National Gallery of Prague, Czech Republic
MicroGallery Project
$180,000 awarded June 1998

The Getty awarded a Museum Interpretation Grant to the National Gallery of Prague to support the MicroGallery, an interactive computer system that provides information on some 2,000 works of art in the museum's permanent collections. Located in several historic buildings, the National Gallery's extensive collection of European and Asian art is the most significant in the Czech Republic. The MicroGallery system includes digital images as well as multilayered contextual descriptions, artist's biographies, and interactive components to encourage visitors to engage more deeply with the artworks. Its dual interface presents information in both Czech and English to serve local as well as foreign visitors. To introduce school children around the country to the National Gallery's collections, a CD-ROM version of the program was distributed free of charge to elementary and secondary schools. Getty funds contributed to the costs of the software, hardware upgrades, translation, reproduction fees, and the services of outside technical consultants. The project also received support from the British Council, the Czech Ministry of Culture, and major U.S. corporations.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California
"Making Sense of Modern Art"
$150,000 awarded October 1999

Getty funds supported Making Sense of Modern Art, a multimedia, interactive program developed by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that explores key works in the Museum's collection of paintings, sculpture, photography, architecture, and design. Designed to address the needs of both first-time and seasoned museum visitors, the program is available on touch-screen computer kiosks in the galleries. The Making Sense program is based on an authoring and publishing tool through which individual screens can be created and then published in groups to a variety of platforms—to Gallery kiosks, the Web, and to CD-ROM—to serve Museum visitors, the general public, and teachers. Rather than arranging the works chronologically or by artist, they are presented thematically, in groups and interactive segments. Users can pose inquiries, juxtapose the work of different artists and receive comparative information, and explore specific periods, themes, artistic methods, and other contextual information. Multimedia highlights include archival videos of artists at work and interviews with art historians, curators, and the artists themselves. Getty funding enabled the Museum to take the program from a prototype version to a fully functional system, contributing to the costs of system development and testing, research and production to develop video portions, curriculum development for teachers' materials, and related expenses.

See a complete listing of grants awarded.