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Slow Art Day Annual Report – 2024

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The 15th Anniversary Slow Art Day is coming up Saturday, April 5, 2025 and I’m happy to announce today the publication of our 2024 Annual Report, which details many of the events held last year.

Read it and get inspired to plan your 15th Anniversary Slow Art Day 2025 events (register your museum, gallery, church, sculpture park or movie theater for 2025, if you have not yet done so).

More than 180 museums and galleries participated in 2024 (plus many more that ran Slow Art Day sessions but did not register with us). The Slow Art Day volunteer team spent hundreds of hours throughout 2024 and early 2025 researching, writing, and publishing individual reports from 45 of these museums and galleries, all so that curators and educators like you can take inspiration from each other.

Read the report and you will see the impressive citywide event held in Bloomington, Illinois (more than 20 galleries, museums, libraries and other sites participated in 2024). This is the same event that has now inspired Mexico City to host a 33-venue Slow Art Day in 2025.

You’ll see how The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Met Cloisters hosted again while Mass MoCA in North Adams celebrated Slow Art Day for the 10th time or so. The beautiful and wonderful Athenaeum in Boston hosted for the first time while Philadelphia’s The Barnes Foundation, Glenn Foerd, and the Magic Gardens all hosted Slow Art Day events.

In Washington D.C., the National Museum of Women in the Arts hosted yet again (they are one the founding museums for Slow Art Day) while Florida hosted 7 different venues including the Frost Art Museum and the Lowe Art Museum both in Miami.

Antwerp’s church-based Slow Art movement grew to four churches – and we hope will grow into a global movement of churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religious organizations.

St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne continued to innovate the art and patient experience (hint: they designed six “slow art cards” with photos of works from their St Vincent’s Art Collection) and in 2025 are reaching out to more hospitals to get them involved.

The Ur Mara Museo in Spain’s Basque country held its 9th Slow Art Day with another full day of slow looking, cooking, eating, and dancing (though we don’t have a report from them this year).

While Ur Mara Museo has been celebrating Slow Art Day for nine years in the Basque country, The Altes Museum (English: Old Museum), a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the heart of Berlin’s museum island, held their Slow Art Day. And check this – the “prerequisite” for participation in this workshop was “curiosity and goodwill towards yourself.”

The Goulandris Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens held the first Slow Art Day in the Greek capital (other Greek cities have hosted – but this year is a first for Athens) while The AGO in Toronto, one of the largest museums in North America, hosted their 9th Slow Art Day.

Europe held three citywide Slow Art Days – Antwerp, Belgium (8 locations), Reims, France (4 locations), Rome, Italy (3 museums).

Belgium hosted 11 locations, Sweden 8, Italy 7, England 6, Germany 5. Read on to get inspired about all the various events around the world.

I want to give special thanks to the Slow Art Day Annual Report team led by Ashley Moran, Editor, and writers Johanna Bokedal, and Jessica Jane Nocella. They work tirelessly to produce this Annual Report and volunteer weekends, mornings, evenings throughout the year.

They fit this in between their full-time job (Ashley Moran at Comcast in the United States), full-time job/PhD student (Johanna Bokedal in Norway), and full-time post-doc work (Jessica Jane in Italy).

And while we are at it, let’s celebrate volunteer Maggie Freeman who is the global director and registrar for Slow Art Day. Maggie started volunteering 10 years ago when she was a sophomore at Mills College. Today, she is finishing her PhD in Islamic Art and Architecture at MIT and somehow, like the others, still finds time to volunteer.

They all do this amazing work for one reason: to grow the Slow Art Day movement around the world so that more people can learn to look at and love art.

Please join me in giving thanks and appreciation to them. They deserve all the kudos we can give them and more.

And have a great 15th anniversary Slow Art Day coming up April 5.

Best,

Phyl and the Slow Art Day team

P.S. Again, if you have not yet registered your 2025 Slow Art Day with us, please do so.

2023 Slow Art Day Annual Report – Get Inspired!

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We are proud to publish our 2023 Annual Report, representing hundreds of hours of work by volunteers to research, compile, and write-up the thousands of hours of creative work of educators and curators around the world.

More than 193 museums and galleries participated in 2023 (plus many more that ran Slow Art Day sessions but did not register with us).

