With museums closed, here are 5 great online experiences
CHICAGO — A few advantages to digital museumgoing: 1. No lines. 2. No fees. 3. No alarms sounding when you venture a little too close to the item on exhibit.
So below are five great ways to visit museums digitally during this resurgent COVID-19 pandemic.
What’s behind this? The big Chicago-area museums have closed down again. With coronavirus rates in the state and region rising dramatically, museums operating indoors fell under a general state order that also shut indoor casinos, theaters and, at least according to the rules, restaurants.
A person could question why a health club operating at 25% capacity, which is still allowed, is less likely to spread coronavirus than bemasked museum patrons peering at artworks. But as civic-minded institutions the museums are, of course, complying.
And this pause in their cautious reopening during the pandemic offers a kind of test case. Most institutions — and especially the ones that never reopened and are waiting for a full return to public-health normalcy to do so — have been touting their strategic pivot to digital programming.
Doing so, they say, will keep their offerings before the public in the short term and make them more nimble and more widely accessible in the long term.
Beyond the well-documented peregrinations of the Shedd Aquarium penguins, which most recently visited the hallowed turf at Soldier Field, here are five museum visits you can make right now:
1. Explore nature with your kids The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park is one of the larger museums that chose not to open back up this summer. Beginning in July, it’s been crafting a series of “Curious By Nature” YouTube
videos that run 3 to 10 minutes long and are aimed at younger viewers. There are now 26 in the series, and they cover topics ranging from bird migration to the differences between reptiles and amphibians to naturebased art activities.
2. The museum of ideas
Beyond a small office in River North, the Chicago Humanities Festival does not operate in a fixed physical space. But it’s been bringing in top-notch speakers for more than a quarter century now and recording their talks in front of, for the most part, packed auditoriums.
From this rich online archive, you could craft a pretty remarkable series of seminars, mini-courses and just general mind-opening events — a museum of ideas, if you will.
You want a 2010 talk on health disparities in the U.S. — or perhaps one from 2017 — that feel prophetic in the current moment? They’re there, linked from the chicagohumanties.org website. You want Nikole Hannah-Jones, ahead of her 1619 Project for the New York Times, on a panel talking about the great Chicago journalist Ida B. Wells? Check. You want comic John Mulaney interviewing theater director Andre Gregory from this autumn’s Digital Fall Festival in an event that was not titled “My Zoom Call with Andre”? It’s there too — and much more engaging than the Zoom calls you’re probably used to.
People complain about being led down online rabbit holes, but this compendium of artists, authors and activists — of thinkers and doers — is one of the most rewarding warrens you’ll ever plunge into.
3. “Notorious RBG” tour
The engaging museum exhibit “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg” opened at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie early this year, as a tribute to the revered Supreme Court justice’s life. After her death in September, it took on memorial overtones.
And now, with the powerful and too often overlooked museum closed back down, “Notorious RBG” has become a virtual experience. From Dec. 2 through Feb. 20, the museum is offering a series of virtual tours of the exhibit, free for members and $10 for others. The schedule and links for tickets are at ilholocaustmuseum.org/pubtours.
4. Going deep with Art Institute staff
You can learn more about some of the Art Institute’s greatest hits, as it were, in a series of short videos called the Essentials Tour: the “flickering quality” of Seurat’s colors, for instance, or the reference to El Greco in Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist.”
But the deeper cuts, to follow the metaphor, are explored in a new series that also highlights a range of museum staffers. Begun in October, “Playing Favorites” gives people who work at the Art Institute a chance to showcase their favorite piece from the vast collection, one per video. In the five made so far, we meet works including a designer’s book exploring the almost 200 uses made of a commercially produced Dutch pig, a sculpture that is more concept than physical reality and a Victorian era photocollage that helped its maker advance in society.
5. Visit outer space
Another museum that has remained closed throughout the pandemic is Adler Planetarium. But it continues to connect with its community via regular, free online events like the upcoming Adler Astronomy Live (Dec. 3), which for this biweekly edition will talk about light pollution in the city.
For something to do on your own schedule, though, the online version of the space museum’s recent exhibition “13 Stories with Captain James Lovell” is one of the better digital takes on a museum show I’ve seen.
Presented on the Google Arts & Culture platform, the series of slides highlights moments in the exhibit about the Apollo crew and Adler board member, like the eternal question of how astronauts go to the bathroom.