Download Report - National Gallery of Art

To broaden the Gallery’s reach both on-site and online,
the education division led several significant initiatives this
year. The Gallery is now featured on Google Art Project,
a database of high-resolution images and text, to which
we have submitted 180 objects from the collection. The
Gallery’s first mobile application was loaded onto twenty
iPod Touch devices, loaned to the public free of charge.
The app contains audio, text, and images for 130 objects
in the West Building, 50 of which were specifically selected
for kids. Following extensive surveys, it will be tailored
to user preferences and released more widely. Ultimately,
visitors will be able to download the application onto their
own mobile devices while at the Gallery.
This year, the education department spearheaded
and helped shape explanatory wall texts for the newly
re-installed French galleries, a first for the permanent collection,
and collaborated with French painting curators to
develop audio guide commentaries.
Other significant “firsts” included a live webcast of a
conversation between art historian and Emory Professor
Michael Harris and collectors of African American art
Darrell Walker and Elliot Perry and an interactive Web
feature that invited the public to create haiku inspired
by the scrolls in Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower
Paintings by Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800). By the close of
the month-long exhibition, we had received more than a
thousand poems posted from computers at the Gallery or
from online visitors in forty-two states, seventeen foreign
countries, and five continents. The division authored Web
tours on frames and on photographer David Seymour.
Eighty-five podcasts of new and re-mastered archival
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lecture programs and three video podcasts, posted on the
Gallery’s website, are now available through iTunes and
ArtBabble, formats that allowed the museum to reach
more than two million virtual visitors.
Programmatic highlights included a demonstration of
Peter Paul Rubens’ seventeenth-century painting techniques
by George Washington University Professor Emeritus
William Woodward and a series of sketching programs
for adults inspired by the loan of Samuel F. B. Morse’s The
Gallery of the Louvre. Three public symposia were offered
in conjunction with the Morse, George Bellows, and Joan
Miró exhibitions. A fourth symposium, held in response
to the re-installation of the French galleries, featured a
roundtable discussion of international museum scholars
on issues related to the installation of nineteenth-century
French collections.
The internship and fellowship program supported
a national and international group of graduate-level
students; seven academic-year and fourteen summer
participants were placed in Gallery departments.
As the High School Seminar celebrated its twentieth
year, a survey of former participants showed the program’s
lasting impact on career choices, personal growth, and
museum-going practices. High School Summer Institute
participants, working with artist Kevin Reese and inspired
by the work of Miró and Alexander Calder, created a series
of mobiles now installed at Northwest One, a Washington,
DC public library.
Students in Teen Studio workshops considered Hudson
River School paintings, Giotto’s Madonna and Child, and
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Queen Zenobia Addressing Her