The past twelve months have been incredibly troubling — so staggeringly hard, so tragic, so challenging — but we have not walked alone. 

As a historian, I know we’re at our strongest if we look forward and back. Through 70,000 years of our shared human experience, we’ve been forced to deal with plague, pandemic, isolation, trauma, and fear of the unknown. And we’ve tried, together, to find solutions and paths through phenomenal life challenges. Because we often create our way out of a crisis, we can see the way women and men across the world have worked through big life questions in science, technology, art and culture from prehistory to the present. 

When the pandemic locked us up a year ago, we had to travel in our minds. For me, less time on the road meant more inspiring digital conversations with friends. Exploring Google Arts & Culture's online collections, I wanted to spend a few minutes — a brain-refreshing tea break — to call on the know-how of friends and experts and dive into some of life's big questions. 

So we came up with Tea with B, a 5-episode series to explore these questions with guest stars ranging from authors, comedians, and poets. 

These chats have been a joy, a chance to explore our shared human story across thousands of years. Whether locked down or liberated, I’m definitely planning more. I want to explore questions like what love means, why we play sports, why we love baking bread, why we’re addicted to music — the list is endless. Because even when our bodies aren’t free, our minds can be!

The artwork captions at a museum seem like such a small thing. Yet those short texts provide essential information: the identity of the artists. What would happen if we stopped and read them carefully?

We might realize the significant lack of space and voice given to women artists. That’s one of the reasons behind the National Gallery of Rome’s radical six-year program, Women Up. It brings together many of our works by women artists, while also focusing on the representation of women and the damage done by residual stereotypes. It also highlights what happens when we bring in a more balanced perspective on gender.

Making a meaningful contribution to the visibility of women in the museum means thinking outside the confines of our physical space, and exploring new curatorial techniques. That’s why we’re excited to partner with Google Arts & Culture to bring the entire program online, along with access to one of the most important Italian feminist archives and the new exhibition “lo dico lo — I say I,”  which brings together the works of 40 Italian women artists from different generations.

To introduce the women behind the works, we’ve compiled more than 130 of their stories. You can explore unsettling collages made by Hannah Höch; the brilliant photographs of Dora Maar; the incredible surrealist canvases of Meret Oppenheim; and even the artistic performances of Marina Abramovic, in which the body becomes a powerful expressive language.

We’ve also digitized over 16,000 documents from the Carla Lonzi Archive: The photographs, critical essays, invitations to exhibitions and writings for Rivolta Femminile guide us through the life and work of the noted art critic Carla Lonzi to understand the reasons for a radical position that changed the history of Italian feminism. For the first time Google Arts & Culture automatically transcribed over 4,000 documents using OCR (optical character recognition), transforming the experience of archival materials by making them text-searchable.

And finally, there’s the exhibition “Io dico Io — I say I,” which opens today at the National Gallery and on Google Arts & Culture and features the work of over 40 Italian women artists. Eleven of them turned the camera on themselves, from their homes, and talked about their work and participation in the display. As they speak, the digital exhibitions of their works allow us to enter their world and get up close to every detail.

By curating these projects and exhibitions, and partnering with Google Arts & Culture to make them widely accessible, the National Gallery of Rome is proud to be making itself more and more socially responsible and inclusive.

Editor’s note: On the anniversary of the first launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery, we’ll hear from Dr. Ellen R. Stofan, planetary geologist and the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, about a new 360 film on board the Shuttle that launched the Hubble Space Telescope.

Since the dawn of spaceflight, only a few hundred people have experienced space firsthand. But since the beginning, there have been moments that captured the world’s imagination and challenged our collective Earth-bound perspective. Of the many orbital endeavors that have made headlines through the decades, one of the most enduring and prolific has been the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble has been called one of the most important single scientific instruments of all time. The data it collected has deepened our understanding of the natural world—from the edge of our solar system to the age of the universe—and the images it has returned have brought the startling beauty of the cosmos to people around the world.

