From fun days out to art-filled visits and outdoor adventures, go on a cultural road trip around the UK.
Art and storytelling can play a vital role in helping people understand the key issues facing our society—and art can also help people see them in new ways. This is especially true for climate change, where scientific data and information can at times seem overwhelmingly difficult to comprehend. This is why for the past two years, Google Arts & Culture has developed a range of collaborations aiming to use art and technology to make the science of climate change more accessible and tangible. Our main program, called Heartbeat of the Earth, was built in collaboration with the UNFCCC and features online experiences by eight artists that interpret scientific climate data—from microplastics in the air to rising sea levels, to the CO2 footprint for individual diets.
Today, as COP26 unfolds and global leaders have gathered in Glasgow to decide on the future of the planet, we are thrilled to announce two new collaborations, Voices for Change with Project Everyone and Pollinator Pathmaker with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, that we hope will inspire people around the world to learn more about the climate crisis and to take action.
Kate Garvey, co-founder of Project Everyone: “Visitors to voicesforchange.world will discover a magical virtual world populated with powerful voice messages of the transformations people want to see in support of the UN’s Global Goals. The viewer can navigate around the world, hear different voices and learn about the Goals as they move through the space. These 17 Goals — agreed in 2015 by 193 world leaders — are the most ambitious plan the world has to end poverty, fight inequality and tackle the climate crisis. They are the answer to the multiple interconnected challenges our planet faces.
The project has been a huge collaborative, creative endeavor. It began with Forest For Change – an installation of 400 trees in June 2021 in the heart of London by Es Devlin and Project Everyone. As part of the interactive experience at the Forest, visitors were invited to choose a Goal and record a message of the change they wanted to see in the world. Thousands did so — with Goal 13: Climate Action emerging as the most popular Goal. These were added to by voices from over 60 countries gathered by a network of Civil Society Organizations. Google Arts & Culture then came on board to craft an immersive, digital world for these voices to inhabit—a world that will forever represent a barometer of passions across the world at a key moment in our planet’s trajectory.
With COP26 — the most critical climate summit, yet — taking place this month, this beautiful world will give a platform to thousands of voices and raise awareness about the urgent need to take climate action in order to achieve all the Global Goals. We are very proud and we hope this world will live on — gathering more voices for change at major moments on the road to 2030."
Artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: “What would the world look like if you were a pollinator, or a plant? This is what I am asking visitors with Pollinator Pathmaker, a 55-meter-long living artwork planted in September 2021 at the Eden Project in Cornwall. The garden is designed, planted and optimized for pollinators’ tastes, using a specially designed algorithm and a curated palette of plants.
The artwork — originally commissioned by the Eden Project with support from the Garfield Weston Foundation as part of Eden’s Create a Buzz program — is the first of a series of gardens that will be planted across the UK, Europe and hopefully the world. With Pollinator Pathmaker, we invite visitors to take part in an international art-led campaign to help save bees and other endangered species of pollinating insects—the first of its kind. There has been a terrifying decline in pollinating insects in the last 40 years due to habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species, and climate change; the artwork is a call to take action against this.
Starting today, people around the world can be part of this unique artwork by visiting pollinator.art, an experiment developed in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture and with founding partners Gaia Art Foundation. The online Pollinator Pathmaker experience allows people to create, plant, and share their own garden, designed for bees and other insect pollinators, in whatever space they have available - at home, in allotments, community gardens, and more.
Enter your location and garden conditions, and the algorithm will create a planting design to support the maximum pollinator species possible. It chooses plants from a palette of plants – each chosen for their benefits to particular pollinators – and arranges them to suit different foraging styles. Users can fly around and through a 3D visualization of their unique garden as it blooms and transforms over the seasons, created from plant paintings I made of each plant used.
By planting living artworks for pollinators around the world, I hope together we can create the world's largest ever climate positive artwork.”
