The annual event celebrating art.
Slow Art Day is Saturday, April 5, 2025 Join Us!
Photo by Greg Neville
15th Annual Slow Art Day Tomorrow
April 4th, 2025The 15th Annual Slow Art Day – with 210+ museums, galleries, churches, and hospitals are – begins tomorrow Saturday, April 5, 2025 (see full list of venues around the world and register yours if you have not yet done so).
New York, Berlin, Mexico City, Paris, Hong Kong, Brussels, Athens, Budapest, Washington, DC, Toronto, Rome, Paris, San Francisco, Sydney, Melbourne, Stockholm, Seoul, Antwerp, Los Angeles, London, Barcelona, Stockholm, Johannesburg, Brazil, Singapore, and many, many other places are participating in Slow Art Day.
We are proud that in this topsy-turvy time, Slow Art Day is a model of global cooperation.
So, yes, while trade barriers, tariffs, and acrimony fill the global political debate, thousands of people across every continent will celebrate the power of art to bring us together.
Here are some highlights from this year’s festival of slowing down to look at and love art.
Mexico City is hosting its first citywide Slow Art Day with more than **40** museums and galleries participating. Read these two articles from CDMX – Ad Magazine and Milenio – to learn more. I also encourage you to check out the Instagram for the Mexico City Slow Art Day – there are a lot of great resources, images, and stories there. Constanza Ontiveros Valdés, writer and cultural projects organizer, has done an amazing job.
Bloomington, Illinois, which started the citywide movement, is now hosting 20+ museums and galleries and a big party to boot. Read this article to learn more or see our post.
Here are two posters from these two citywide events.
Mass MoCA is celebrating again as is the beautiful and wonderful Athenaeum in Boston while the Morgan Library is hosting in New York, and The Barnes Foundation , Glenn Foerd, and the Magic Gardens are all hosting in Philadelphia.
In Washington D.C., the National Museum of Women in the Arts is hosting yet again while the National Museum of Asian Art is joining us for the first time.
Antwerp’s church-based Slow Art movement continues to grow while St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne has become a leader in hospital-based Slow Art.
The Ur Mara Museo in Spain’s Basque country holds its 10th Slow Art Day with another full day of slow looking, cooking, eating, and dancing. While Ur Mara Museo has been celebrating Slow Art Day for a decade in the Basque country, The Altes Museum (English: Old Museum), a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the heart of Berlin’s museum island, holds their second Slow Art Day tomorrow.
The Goulandris Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens also holds their second Slow Art Day while The AGO in Toronto , one of the largest museums in North America, hosts their 10th Slow Art Day.
Australia has 11 participating museums, galleries and hospitals. The first Slow Art Day is being hosted at the De Young Museum in San Francisco (hosted by Slow Art Day pioneer, Carol Rossi).
There is so much happening all over the world, it’s impossible to summarize effectively.
But you can check out our 2024 Annual Report to get a sense of the range of activities from last year (and get inspired for this year).
Have a great 15th Annual Slow Art Day.
This is certainly a year we all really need to slow down, look at and love art, and love each other.
– Phyl, Ashley, Jessica Jane, Johanna, and Maggie
Slow Art Day en Plein Air in Cheshire, England
April 1st, 2025The 15th anniversary Slow Art Day is coming up this Saturday, April 5 – with hundreds of museums, galleries, churches, sculpture parks and other venues (be sure to register your museum, gallery, church, hospital, sculpture garden or other venue).
One location this year will be en plein air so to speak – in a hectic shopping center – hosted by the West Cheshire Museums in England.
They are bringing art outside to the heart of the city center and thereby making both the art and the art of slow looking more accessible.
Museum staff and community groups (including their dementia-inclusive Meet and Make group) have set questions for the public to encourage a slower look at the images.
They have chosen three art works out of their multiple galleries to bring to the Grosvenor Shopping Centre in Chester. The art they have chosen depict the city in different eras of its development – early 18th century (first image below), the Victorian era (second image below), and 2017.
The West Cheshire Museums are a diverse group of museums, which includes Grovesnor Museum, and other locations like a working watermill and a restored salt production site. Their collections cover a large slice of Cheshire’s history and tell the stories of the area’s people and places, from prehistoric times to the present day.
The West Cheshire Museums have been celebrating Slow Art Day since 2017 and we are happy to welcome them back for our 15th anniversary year – especially with their program to bring art out to the people.
– Phyl
P.S. We are proud this is now the 15th anniversary of Slow Art Day – the movement has grown and we continue to be delighted by the creative and innovative ways that museums, galleries, churches, hospitals and other venues choose to celebrate this day dedicated to looking at and loving art.
House of European History Slow Art Day 2025
March 28th, 2025Slow Art Day 2025 is coming up April 5 – with hundreds of museums, galleries, churches, sculpture parks and other venues (be sure to register your museum, gallery, church, hospital, sculpture garden or other venue).
One of these locations this year will be The House of European History in Brussels, which is focusing on “Our Family Garden” by Smirna Kulenović, a citizen-led photographic project designed to heal collective trauma from the Bosnian War.
And we are happy to report that their Slow Art Day event will launch Slow Looking Saturday, a monthly guided experience that will focus on a different image from the exhibition, examining topics such as commemorations, historical re-enactments, and personal legacies.
These sessions will continue monthly through the end of the exhibit in November 2026.
We at Slow Art Day love seeing this.
Our goal since day one has been to inspire museums and other venues not only to participate in the annual event, but to create year-round programming that helps visitors slow down.
We’ll note that The House of European History worked with Claire Bown to develop this program. Claire is author of The Art Engager: Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums.
We are glad to see the House of European History’s year-round commitment to Slow Art Day and look forward to getting updates on their progress.
Have a great Slow Art Day 2025.
Best,
– Phyl
P.S. Slow Art Day 2025 is coming up – be sure to register your museum, gallery, church, hospital, sculpture garden or other venue.
Slow Art Day Annual Report – 2024
March 26th, 2025The 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.