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.

Picturing the Divine: Slow Art Day at the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum

Posted on June 6, 2023 by Johanna Bokedal

For their third Slow Art Day the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum (RPM) in Hildesheim, Germany, featured three statues representing the divine or enlightenment from several permanent exhibitions:

– The Egyptian goddess Isis

– A Bodhisattva (a Buddhist monk that is acknowledged to have achieved enlightenment on Earth through discipline and compassion)

– A Pieta (image of the Virgin Mary in mourning with the dead body of Jesus)

The goddess Isis, seated. Egypt. c. 600 BCE/BC. Photo courtesy of the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum.

Bodhisattva of Compassion (Bodhisattva der Barmherzigkeit) Guanyin, China, Ming-dynasty. 1368-1644. Photo courtesy of the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum.

Pieta. Mary, mother of God (Mary, Mutter Gottes). Hildesheim. c. 1520-1525. Photo courtesy of the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum.

Participants were invited to look slowly at the three featured statues, while museum staff were also available for in-depth discussion.

The theme of divinity was chosen as an interesting way to focus on images of women in diverse religious and cultural traditions: the Egyptian goddess Isis, and – in the Catholic tradition – the Virgin Mary. Interestingly, in Buddhism it is debated whether women can become enlightened and achieve Buddha-status, or if they need to first be reborn as a man. Some paths of Mahayana Buddhism acknowledge both male and female Bodhisattvas, but in the stricter Theravada tradition only men are able to achieve the status of Arhat (a version of enlightenment that is founded on individual wisdom rather than on the principle of compassion). Thus, the Bodhisattva statue is a great example of how visual representation can lead to dialogue and exploration.

In the words of Andrea Nicklisch, ethnologist at the museum:

“Slow Art Day offers a wonderful opportunity to explore representations of women and to deal intensively with deities in different cultures and art in a new way.”
RPM ethnologist Andrea Nicklisch.

We look forward to whatever this archaeological museum comes up with for April 13, 2024.

– Johanna, Ashley, Jessica Jane, and Phyl

P.S. Stay updated with the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum via their Facebook and Instagram pages.

P.P.S. Registration is now open for Slow Art Day 2024.

Fossil Interpretations at the RPM in Hildesheim

Posted on November 20, 2020 by Johanna Bokedal

For their second Slow Art Day, the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum (RPM) in Hildesheim, Germany, produced short videos about three objects by artist Gerd Hjort Petersen that were part of the exhibit “Begegnung mit Gerd Hiort Petersen und Hans Munck Andersen” [Encounter with Gerd Hiort Petersen and Hans Munck Andersen].

Gerd Hjort Petersen,”Sea Urchin Fossil 1″, 2015. Photo: Sh. Shalchi.
Denmark, Bornholm, stoneware, owned by the artist. (Click here to see this and the other videos.)

Gerd Hiort Petersen, “Sea Urchin Fossil 2”, 2011. Photo: Sh. Shalchi.
Denmark, Bornholm, stoneware, owned by the artist. (Click here to see this and the other videos.)

Gerd Hiort Petersen, “Rock Shell”, 1993. Photo: Sh.
Shalchi. Denmark, Bornholm, stoneware, collection Claßen. (Click here to see this and the other videos.)

Short texts promoting the objects and Slow Art Day were shared before the videos went live. Then, on April 4, the three videos were shared to Facebook and the Museum’s website, featuring brief commentary by Dr. Andrea Nicklish, Curator of the Ethnological Collection. They received 350+ views, and are still available to watch on the Museum’s website.

At Slow Art Day HQ, we love the focus on shapes, materials and textures in this event. The videos recreated the experience of viewing the objects in the actual museum space, and gave a sense of their sizes, intentionally exaggerated by the artist.

We look forward to what the Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum come up with for Slow Art Day 2021.

– Johanna and Ashley