Earlier this month, the George Eastman Museum launched an online exhibition of 44 photographs as part of the Google Cultural Institute’s celebration of Black History Month. Thanks to this initiative, users around the world can access the exhibition in just a few clicks at g.co/blackhistory.
The Eastman Museum is one of more than 40 cultural and archival organizations to create a thematic virtual exhibition commemorating Black History Month with the Google Cultural Institute. Each partner institution—including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Archives, among many others—have drawn on their collections to explore black history and culture in the United States, in order to create these online experiences.
The George Eastman Museum holds one of the world’s foremost collections of photography. The collection traces the impact of photography since its introduction in 1839 and serves as a lens through which many subjects can be analyzed. Spanning the history of photography, the Eastman Museum’s online exhibition through the Google Cultural Institute an exploration of black history and culture through photography, -spanning from daguerreotypes to contemporary art. It features photographs made by known and unknown men and women, including portraits of famous individuals such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Paul Robeson, and Jesse Jackson.
The museum’s online exhibition was curated by Jamie M. Allen, William Green, and Heather Shannon, from the Department of Photography. The Google platform that hosts the exhibition allows users to navigate and view photographs from the collection at incredible detail. The experience is enhanced by and through narrative descriptions of each work. In addition, a selection of the photographs from the online exhibition will be on view at the museum as part of its History of Photography rotation that will open on March 12, 2016.
About Google Cultural Institute
The Google Cultural Institute and its partners are putting the world’s cultural treasures at the fingertips of Internet users and are building tools that allow the cultural sector to share more of its diverse heritage online. The Google Cultural Institute has partnered with more than 1,000 institutions giving a platform to over 250,000 thousand artworks and a total of 6 million photos, videos, manuscripts and other documents of art, culture and history. Read more here.