Guggenheim, Google expand access to museum's architecture

PanARMENIAN.Net - Online visitors from around the world can now explore the interior of the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through Google Street View technology. Additionally, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, in collaboration with the Google Cultural Institute, has made available over 120 artworks from its collection for online viewing, Art Daily reports.

Contemporary artworks collected through the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative and presented in the exhibition No Country: Contemporary Art For South and Southeast Asia (2013), along with those featured in the exhibition Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim (2015), are available on the Google Cultural Institute’s Art Project platform. Publishing these materials on Google Art Project gives an expanded audience the opportunity to view high-resolution photographs of large-scale works such as Navin Rawanchaikul’s mural-sized Places of Rebirth (2009), Sopheap Pich’s Morning Glory (2011), and Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s 366-part sculpture Sitting (Money) (2004–06).

Later this year contemporary art from Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa that was acquired for the museum’s collection through the Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund will be added, so that more than 100 living artists from the Guggenheim’s collection will be represented on the site.

Using Street View technology, it will now be possible to tour the museum’s distinctive spiral ramps from anywhere online. The Guggenheim’s architecture presented unique challenges for Google’s engineers and Street View team. Drone, tripod, and Street View “trolly” images were stitched together to provide a 360 degree experience of the building’s rotunda galleries that online visitors can freely navigate. Street View makes it possible to move from ramp to ramp; to gaze at the building’s oculus above; and to examine works on view in the 2015 special exhibition Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim.

Users are able to click on artworks—like Juliana Huxtable’s Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm) (2015), a self-portrait in which the artist interrogates gender norms and portrayals of femininity, and Maurizio Cattelan’s Daddy, Daddy (2008), a sculpture of Walt Disney’s Pinocchio floating facedown in the fountain on the ground floor of the Guggenheim rotunda—to learn more about the works and artists.