And we researched, wrote, and published reports from 41 of these museums and galleries, which is what you will find in this report.

So, read this and get inspired by what a wide range of museums and galleries did last year including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Sweden’s Nationalmuseum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Europe’s largest museum complex), The Frederiksberg Museum in Copenhagen, the 15-site citywide Slow Art Day in Bloomington, Illinois, to name just a few.

And please join me in thanking the volunteer team who worked tirelessly all year long to produce this report: Ashley, Jessica Jane, and Johanna. This global team deserve much thanks (please comment or write to me so I can share with them your appreciation ;-).

Thanks!

Phyl

P.S. Read earlier annual reports including: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 (we only started producing these in 2019, nine years after the official launch of Slow Art Day).

Slow Art Day 2023 Is Over – Now Our Work Begins

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It’s a wrap!

Slow Art Day 2023 is now officially over.

Congratulations.

Our community came together and produced another continent-spanning event – China, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, England, Ireland, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, U.S., Canada, and *many* other countries.

In fact, Slow Art Day 2023 featured about 200 total events (actually, more than that when you count those that didn’t register with us).

With the work of the museums and galleries done for this year, the work begins for the volunteer Slow Art Day HQ Team. We will spend the rest of 2023 compiling, editing, and publishing reports about each of these individual events.

We have two goals with these reports: 1) help all of you learn from each other; 2) build the bonds of this global community of educators, curators, gallerists.

Our first step is reaching out to each host and asking them to provide us with details, photos, and artifacts from their 2023 Slow Art Day events.

Then when we get their information, we take these five steps:

1. Write-up individual reports
Our volunteer team will spend about five hours working on each individual museum/gallery report – editing and crafting a good write-up of what every individual museum and gallery did and calling out what others might learn from their design.

2. Email your report out to our global community
When each individual report is done, we email it out to the thousands of educators, curators, artists and others on our email list.

3. SlowArtDay.com
We then post it to our website for the world to see.

4. Facebook, Instagram
And we also post each report to our social media channels.

5. Annual Report
Finally, we add each individual report to our Annual Report, which has become the Bible of the slow looking movement (note: the full Annual Report for 2023 will be published in February of 2024).

Thank you for another great Slow Art Day – and here’s to spending the rest of 2023 learning what each other did.

Best,

Ashley, Jessica Jane, Johanna, Maggie, Robin, and Phyl

P.S. Find all our previous Annual Reports in the Host Tools section of the website.

2022 Annual Report – Get Inspired!

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We are proud to publish our 2022 Annual Report, representing hundreds of hours of work by volunteers to research, compile, and write-up the creative work of educators and curators around the world.

More than 175 museums and galleries participated in 2022 (plus many more that ran Slow Art Day sessions but did not register with us).

And we researched, wrote, and published reports from 54 of these museums and galleries, which is what you will find in this report.

So, read this and get inspired by what a wide range of museums and galleries did last year including The Wallace Collection in London, the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Frederiksberg Museum in Copenhagen, the Khaneko Museum in Kyiv, MIT’s List Visual Arts in Cambrige, MA, the Tarra Warra Museum of Art in Melbourne, and many, many others.

And please join me in thanking the volunteer team who worked tirelessly all year long to produce this report: Ashley, Jessica Jane, Johanna, and our newest member, Robin.

Thanks!

Phyl

P.S. Read earlier annual reports including: 2021, 2020, 2019.

2021 Annual Report – Get Inspired!

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Our 2021 report is now available for you to review.

Read it and get inspired by your fellow slow-art-loving educators, curators, and artists.

As of 2021, Slow Art Day events have been held in more than 1,500 museums around the world.

Yet, we continued our second decade during the second year of the pandemic with many museums and galleries still closed in spring of 2021.

Despite the closures, 110 organizations registered for Slow Art Day 2021, and we received 37 reports, which we catalog in this annual report as a way to encourage sharing of best practices among our global community.

So, take a look and get inspired as you design your 2022 slow looking sessions.

And thank you for helping us grow in our second decade (2021 was our 12th year!) – and for all you do to remind the world of the power of art to bring all of us together as humans deserving of respect and inclusion.

Best,

Ashley, Erica, Jessica Jane, Johanna, Maggie, Phyl, and Richard

P.S. We are thinking now especially of our Ukrainian colleagues (several Ukrainian museums registered for Slow Art Day again this year). We cannot imagine what they are going through.

