My Top 6 Virtual Tours of Galleries

It’s wonderful that so many galleries and museums have created virtual tours in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s certainly allowed me to see inside galleries and museums that I’ve never been to before. It’s also a great way to expose our students to more art and that’s always a good thing. All the galleries I feature below are, what I think of, proper virtual tours rather than glorified slide shows or videos. Click the picture or logo to explore the tour.

1. Virtual Tour of Frida Kahlo’s Home

Ok, ok, so I know I’ve blogged about this before, but it’s still my favourite. It’s because you don’t just get to see Kahlo’s art, you get to see her home. Her bed, her kitchen, her belongings. It’s a beautiful environment and it makes you feel that you know a little bit more about the artist.

2. The Cave Paintings at Lascaux

This tranquil tour, that glides from area to area within the caves, and been suberbly created. Not many art exhibits take you back 19,000 years. I enjoyed feeling that I was searching for the paintings and didn’t really know when the next one was going to come into view.

3. The Dali Museum

This beautifully photographed and smooth gallery tour is more like a ‘teaser’ to see the art than an exhibition tour. You can move around the outside of the sunlit building which was designed by architect Yann Weymouth. The tour takes you to the various rooms, including the shop and cafe, and then features 2 artworks in the gallery.

4. The Guggenheim

This virtual tour makes you feel you’re really in the gallery. (This is a where some other virtual tours fail). You really feel amongst the art and sculptures. It also has a pretty good zoom, so you feel you can get close enough to an artwork to take it in.

5. The Courtauld Galleries

This is one of the best of the rest because the zoom is just so amazing. The detail is fantastic. I particularly enjoyed rooms 5 , 6, and 7 where I got up close to some familiar impressionist paintings.

6. Musée d’Orsay

If you want to get up close to Van Gogh’s portraits or Degas’s ballet dancers. Or if you’d like to say hello to Whistlers Mother, then this is the virtual tour for you.

If you have a virtual tours of galleries that you would recommend to art teachers, please comment below.

Posted

May 15, 2020

Inspiration

The Arty Teacher

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6 responses to “My Top 6 Virtual Tours of Galleries”

Sell Art Vancouver

November 28, 2020

This is a brilliant post, thank you for sharing about my top 5 virtual tours of galleries. We always tend to change something or the other in our house, thanks for this great advice.

Reply
1. The Arty Teacher
  
  November 28, 2020
  
  That’s great to hear. Thank you.
  
  Reply
patty steponovich

September 27, 2020

I love these tours. Is there a worksheet for them that you sell?

Reply
1. The Arty Teacher
  
  September 28, 2020
  
  I have a new resource coming out this week that uses these virtual gallery tours. It asks students to use QR codes to get to the tours and then they have to answer questions or draw things they see.
  
  Reply
Julia Lee

August 17, 2020

Hi Sarah
You seem extremely knowledgable in the appliance of technology to art. Brixham Art Society normally runs art demonstrations, by visiting artists, for its members. All this, of course, stopped during lockdown. We are thinking of having our first face to face demo in September, however, this time, due to a cap on numbers, many members will be excluded.
Would you happen to know If we can somehow transmit a live demo on Zoom to our members. I can’t quite get my head around how the host would be able to manipulate our camcorder, zoom in and out etc while on Zoom.
Hope this makes sense and that you could share a few tips.
Julia
jlee1512@gmail.com

Reply
1. The Arty Teacher
  
  August 17, 2020
  
  Two things spring to mind. One is that the host has someone to help them, so they can zoom and the other person operates the camcorder. The other is that she pre-records the demo bits and then simply shares her/his screen at the appropriate moments.
  You can’t zoom in and out on Zoom, but an alternative would be for the host to use their phone to zoom and then place the phone in a tripod/gorilla grip to do the demo instead of a camcorder.
  I hope these comments help! Have you watched anyone else do the same sort of thing online? You might be able to see how they do it.
  
  Reply