These two new experiences and many more are available for everyone to interact with online, and if you’d like to continue your journey of exploration of climate, art and technology, don’t miss Culture Meets Climate, Google Arts & Culture’s home for all artist, museum and scientist collaborations focused on telling the planet’s stories and reimagining climate data.
Since its creation in 2011 — and thanks to the collaboration of 2,500 cultural organizations in 80 countries — Google Arts & Culture has allowed people to explore the world through a cultural lens. Like culture, nature plays a foundational role in people’s lives and identities and over the years, its presence on our platform has developed organically, thanks to collaborations with natural history museums, scientists, artists, NGOS, preservation and scientific organizations. And as the climate crisis becomes more urgent, culture, storytelling and technology increasingly have a role to play.
Because of this, we are proud to announce today g.co/culturemeetsclimate, a new unified experience bringing together the diverse range of experiences, resources and features available to anyone interested in learning more about the environment, climate change and sustainability from museums, artists and scientists.
The climate crisis and the challenges we face are a complex subject, but artists and culture can present it through a new lens. In June 2020, Google Arts & Culture teamed up with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to launch Heartbeat of the Earth, where artists interpret scientific climate data and which invites you to interact with a series of artworks that make the data more tangible and understandable. You can dive into an Acidifying Ocean with Cristina Tarquini and explore the impact of rising temperatures on marine life; or “see” and learn about the plastic particles that are ever-present in the atmosphere around you with Plastic Air by Giorgia Lupi; and to visualize the actual and predicted global sea level rise caused by the climate crisis, visit the Coastline Paradox by Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta.
Thanks to the contributions of institutions and experts around the world, you can explore the planet’s treasures via multimedia storytelling and 360 imagery from Antarctica to the Great Barrier Reef and Borneo’s Rainforest, and how it supports an incredible ecosystem that is home to numerous endangered species. Learn about fascinating topics such as the magic of mangroves, how gardens can predict climate change or how edible plastic can help fight our plastics pollution problem. Get to know the first non-human ambassador to the United Nations General Assembly and follow a ranger through iconic National Parks in the US.
Discover how climate change and global socio-economic shifts are threatening our magnificent natural landscapes and disrupting small communities, from the resilient women of Namibia’s Himba Tribe to the Uro community of Lake Titicaca, to the Tribes of Papua New Guinea.
Find out about the devastating effect the climate crisis is having on our cultural heritage, and how people around the world are using technology to protect their cultural sites against climate change with Heritage on the Edge. Using 360 imagery, 3D modeling and storytelling, the collaboration with ICOMOS and CyArk highlights a small selection of cultural sites being affected by climate change: Rapa Nui’s (Easter Island) iconic statues, Scotland’s Edinburgh Castle, the great mosque city of Bagerhat in Bangladesh, the historic coastal city of Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania and the adobe metropolis of Chan Chan in Peru.
Culture Meets Climate is a live hub that will highlight all our new initiatives related to the environment, as new collaborations and experiences come online, so keep an eye on g.co/culturemeetsclimate for more.
Since its creation in 2011, Google Arts & Culture has made a wide range of cultural stories and experiences available to everyone, thanks to our collaboration with cultural organisations around the world. From experiencing dinosaurs and iconic fashion garments in 360 to getting immersed into masterpieces guided by your favourite actor or musician, and even projecting Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit into your home in AR, the platform offers curious minds many opportunities to learn.
Whether it's taking art selfies, playing puzzle parties with friends, or diving into richly documented resources about US Black History or Inventions and Discoveries in history, Google Arts & Culture has been a valuable learning companion to people of all ages and backgrounds.
And today, we are releasing a new Teacher Guide – a dedicated resource for educators to make learning with Arts & Culture and using the platform in class easier than ever. The guide, developed in partnership with education and instructional design experts at Google, was created to help teachers better understand how to use the platform to engage their students. It includes ready-to-use handouts and customizable activity templates, and compliments other popular experiences on Google Arts & Culture that were designed with educators in mind.
