Closed museums pump up online content to aid coronavirus shut-ins
Audiences missing the arts during coronavirus-related museum closures can still engage with local museum content online thanks to efforts by teams at the Crocker Art Museum, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art and the Mondavi Center.
All three centers for art have refocused on online content while the masses practice social distancing, providing videos of current exhibitions and performances as well as access to blogs, links and long reads to help audiences dive into material they may otherwise not explore while museums are closed.
“Museums are very empathetic places, and we don’t want people to go through this in isolation,” said Karen Christian, spokeswoman for the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Art, she said, is a way of bringing people together into cumulative experiences.
The Crocker is “Sacramento’s museum,” Christian said.
“It’s weathered a lot of storms, including the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic, both world wars and the Great Depression. We can look back and see that the Crocker has adapted. That’s what we want to do, to keep in that spirit today,” she said.
Adaption in a time of mass social distancing largely means reformatting experiences with art into digital mediums.
While “there’s nothing like visiting the museum for art,” according to Christian, the Crocker has shifted its strategic focus onto video content for YouTube, and social media outlets Facebook and Instagram. They include virtual tours by staff members and upcoming footage of current exhibition “The Splendor of Germany,” featuring 18th Century drawings.
The Crocker also has a blog on its homepage that will feature additional insight, projects for kids, and more information on ways to engage with the museum throughout the month of April.
For kids ages 6 through 9, the Crocker is hosting Invisible Art Camp next week. A digital art camp, Christian described it as an experience in which “campers embark on a digital art excursion through time and around the world while creating eight fantastic artworks.”
The camp consists of 75-minute morning and afternoon sessions where, using Google Hangouts, kids interact with art instructor Crystal Ruiz and each other while exploring a variety of art-making techniques. The Crocker is providing bags of supplies for each camper that will be and quarantined for 72 hours before being made available for pickup Thursday, April 9, and Friday, April 10. To register visit crockerart.org/calendar.
The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis’ contemporary art museum, is taking an equally hands-on approach to digitally formatting content during closure by creating The Manetti Shrem Museum at Home newsletter, delivered every Friday to subscribers’ inboxes along with topical online content readers can follow up with throughout the ensuing week.
“We see our role as a contemporary art museum, bringing in new artists, new voices, as part of the UC Davis legacy,” said Rachel Teagle, founding director of Manetti Shrem.
The newsletter will share art projects for kids, long reads for the weekend and “links to open your mind and heart to art,” according to Manetti Shrem’s Museum at Home website, where you can sign up for their emails.
“It’s been a great teambuilding moment,” Teagle said of the COVID-19 related closure efforts. “Our team felt really forlorn at the beginning, like how do we have purpose if people can’t come to us? And I’m really proud of how quickly people were like, right, okay, we can do this really differently.”
The second edition of the newsletter focuses on local artist Stephen Kaltenbach’s exhibition that began in January and runs through May 10. Future planned newsletter content includes a zoom interview with the artist and a time capsule project for kids using toilet paper rolls and other materials people are likely to have at home.
When it comes to how she and her team choose content for the newsletter, Teagle said: “I want to read about moments of beauty, about moments of human creativity and ingenuity, about new ideas. Those are the things that bring me hope, and that’s the kind of things we focus on in our outreach effort.”
Audiences can also follow the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art on Facebook and Instagram.
The Mondavi Center at UC Davis normally hosts an eclectic array of performing artists, with a core program of classical, jazz and modern dance. They too have shifted to digital content for the public after having to cancel most of their events and programs well into the summer.
“We really focus our attention on a wholistic art experience,” said Jeremy Ganter, the Mondavi Center’s director of programming. “Contextualizing information, providing a warm and welcoming environment for people, so they can come in, bring their barriers down and experience the live performance in the purist way possible.”
In response to the closures, Mondavi has muscled up its social media presence, providing video and recordings of artists whose performances were abruptly canceled, and planning with other artists to create recordings of live performances specifically for Mondavi in lieu of their scheduled concerts.
For example, world musician Yumi Kurosawa, whose performance was canceled the first weekend of May, is collaborating with the Mondavi Center to create live performance video that will be made available to UC Davis students and the public.
“We’re going to try to do this for every canceled performance,” said Ganter, “to keep something intact about those canceled performances and provide some exposure for the artists.”
Content online from the Mondavi Center will be periodically uploaded according their canceled concert schedule, and can be found on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Additional content from Mondavi can be found on their blog, most recently an article written by Ganter about the late Ellis Marsalis who died April 1 at the age of 85 from complications related to COVID-19. To receive periodic email content known as Artsmail from the Mondavi Center, sign up on their homepage, mondaviarts.org.
