Museum London is thrilled to announce our selection of two project teams to each be awarded a $30,000 grant to develop and pilot test their ideas. The Museum London Idea Incubator – Digital Solutions for Arts Education and Engagement is an initiative by Museum London in collaboration with Nordicity and Lord Cultural Resources, and is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts through the Digital Strategy Fund.
The initiative aims to develop digital solutions for enhancing student engagement with the arts through new forms of digital participation. By unifying diverse experiences and skill sets, this initiative seeks to enable the development of innovative, practical, technology-driven applications and platforms intended to improve arts education and engagement for students and teachers.
The two projects will be developed over the next five months. The Museum London cARTography Project, led by Jill Bogart, aims to draw out and highlight the connections between works of art in the museum’s collection and the time and place of their production. Users will use interactive maps on which works of art are “pinned” to locations, both local and international, related to their creation and history. Further exploration of the map, using filters for variables such as theme and time period, will help users gain insights into how artworks and artists relate to each other, relate to or differ from the sites they depict, how our lived environment changes over time, and how place is experienced and represented by different artists.
Discover London Art, led by Juan Bello, will provide school-age children with an interactive opportunity to engage with Museum London’s permanent collection. Students will get access to a variety of digital-stories: content that will introduce them to a diverse selection of the museum’s most iconic masterpieces. By exploring the life and work of some of the most influential Canadian artists, students will learn about the processes involved in the production of a work of art, and also about the multiple connections between art and history. Discover London Art will facilitate the children’s first encounters with some of the city’s most significant art treasures.
For further questions please contact Museum London Executive Director Brian Meehan, at bmeehan@museumlondon.ca or 519.661.2489 x 4241.
Image: Paul Peel, Three Boys Fishing at the Coves (detail), 1880 oil on canvas. Collection of Museum London, Transfer from the Material Culture Collection, 2009. Gift of Mrs. Edna Bland Stratton in memory of her father, John Bland, 1959
