The annual event celebrating art.
Slow Art Day is Saturday, April 11, 2026 Join Us!
Photo by Greg Neville
Slow Looking and Slow Walking at Museo Universidad de Navarra in Spain
March 21st, 2026For their third Slow Art Day in 2025, the Museo Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona, Spain organized two free events — one for adults and another for children — both exploring different ways of slowing down with art.
Featured works included:
• “Incendi” by Antoni Tàpies
• Walking route map artwork by Hamish Fulton
First, nine adults gathered in front of the abstract painting “Incendi” (1991) by Antoni Tàpies for a slow looking session guided by a museum educator. Participants spent extended time contemplating the work before sharing their observations and reflections together in discussion.
The museum also hosted a Slow Art Day workshop for nine children aged 8-12, inspired by the work of the “walking artist” Hamish Fulton, who has walked the Camino de Santiago several times.
The workshop had two parts. First, participants carried out a “slow walk” exercise inside the museum inspired by Fulton’s artistic practice. Then the group went outside and walked a small section of the Camino de Santiago, which passes through the University of Navarra campus near the museum.
Through this combination of walking, observation, and conversation, the children explored how movement and place can become part of artistic experience.
At Slow Art Day HQ, we love seeing hosts expand the idea of slow looking in creative ways. By combining careful observation with walking and place-based exploration, the Museo Universidad de Navarra created two thoughtful experiences that helped adults and children connect with art in different ways.
We look forward to seeing what Museo Universidad de Navarra comes up with for Slow Art Day 2026.
– Ashley, Johanna, Jessica Jane, and Phyl
See–Think–Wonder at Museum of Chelmsford
March 21st, 2026For their first Slow Art Day, the Museum of Chelmsford in Essex, United Kingdom invited visitors to slow down with art using a simple framework: See – Think – Wonder. The activity took place within the exhibition Shifting Perspectives: Exploring Art Together, which ran in the museum’s temporary gallery space through November 2, 2025.
To guide visitors, the museum created a set of “See Think Wonder” cards that guests could pick up in the gallery. The cards encouraged people to slow down and consider different ways of engaging with artworks — an approach that works not only in museums but whenever people encounter art in daily life.
Visitors were invited to explore artworks through three stages of looking.
See — what catches your eye? Look at the colors the artist used. Explore the atmosphere of the picture. Can you copy the pose or expression of any figures you see?
Think — can you imagine yourself inside the picture? What might the artist be trying to say to us? Does the title change how you see the picture?
Wonder — what might happen next in the picture? What conversations might be taking shape? What unanswered questions do you have about the picture?
This simple structure gave visitors permission to take their time and engage with artworks through curiosity rather than expertise.
Featured works included:
• “Cecil Collins at the CSA” by Rosalind Cuthbert
• “Point of View” by Doris Boulton-Maude (1892–1976)
The museum’s See–Think–Wonder cards were inspired by the I Picture This toolkit developed by the The Wallace Collection, a past Slow Art Day participant.
At Slow Art Day HQ we love the simple See–Think–Wonder cards – they are easy to use with any artwork, and help shift the experience from passive viewing to active discovery. We encourage other museums and galleries to copy these.
Since this was the Museum of Chelmsford’s first Slow Art Day, we’re especially happy to welcome them to the global Slow Art Day movement and look forward to seeing what the Museum of Chelmsford comes up with for Slow Art Day 2026.
– Ashley, Johanna, Jessica Jane, and Phyl
Music, Poetry, Drawing and Discussion at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp
March 18th, 2026For Slow Art Day 2025, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) in Belgium invited visitors to slow down and engage deeply with art through a series of thoughtfully designed experiences across the museum’s exhibitions.
KMSKA has been an important participant in the Slow Art Day movement for nearly a decade and was notably the first museum in Belgium to organize a Slow Art Day event in 2016. For the 2025 edition, the museum expanded its program with several creative formats designed to help visitors observe more carefully and reflect more deeply.
