Photo courtesy of the Hilliard Museum
Anyone who thinks the arts are optional for a well-functioning society need only imagine how much bleaker 2020 would have been without the movies, books, music, and works of visual art that helped us make sense of things during lockdown. Yet as the tidal wave of the pandemic has swamped large parts of the economy, one of the sectors to suffer most has been that of visual arts institutions. Fortunately, the people who run our museums and galleries are a creative bunch who have been quick to adapt, developing effective means of bringing exhibits to life online. One institution successfully navigating the transition from the physical exhibit to the virtual is the Hilliard Art Museum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which launched its first fully virtual exhibit, Acadian Brown Cotton: The Fabric of Acadiana, in September 2020 (it runs through February 27). To learn how one museum is successfully translating an exhibit to the virtual realm, we spoke with Susie Gottardi, the Hilliard’s Marketing Manager. Here are excerpts of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
"We were already thinking ‘How can we make this exhibit most accessible?’ But COVID had other plans."—Susan Gottardi
CR: So Acadian Brown Cotton was the museum’s first truly virtual exhibit. Did you start out envisaging it that way? Or did it begin as a more traditional exhibit?
SG: Acadian Brown Cotton was actually planned nearly three years ago. We received funding from a $75,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to cover fabrication, photography, cultural stewardship, and education; and had originally planned to use this to bring the exhibit to satellite locations around Louisiana. We were already thinking ‘How can we make this exhibit most accessible?’ But COVID had other plans.
CR: When it came to figuring out how to deliver a meaningful exhibit experience virtually, what did you need to think differently about?
SG: There were different tools and technology. To capture the experience of being within the exhibit space, we created a 360-degree virtual tour, which used this cool, basketball-shaped sphere with lenses on eight surfaces. You put it in the middle of the gallery and it captures the whole room, allowing viewers to navigate the space.
Photo courtesy of the Hilliard Museum
CR: The exhibit interweaves folklore, anthropology, economics, and art history. How do you reflect that online, as opposed to in the flesh, so-to-speak?
SG: This particular exhibit was very intentionally laid thinking about how people would move through the space. So on our website, we created a site-within-a-site, which was a place to provide lots of different ways to explore the subject. As well as the virtual tour, visitors will find video walk-throughs, artist interviews, tons of different educational materials, and lots of curricula, too.
[Read our listing for the Acadian Brown Cotton exhibition at the Hilliard here.]
"It’s also allowed us to deliver a simulated guided experience that we couldn’t provide otherwise. So we can make experts available to viewers in a different, more intimate way." —Susan Gottardi
CR: What could you do with a virtual exhibit, that you can’t do with an in-person exhibit?
SG: We could do a lot with the close-up detail imagery of pieces in the exhibit. We always take detailed photographs, but these are not typically things that would be shared with the public. It’s also allowed us to deliver a simulated guided experience that we couldn’t provide otherwise. So we can make experts available to viewers in a different, more intimate way.
CR: What has the initial response been like?
SG: The reach and the engagement we’ve been able to achieve has been very encouraging. In its first week, the Acadian Brown Cotton website received more than two thousand visitors. Our website usage is up 20% from 2019, and the engagement with our digital community on Facebook has been explosive. We currently reach roughly fifteen thousand individuals on a weekly basis as compared with less than a thousand during the same period last year—a comical, and exciting, 1400% increase.
Photo courtesy of the Hilliard Museum
CR: Once the pandemic is behind us, are there things the museum has learned to do differently that you think will endure?
SG: “We can’t unring the bell on digital programming. Even as people start to come back to the museum I think they’ll still expect to be able to extend their museum experience further. So maybe now, as well as a guided gallery tour with the curator, there’ll be a Facebook Live curator-led tour. The whole experience has made our staff more conscious of our audience in a different way. The team has come together to think differently about content and how we present it. That awareness of the community around us definitely helps us serve them better.