Take a Virtual Field Trip, Julia Allum, 2021, Google Arts & Culture
Teachers can take their students on a virtual field trip, with hundreds of expeditions now available on Google Arts & Culture. Fly to the Moon, dive to the Great Barrier Reef, zoom Inside a Cell, visit museums, uncover scientific theories and explore distant lands. You can still explore the world from the comfort of your desk or classroom, no headset needed.
Created by education experts, the lesson plans can also be used as worksheets.
Ten new downloadable lesson plans have been published, such as Uncovering Egypt’s Layered History, Milestones in the Pride Movement, and The History of Computing. All Google Arts & Culture lesson plans have been written by education experts. In addition, Get Smart with Art is a new resource created by the de Young Museum and designed to enable educators, with no prior knowledge of art, to get younger students to look at art works.
Learn with Google Arts & Culture, London Stories by Julia Allum, 2018, London Transport Museum
For those looking for information on a particular topic, the Learn about Arts & Culture page gathers materials and experiences from across the platform, based on subjects including natural history, physics, geography, art and music.
Google Experiments, Art Coloring Book, Dish of Apples by Paul Cezanne, c. 1876-77, Metropolitan Museum of Art
If a teacher wants to excite students about a subject, one of the Google Arts & Culture Experiments might get them hooked. Get them composing like Beethoven, Bach and Mozart by creating melodieswith AI. You want them to think about their global footprint? Then the CO2 footprint of food we eat might do the trick. There are also simple, fun ways to engage with art such as the art coloring book or the collaborative puzzle party.
The Google Arts & Culture home page changes daily
The homepage is usually where you start your journey on Google Arts & Culture. It is refreshed daily, so if you find something useful, make it a favorite by clicking on the heart shaped icon. That way you can locate it quickly next time you visit the site and you can share it on Google Classroom, using the share link. You can also do a quick search (magnifying glass, top right hand corner); from apples to zebras, you’re bound to find something of interest.
Whatever the future of teaching holds, educators can be sure that they will find something on Google Arts & Culture to keep their (online) class occupied, no matter what, or where, they are studying.
We hope that these resources will help everyone learn for life, and encourage you to also check out some other resources Google provides – now brought together on our new Learning site– to help everyone in the world learn anything in the world.
As students, families and educators increasingly rely on tools to support a hybrid approach to education, they depend on accessing helpful online resources to bring their curriculum to life.
Google Arts & Culture, in collaboration with more than 2000 cultural institutions, has long offered a range of tools and experiences to inspire those teaching virtually and everyone looking to learn online. To improve the experience and reflect how we’re all learning, today we’re launching Learn with Google Arts & Culture, a dedicated gateway for teachers, parents and students that brings together the stories, knowledge and treasures from cultural institutions around the world.
This includes downloadable lesson plans crafted by educational experts, with topics like dinosaurs, Space exploration, Black history and culture and Hispanic heritage. Want to learn about the Big Bang? Dive into physics and find out what happens at CERN — or take a 3D look at prehistoric animals and NASA’s latest Mars Rover Perseverance. Need a fresh take for an art lesson? Introduce your students to Frida Kahlo by visiting her atelier or Lee Ungno by zooming into his masterpieces in ultra high resolution, and art movements such as Impressionism or the Harlem Renaissance.
This is a first step for Google Arts & Culture and we hope it will complement the many resources that our cultural partners have developed and made available over time.
As students, families and educators increasingly rely on tools to support a hybrid approach to education, they depend on accessing helpful online resources to bring their curriculum to life.
Google Arts & Culture, in collaboration with more than 2000 cultural institutions, has long offered a range of tools and experiences to inspire those teaching virtually and everyone looking to learn online. To improve the experience and reflect how we’re all learning, today we’re launching Learn with Google Arts & Culture, a dedicated gateway for teachers, parents and students that brings together the stories, knowledge and treasures from cultural institutions around the world.
