Visiting Museums from Home

Art allows us to lose ourselves and find ourselves all at once, to paraphrase 20th-century Trappist monk Thomas Merton, and strolling through a gallery or museum and absorbing the images on view affords that in spades. Although COVID-19 has halted all in-person exhibition tours, that doesn’t mean you can’t get your art fix virtually, as heaps of establishments from around the globe offer digital access to their collections. 

For a particularly immersive experience, check out the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 360° Project (metmuseum.org/art/online-features/met-360-project) — a series of six two-minute videos that give stunning visual access to Met sites such as the Cloisters, the Temple of Dendur, and its Arms and Armor galleries. 

Paris’s Musée D’Orsay, housed in a former railway station, has an interactive floor plan that allows you to click on a floor and section to see what art is exhibited there. Take a peek at paintings by Impressionists such as Monet and Pissarro, sculptures, and even doors and chairs.
See musee-orsay.fr/en/visit/welcome.

If music photography is more your bag, check out Morrison Hotel Gallery’s online exhibits such as Sir: A Retrospective of Rock Royalty, which chronicles Elton John’s musical life in pictures and opens virtually April 2. Also, tune into to their Behind the Lens series, which streams interviews with famous shutterbugs, including Danny Clinch, Mick Rock, and Lynn Goldsmith. See morrisonhotelgallery.com.

Closer to home, the Wildling Museum has made it possible to experience their exhibits online, including Starry Nights: Visions of the Night Sky, which features telescope images captured by Goleta’s Las Cumbres Observatory, nocturne paintings by early California artists such as Fernand Lungren and Lockwood de Forest, night-sky photography by Marc Muench, and more. 

The Wildling is also accepting applications for its 2020 nature photography competition (wildlingmuseum.org/news/2020-photography-competition). This year’s theme is all forms of wildlife that live in the Tri-County, including land and sea mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects. Deadline for entries is Monday, July 6. See wildlingmuseum.org.