwell Museum is no stranger to exploring how modern technology, including NFTs, can be integrated into its programming. Currently, the organization is exploring video game development technology to recreate its gallery spaces in a customizable digital “shell,” Bradway said. This would potentially allow the museum to curate not only digital supplements to its in-person shows but also virtual-only special exhibitions and extend the geographic range of high school juried exhibitions. The program could even be used by teachers who want to curate their own galleries from Norman Rockwell’s archives to supplement their curriculums.