Home | Museum Collections | Themed Galleries | Index of Artwork
The Kentucky Virtual Art Museum
Introduction
Special Thanks ...
To the W. Paul and Lucille Caudill Little Foundation for project funding.
And to all the artists who gave KET permission to include images of their work in the Kentucky Virtual Art Museum.
Twenty Kentucky museums and arts organizations with permanent collections have contributed more than 230 images of artworks to KET’s Kentucky Virtual Art Museum CD-ROM, literally making a world of art just a click away. The featured artworks range from paintings to sculpture, from quilts to folk art, and from historical artifacts to contemporary pieces and include works by the European masters as well as past and present Kentucky artists. Museums were asked to select artworks that represent the scope of their collections while relating to Kentucky academic content. Our goal is to provide Kentucky teachers with an exciting array of images for classroom use, while making them aware of the rich resources available in Kentucky museums. The CD-ROM also includes 20 artworks made by children, from University of Kentucky Professor George Szekely’s collection.
The Kentucky Virtual Art Museum is a centerpiece of the Visual Arts Toolkit, one of a series of Arts Toolkits created by KET for Kentucky teachers. Each toolkit includes hours of high-quality instructional video clips addressing Kentucky Core Content in the arts and humanities, accompanied by lesson plans keyed to specific curriculum standards, ideas for additional classroom activities, glossaries, handouts, and a binder full of other resources. Each Arts Toolkit also includes bonus resources tied to the specific arts discipline. In addition to the Kentucky Virtual Art Museum CD-ROM, the Visual Arts Toolkit includes transparencies of selected works from this collection and a beautiful 24" X 36" full-color Purposes of Art poster. See the Arts Toolkit web site [www.ket.org/artstoolkit] for more information about this exciting instructional resource.
CD Contents
The Kentucky Virtual Art Museum gives you three ways to explore a world of artworks:
- Museum Collections—20 separate galleries—one for each of the participating museums
- Themed Galleries—collections of artworks that explore specific themes or are targeted at special audiences
- Index of Artworks—by artist, artwork title, or medium
In addition, two special exhibits gather together work that will appeal to primary students: Young at Art and the George Szekely Collection of Children’s Art, a gallery of works made by children from found objects.
How It Works
To go to a museum gallery, select Museum Collections at the top or bottom of any page. You will see an alphabetical list of the participating museums. Click on the name of the museum you are interested in to go to the museum index page, which displays thumbnails of the works from that museum. Clicking on a thumbnail puts an image of that work in the larger window. You may also click on the large image itself to change it to another artwork.
Under the thumbnails on a museum index page, you will see some basic information about the artwork shown in the large window, with an “Artwork Info >>” link at the bottom. Click on that text to go to a page with detailed information about the artwork, including background on the work and the artist, classroom ideas, and related links. From the artwork information page, you may also enlarge each work and zoom in to see details. For many 3D works, you can use a rotator program to see the piece from any side. A few works are accompanied by streaming video, generally artist profiles (as an example, see the profile of Evan Decker that accompanies Horse and Buggy with Man and Woman in the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art gallery).
A museum logo appears at the top of each museum index page. To see general information about the museum, click on that logo or on the “For More Information” link under the museum address.
The Themed Galleries also link to the artwork information pages for the artworks they include. And each artwork information page includes a link back to the museum whose collection the work is from as well as any Themed Galleries including that work.
Note: The Kentucky Virtual Art Museum is designed to display properly on monitors with a resolution of 800 X 600 or better (typically, 16-inch diagonal or larger). If you are not able to see the entire thumbnail page, try adjusting the resolution setting.