This includes downloadable lesson plans crafted by educational experts, with topics like dinosaurs, Space exploration, Black history and culture and Hispanic heritage. Want to learn about the Big Bang? Dive into physics and find out what happens at CERN — or take a 3D look at prehistoric animals and NASA’s latest Mars Rover Perseverance. Need a fresh take for an art lesson? Introduce your students to Frida Kahlo by visiting her atelier or Lee Ungno by zooming into his masterpieces in ultra high resolution, and art movements such as Impressionism or the Harlem Renaissance.
This is a first step for Google Arts & Culture and we hope it will complement the many resources that our cultural partners have developed and made available over time.
In 1981, African-American civil rights leader Queen Mother Moore visited the U.K. on a speaking tour that would have an enduring impact on Black British history. Coming in the wake of London’s Brixton uprisings, her teachings from the movement in the U.S. would go on to inspire the foundation of the Black Cultural Archives (BCA), a living monument to Black history and culture.
To celebrate Black History Month in the UK this October, Google Arts & Culture partnered with the BCA to bring its unique collection of images, artifacts and artworks together online for the first time.
Based in London’s Brixton neighborhood, the Black Cultural Archives is the only national heritage center dedicated to collecting, preserving and celebrating the histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain. With this project, Google Arts & Culture has digitized over 4,000 items from the BCA to help inspire and educate.
The collection features over 30 online stories, with highlights including the Black Women’s movement in the UK, the evolution of Black British dance and a collection of paintings and ceramics by Jamaican-born artist Rudi Patterson. Thanks to our Art Camera technology, you can now study the intricate details of newly digitized artworks in Gigapixel resolution.
This past summer, Google Arts & Culture also partnered with London’s Somerset House to digitize and share stories from its recent exhibition Get Up, Stand Up Now, which explored the past 50 years of Black creativity in Britain and beyond. The partnership culminated in a new collaboration with Samm Henshaw, recognized by YouTube Music UK as a “One To Watch” emerging artist. Inspired by the generations of creative pioneers featured in the Somerset House exhibition, Samm wrote an original track honoring “the motherland” and invited visual artist Wumi Olaosebikan to contribute a creative response to his song through painting.The theme of the motherland can also be found in another new exhibition on Google Arts & Culture. Everyone in the world can trace their origins back to East Africa, which is sometimes called the cradle of mankind. We’ve collaborated with the National Museums of Kenya in a new online collection that celebrates the heritage and stories of Kenya’s many communities.
This is Google Arts & Culture’s most ambitious project to date in Africa, and lets you explore Kenya across cultures, generations and geography through over 10,500 high resolution photographs, more than 100 expert-curated exhibits and 60 Street Views.
To explore these remarkable stories in more detail, and to discover collections from more than 2,000 museums around the world, visit the Google Arts & Culture app for free either on the web or on iOS or Android.
“In the olden days, everybody sang.”
Those are the words of Leonard Bernstein, composer behind the iconic musical “West Side Story,” where everyone danced and snapped through the streets, too. Whether you’re a Jet all the way or you side with the Sharks, Tony and Maria’s love story is as poignant today as it was 60 years ago, when the Broadway musical first debuted.
In partnership with Carnegie Hall, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Museum of the City of New York and the National Museum of American Jewish History, Google Arts & Culture is launching a new collection honoring “West Side Story.” Bringing together artifacts and mementos from the making of the musical and movie, behind-the-scenes photographs, and a peek into the modern-day representation of the musical, this collection explores the history, artistic value and social relevance of “West Side Story.” Check it out at g.co/westsidestory and on the Google Arts & Culture app (available on Android and iOS).
Stephen Sondheim on piano and Leonard Bernstein standing amongst female singers rehearsing for "West Side Story."
In 1959, photographer Bruce Davidson observed and photographed a teenage gang in Brooklyn, New York, capturing the spirit of post-war youth culture that inspired the rival gangs of "West Side Story." This photo is one is called “Man in sunglasses smoking.”
From March 4–6, 2016, three extraordinary performances of “West Side Story” were presented at the Knockdown Center, a restored factory in Queens. The production brought together high school–aged apprentice performers joining the cast, and a 200-voice youth choir adding a new dimension to Leonard Bernstein’s iconic score.
