The Norman Rockwell Museum is launching a free, virtual field trip program

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 donning headsets, 50,000 adventurous – and mostly younger – visitors were able to “engage with almost every object in the exhibition via virtual reality,” said Rich Bradway, the museum’s digital innovation officer, and they interacted with it as the Art “is connected with culture and society.”

That experiment six years ago gave rise to a new one, built around the same exhibition. Now classrooms around the world can immerse themselves in art with a few clicks of the mouse through a new virtual field trip program launched by the Norman Rockwell Museum earlier this month. And through the support of donors, the program is available to schools and teachers free of charge.

The virtual excursion uses 250 works of art – including Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series and works by contemporary artists – to explore freedom in a modern context. The immersive platform uses a mix of historical backgrounds, videos, Rockwell research materials, lesson plans aligned to national educational standards, and narratives recorded in English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic to explore topics such as social Justice and Civil Rights examine movement, storytelling, and the creative process. Interested educators can gain access by submitting an online form at nrm.org/learn.

“We really wanted to get people to understand the whole concept: This is the art, this is what the art means, but this is how the art was made, this is how people researched it,” Bradway said. “Illustration is more than just drawing a picture or making a picture that you then sell commercially. It takes a lot of research to compose an image to tell a story.”

The museum began digitizing its collection in 2004, Bradway said, and about a decade ago the museum began looking for ways to better connect that archive with audiences through various online resources. In those 10 years, Bradway watched the online audience grow from 200,000 per year, 80% of whom went there looking for opening hours or ticket information, to now 2 million visitors per year, with about 63% using the museum’s online education website visited content.

One of the most popular of these early resources was an online exhibition focused on Rockwell’s Civil Rights images, created using the Google Arts & Culture platform. When it launched nine years ago, 20,000 people a month viewed the Google exhibition, Bradway said.

“Google offers this great utility to make your content accessible, but they don’t really give you a good utility to connect that experience back to the institution,” Bradway said. “We wanted to figure out how to capture that lightning in a bottle but connect it directly to the museum.”

Enter the virtual excursions and exhibitions that we have created ourselves. These programs allowed the museum to make its collection more widely accessible and reach people outside the United States and a broader demographic, including younger audiences, Bradway said. For its innovation, the virtual excursion won an Anthem Award, an offshoot of the Webby Awards that honor missionary work.

“It’s about how we give people the opportunity to go to the museum and interact with the art,” Bradway said. “That was really the core of what we were trying to do, both with virtual reality and now with the virtual exhibitions 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 technologies to recreate its gallery spaces in a customizable digital “shell,” Bradway said. This would potentially allow the museum to curate not only digital additions to its in-person exhibitions, but also virtual-only special exhibitions, expanding the geographic reach of juried high school exhibitions. The program could even be used by teachers who want to curate their own galleries from the Norman Rockwell archives to supplement their curricula.