With the National Gallery closed until further notice, the curatorial team has been hard at work on several digital initiatives aimed at sharing NGCI’s cultural offerings online. The first of these is part of an ongoing two-year project, generously sponsored by the Fil Foundation to share the gallery’s temporary exhibitions with audiences through interactive virtual tours. Produced by digital marketing firm Dragonfly 360, these virtual reality tours allow visitors to NGCI’s website to remotely ‘see’ and experience an exhibition, such as our current show Island of Women, and fully immerse themselves in the gallery’s exhibition space. Sophisticated digital camera technology, similar to that used to capture streetscapes in Google Street View, enables viewers to move seamlessly through the exhibition galleries and view individual artworks and wall texts with the click of a button. In addition to this zoom-in feature, our virtual tours include a birds-eye floor plan, as well as a doll’s house feature that lets viewers tilt and rotate a 3-D architectural rendering of the National Gallery to view our exhibitions from never-before-seen perspectives. Exhibition images and each of the artworks can also be viewed via the Island of Women page.
With this new initiative, NGCI is joining other museums and institutions in a worldwide effort to connect people to arts and culture from the comfort of their own home. Despite the challenges we currently face, NGCI is committed to turning these difficult circumstances into a moment of opportunity, with greater accessibility to our exhibitions online allowing us to share Caymanian art and culture in new and exciting ways. In addition to our current Island of Women exhibition, visitors to our site can also check out the recently concluded Bendel Hydes: A Retrospective, as well as the hugely popular Cross Currents: 1st Cayman Islands Biennial, the largest and most ambitious display of contemporary art in NGCI’s history, originally on view in early 2019.