Slow Art Day Annual Report – 2024

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Posted on March 26, 2025 by Phyl Terry

The 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.

ikono TV Presents ‘Virtual Slow Art Day’

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Mr. Turtle

Our sponsor and partner, ikon TV, has created a 4 minute “virtual Slow Art Day” video that they are showing as part of their Slow Art Day programming in Germany and the Middle East.

Watch their “Virtual Slow Art Day” video here (note: there is *no* sound intentionally)

And here’s Ikono TV’s description of their video and their commitment to Slow Art Day:

“Let’s take a closer look – like all art, we can understand it better when we look more closely.” This love for detail and contemplative, decelerated experience of art is something we – ikono – stand for. Just like the Slow Art Day initiative, ikono invites people to experience art as a pure visual experience at home thanks to its two TV channels broadcasting now in 25 countries, spreading therefore the Slow Art Day mission to the largest possible audience – even outside of art institutions.

On the occasion of this year’s Slow Art Day on April 28th, ikono presents two themed programs: Miniature and Calligraphy in art. Both represent two classical forms or artistic practice in the Menasa region – the region ikono was launched in a few years ago. Both miniature and calligraphy require the viewer to slow down in order to discover details and to decipher.

The word “miniature” comes from the Latin word “miniare”, which means to color with red lead and was used for the capital letters. Miniatures were first used as decoration of hand-written books. We show a range of the traditional miniature paintings from the Ottoman, Persian, Asian and European heritage.

In addition, we present also the “conceptual idea of much-smaller-than-usual sizes” in painting, photography, sculpture, installation works and other forms of contemporary art.

A number of cultures throughout the world draw upon calligraphy as a prominent source of artistic practice from ancient times to most recent contemporary styles and movements. Calligraphy has also arguably become the most venerated form of Islamic art. Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish calligraphy is associated with abstract arabesque motives on the walls and ceilings of mosques as well as on the page. Contemporary artists in the Islamic world draw on the heritage of calligraphy to use calligraphic inscriptions or abstractions in their work. The calligraphy special presents traditional and contemporary works of different artistic backgrounds.

ikonoTV is a new platform proposing an alternative to museums and galleries – as it goes beyond the limitations of space and time frames. In Berlin, a team consisting of artists, art historians, filmmakers, art critics and curators from over a dozen different nationalities, is working together to find new ways of showcasing visual arts.

In late 2010, ikono launched its art channel ikonoMenasa: the first TV channel solely devoted to art. ikonoMenasa runs 24 hours every day with no commercial breaks, no added sound or narrative in 24 countries throughout the Menasa region – the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

In December 2011, ikonoTV was launched in Germany as a second channel – bringing this unique, contemplative way of experiencing art to the German public.

For more information, please visit us at www.ikono.org