Did you know that the Bush Family has a favorite taco recipe, which First Lady Barbara Bush described as “loved by all who love Mexican food”? Or that George Washington’s dentures were not made of wood as is popularly thought, but actually from human and cow teeth as well as ivory? Or how about that, to celebrate his Inauguration, Theodore Roosevelt received a lock of president Lincoln’s hair as a gift?
No, we’re not presidential scholars; we’re just excited for Presidents’ Day! Today, as a follow-up to our American Democracy collection, Google Arts & Culture is partnering with more than 30 cultural institutions to bring you history from the United States presidency, available at g.co/americandemocracy.
With over 2,000 new artifacts, photos, pictures and more, and 63 new exhibits (for 158 exhibits, total) this collection invites you to remember and celebrate the history, lives and legacies of the 44 U.S. presidents. Take an immersive tour of presidents’ iconic homes and get a sneak peek into their private lives—from childhood and family life, to favorite pastimes and chefs—in addition to their public accomplishments.
You can view 25 presidential portraits captured using Google’s Art Camera. These gigapixel quality images allow you to zoom in and explore details of these portraits more thoroughly than you could with the naked eye.
We’re making available 17 new 360-degree virtual tours that transport you to places full of presidential history. Using the Google Arts & Culture App (available on iOS and Android) and Google Cardboard, take a virtual tour of places like the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site. And, in addition, educators can use Google Expeditions to take students on a guided tour of the White House, right from their desks! There are 14 Google Expeditions relating to the Office of the President, including Presidential Museums and work by the First Ladies, all great trips for students across grades and subjects.
Ever wonder what it’s like to travel like POTUS? Take a look at Ronald Reagan’s Air Force One (now housed in his Presidential Library) and other ways presidents have traveled in safety and style.
Our Presidents’ Day collection covers the vast political and personal histories of our U.S. heads of state, full of intriguing and surprising stories that allow for anyone with an internet connection to turn into a presidential historian. We hope you enjoy!
Did you know that the Bush Family has a favorite taco recipe, which First Lady Barbara Bush described as “loved by all who love Mexican food”? Or that George Washington’s dentures were not made of wood as is popularly thought, but actually from human and cow teeth as well as ivory? Or how about that, to celebrate his Inauguration, Theodore Roosevelt received a lock of president Lincoln’s hair as a gift?
No, we’re not presidential scholars; we’re just excited for Presidents’ Day! Today, as a follow-up to our American Democracy collection, Google Arts & Culture is partnering with more than 30 cultural institutions to bring you history from the United States presidency, available at g.co/americandemocracy.
With over 2,000 new artifacts, photos, pictures and more, and 63 new exhibits (for 158 exhibits, total) this collection invites you to remember and celebrate the history, lives and legacies of the 44 U.S. presidents. Take an immersive tour of presidents’ iconic homes and get a sneak peek into their private lives—from childhood and family life, to favorite pastimes and chefs—in addition to their public accomplishments.
You can view 25 presidential portraits captured using Google’s Art Camera. These gigapixel quality images allow you to zoom in and explore details of these portraits more thoroughly than you could with the naked eye.
We’re making available 17 new 360-degree virtual tours that transport you to places full of presidential history. Using the Google Arts & Culture App (available on iOS and Android) and Google Cardboard, take a virtual tour of places like the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site. And, in addition, educators can use Google Expeditions to take students on a guided tour of the White House, right from their desks! There are 14 Google Expeditions relating to the Office of the President, including Presidential Museums and work by the First Ladies, all great trips for students across grades and subjects.
Ever wonder what it’s like to travel like POTUS? Take a look at Ronald Reagan’s Air Force One (now housed in his Presidential Library) and other ways presidents have traveled in safety and style.
Our Presidents’ Day collection covers the vast political and personal histories of our U.S. heads of state, full of intriguing and surprising stories that allow for anyone with an internet connection to turn into a presidential historian. We hope you enjoy!