One of the highlights was an experimental program called “Slow Looking with Music.” Visitors spent an hour focusing on a monumental triptych by the 15th-century Flemish painter Hans Memling, while a live soundtrack was performed by the Belgian experimental band Monnik. The musicians performed from behind the audience so that all attention remained directed toward the artwork (note: we at Slow Art Day HQ wish we could have been there).
Electric guitars, analog synthesizers, effect pedals, and layered vocal sounds created an immersive soundscape that encouraged visitors to observe the painting slowly and thoughtfully. Participants were given printed prompts to guide their reflections, including questions such as: What do you see? What do you hear? What thoughts or feelings arise? slow_looking_prompts_music_KMSKA
After the musical performance, a museum guide facilitated a group discussion where visitors shared their interpretations and experiences.
In addition to this musical slow looking experiment, KMSKA organized several other Slow Art Day activities throughout the museum.
During “In Dialogue,” visitors sat together in front of a selected artwork by Belgian contemporary artist Hans Op de Beeck, guided by a museum educator who helped participants observe closely and discuss their impressions.
Another activity invited visitors to participate in a drawing tour through the exhibition spaces. With drawing prompts provided by a museum guide, participants of all skill levels used sketching as a way to slow down and connect with the artworks.
A literary component was also included. Museum staff member Sophie led a poetry session, reading selected poems alongside artworks and encouraging visitors to reflect on how language and visual art interact.
Finally, visitors could participate in Radio Bart, a special conversational format led by art lovers who are blind. Through discussion and thoughtful questioning, the Radio Bart hosts helped visitors experience artworks from new perspectives and notice details they might otherwise overlook.
Together, these varied programs demonstrated how many different paths can lead to slow looking. Whether through music, drawing, poetry, or spoken word and conversation (especially awesome for blind participants), visitors were encouraged to pause, reflect, and engage more deeply with the artworks around them.
We at Slow Art Day HQ are deeply grateful to the team at KMSKA for continuing to innovate around slow looking and for being such a long-standing leaders in our movement.
We look forward to what amazing design they come up with for Slow Art Day 2026.
— Ashley, Johanna, Jessica Jane, and Phyl
Multisensory Slow Art Day at the House of European History
March 17th, 2026For Slow Art Day 2025, the House of European History in Brussels, Belgium, launched a new program called “Slow Looking Saturday,” a guided series designed to accompany the museum’s temporary exhibition Presence of the Past: A European Album, which explores documentary photography and how Europeans engage with memory, history, and the legacy of the past.
The inaugural session, held on April 5 for Slow Art Day, focused on a single photographic project: “Our Family Garden” by Bosnian artist Smirna Kulenović. Participants gathered for a one-hour facilitated slow looking experience led by Pauline Gault, Informal Learning Project Manager at the museum. The session was designed to help visitors deeply explore one image and its many layers of meaning.
“Our Family Garden” documents a remarkable act of healing through nature. In the project, calendula flowers are planted in former trenches used during the Siege of Sarajevo, transforming spaces once associated with violence into places of growth and remembrance. The Slow Art Day session took place just one day before Sarajevo’s city day, when people now gather to care for these gardens.
To guide the slow looking experience, Gault incorporated educational frameworks including Project Zero Visible Thinking routines from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Thinking Museum® Approach developed by museum educator Claire Bown, author of The Art Engager: Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums. Participants engaged in several structured activities including Memory Draw, Engage & Imagine, and 3–2–1 Reflection, each designed to deepen observation, interpretation, and conversation.
The session also activated the sense of smell: dried calendula flowers were present in the room, allowing participants to connect physically with the plant at the center of the artwork. During the closing reflection exercise, visitors wrote their thoughts on the back of specially designed postcards featuring the artwork. These served both as reflection tools and souvenirs for participants to take home.
Feedback from participants was very positive. Many remarked that focusing on a single photograph allowed them to notice details and meanings they would have otherwise overlooked.
We at Slow Art Day HQ are delighted to see the House of European History launch an entire learning series from their Slow Art Day program. Special thanks to Pauline Gault and the Learning & Outreach team for developing this thoughtful approach, and we look forward to hearing about their event for Slow Art Day 2026.
— Ashley, Johanna, Jessica Jane, and Phyl