Slow Art Day Annual Report Coming Next Week

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We are excited to announce that our Slow Art Day 2021 Annual Report, which details the hard work and creativity of educators, curators, artists, and docents from around the world, will be published next week.

For those of you designing Slow Art Day 2022 events, this report will inspire and guide you in the design of your slow looking events.

In the meantime, you can also read our 2020 and 2019 annual reports, which are also chock full of good ideas for running Slow Art Day events.

And if you have not yet registered your museum or gallery for 2022, then please sign up.

– Ashley, Jessica Jane, Johanna, Maggie, and Phyl

P.S. 73 museums and galleries have already registered for 2022 including the Olena Kulchytska Art and Memorial Museum in Lviv, Ukraine, The Met Cloisters in New York, the National Gallery of Singapore, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and many, many others (see the full list).

2020 Annual Report

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Our 2020 report is now available for you to review!

Read it and get inspired by how educators around the world engaged the public during the pandemic. 

Also, get practical tips for designing virtual events.

A few highlights from 2020:

  • 2020 was our 10th anniversary. Since we began, more than 1,500 Slow Art Day events have been held in museums around the world, including The Tate Modern, SFMoMA, The Art Gallery of Ontario, The National Gallery in Australia, and The Art Institute of Chicago, to name a few.
  • We hosted virtual webinar training just after the lockdowns on how to use Zoom and host virtual events, with participants from several continents.
  • All Slow Art Day events were virtual this year except one, which was a walk-by window display.
  • A number of museums hosted their first Slow Art Day in 2020, despite the pandemic
  • Starting in April of 2020, we invited Slow Art Day hosts to join us for webinars with leading African Americans from outside the art world including:
    • NBA Deputy Commissioner, Mark Tatum
    • Then-Princeton educator, and now chair of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors, Cecilia Rouse
    • Dallas youth community organizer, Antoine Joyce
    • Former Deputy Mayor to then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Bo Kemp
  • We also spent time with museum leaders like Jack Becker, CEO and Executive Director of the Jocelyn Museum of Art in Omaha, who talked about “Diversity, Inclusion, and the Museum Experience.

So, thank you, thank you for helping us reach our 10 year anniversary – and for all you do to remind the world of the power of art to bring us together.

Best,

Phil, Johanna, Ashley, Maggie, and the whole Slow Art Day team

P.S. Again, here’s the link to download the annual report.

Slow Art Day 2019 Annual Report

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As we prepare for Slow Art Day 2020, we have finished our 2019 report with host summaries from around the world.

If you would like to review the full report, you can
download it here (PDF – 14MB).

Highlights 

  • SFMOMA hosted a ticketed lunch and slow viewing session, which sold out 
  • Chicago Art Institute trained young people to be docents for Slow Art Day engaging young people in a new way that gives them ownership over the experience 
  • Brazil’s largest foundation of contemporary art, Inhotim, hosted its first Slow Art Day 
  • Toronto hosted more Slow Art Day events than any city around the world 
  • Many venues held daylong events with food, music, dancing, and lots of slow viewing (check out this video from Ur Mara Museoa in the Basque country) 
  • Multi-sensory sessions took off around the world (close to 25% of reporting museums did some multi-sensory work, as you can see below) 
  • Phil Terry, Founder, delivered a keynote about Slow Art Day at a Toronto inclusive design conference  
  • Phil and the team started visiting cities (Toronto and Philadelphia to begin with) to bring together educators and curators to strengthen the community and share best practices 

We also continued to receive great press attention including from The BBC, The Art Newspaper, Smithsonian Magazine, and many local and regional offline and online newspapers, radio, and television. 

Again, to read the full report including summaries from around the world, download our 2019 Annual Report here (PDF-14MB).

We look forward to celebrating our 10th anniversary with you in 2020. Thank you for all you have done to make possible the 1,500 total Slow Art Day events over the years on every continent and land mass except for Greenland (who is up for Greenland this year?). 

Best,  

Phil, Ashley, Maggie, Johanna and the whole Slow Art Day central volunteer team 

PS –

If you haven’t already, you can register for 2020 participation via this link: https://www.slowartday.com/be-a-host