Today, on the 34th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Discovery’s maiden voyage, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and Google Arts & Culture have teamed up to bring visitors into the orbiter like never before. Two of the astronauts who helped deliver Hubble to orbit as part of STS-31—Maj Gen Charlie Bolden  and Dr. Kathy Sullivan—take us on a 360 journey inside Discovery at the Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

The video was captured using Google’s Halo camera, and takes us along with the astronauts as they climb aboard the spacecraft together for the first time in 28 years. Charlie and Kathy show us what life in space was like from dawn (they saw 16 sunrises and sunsets each day) to dinnertime (sometimes eaten on the ceiling), and relive the moment they deployed Hubble after years of planning and training.

STS-31 is just one great example of why Discovery was called the champion of the Shuttle fleet—and why it is now on display as part of the Smithsonian’s national collection. Discovery flew every kind of mission the Space Shuttle was designed to fly, from Hubble’s deployment to the delivery and assembly of International Space Station modules and more. Today, we’re celebrating the orbiter’s 39 missions and 365 total days in space with this special immersive film, 15 digital exhibits, virtual tours, and over 200 online artifacts.

As we enter a new era of spaceflight in the years ahead—with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program and the development of Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope—I hope this new collection demonstrates the remarkable progress we’ve made toward unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and how much farther we can go together. Explore the magic of Discovery Space Shuttle on Google Arts & Culture. 

In 1934 the trumpeter, singer and movie star Louis Armstrong visited a studio in Paris to record his song “Tiger Rag” on a phonograph record that people could play on home gramophones. And while later recordings of “Tiger Rag” made it a celebrated jazz standard, the original recording that captured Armstrong’s passionate and original interpretation faded from memory.

To mark the birthday of Louis Armstrong 117 years ago, Google Arts & Culture and the record label Deutsche Grammophon teamed up to restore and digitize phonograph records like “Tiger Rag” from the label’s archive, and to tell the story of Emile Berliner, who invented the grammophon player and records that brought the music of Armstrong and many other artists to the masses.

In the summer of 1888, thirteen years before Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, Emile Berliner travelled to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia to unveil his gramophone player and record. Together, they represented the first iteration of the record player as we know it today, and a technology that would outlast every other audio format until the invention of digital formats. For the first time, music lovers everywhere could purchase their favorite songs and enjoy them at home. Later on, Berliner would also launch Deutsche Grammophon, the world’s first record label, as an attempt to commercialise his groundbreaking invention.

Deutsche Grammophon is home to one of the world’s oldest sound archives and still releases music today. Although much of the early archive has been lost due to war and natural decay, there are still thousands of recordings—from jazz and classical, to opera and even spoken poetry awaiting to be listened to again.

With Google Arts & Culture, Deutsche Grammophon is restoring and digitizing hundreds of these previously unpublished cultural treasures. Some of them will be played for the first time in decades; all of them will be made available to the public in high-quality.

In addition to these recordings, Google Arts & Culture launched 12 online exhibitions curated by Deutsche Grammophon with background material on Emile Berliner and the label’s heritage. All of the above is accessible via the Google Arts & Culture website at g.co/deutschegrammophon, as well as the Android and iOS mobile apps.

Join us in celebrating Louis Armstrong’s birthday and Emile Berliner’s inventions by listening to the original recording of “Tiger Rag” here.

For the last century, the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing has been the preeminent school of art education in China. Some of the most renowned masters of Chinese modern art trained at this hallowed institution and many of their works are stored in the CAFA Art Museum.

For CAFA’s 100th anniversary, Google Arts & Culture is taking the masterpieces in its museum to the world, for a new generation of art aficionados to enjoy. These include some iconic and rarely-exhibited works by the father of Chinese modern art Xu Beihong, like Tian Heng and His Five Hundred Followers and Behind Me.

Xu, was the first President of CAFA. Although he lacked a formal art education, his talent was evident from an early age and he received financial assistance to study painting in Japan and Europe. Xu was obsessively dedicated to reviving Chinese art, which he thought had gone to seed because of its over-reliance on traditional Chinese methods of painting. He often spent more than 12 hours a day painting, integrating the best of Western and Chinese techniques. Xu’s works exemplify the realism that became a defining characteristic of Chinese modern art, and you can see over 100 of these pieces on Google Arts & Culture today.

Visit and explore the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum on Google Arts & Culture today, available on desktop, iOS and Android.