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Slow Art Day Annual Report – 2024

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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.

Aesthetics and Emotions at MART

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For their second Slow Art Day, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rovereto and Trento (MART), Italy, organized both an online and an in-person event.

For the online session, which took place on April 1, the eight participants received three artworks by email the day before of the event so that they could look slowly on their own and then come and present their thoughts during the session.

For the in-person event, organizers presented the three artworks at the beginning of the session, then they left the 20 participants to look slowly for 45 minutes.

Participants were given some prompts to think about while looking:

  • Which elements strike you the most?
  • Which positive or/and negative emotions do you feel looking at this artwork?
  • Do you like this artwork asethetically?
  • Does it evoke you memories? If so, which ones?

They also asked participants to do the following:

  • Rate their emotional and aesthetic responses with a scale of of 0 to 5 points.
  • Assign a title for each work of art (we recommend other educators consider adding this fun element).
  • Think of a common thread connecting the three artworks.

Once their slow looking was done, the museum then divided the participants into small discussion groups of four people each.

Photos from the in-person session can be viewed below.

Gino Severini, Cannoni in azione, 1915 oil on canvas, 50 x 61,5 cm, Mart, Collezione VAF-Stiftung
On the left: Participants engaging with a piece of art. In the middle and on the right: participants working in groups.

Organizers collected the participants feedback and shared with us a few snippets (translated from Italian).

Admiring, observing and talking in a group about the individual and personal sensations that the works made on us was very beautiful, instructive and formative. Feeling how each participant had his own point of view and his impression and how the various impressions intertwined with each other was very welcome and was appreciated by all.

Renzo – Slow Art Day participant

I think we all had a great desire to live this moment, in which physical closeness, looks, voice, were finally used as “normal” means of communication and expression simply belonging to our human race. After these two years of restrictions [for Covid] I think we all felt happy to get to know and re-know each other in a close way and to make a group. Looking together, exchanging opinions and impressions, sharing the different possibilities of reading and interpreting the works was an enriching experience and, let me say, at least for me, even moving.”

Maddalena – Slow Art Day participant

We’d like to add that Denise Bernabè, Membership Coordinator at MART, and Piero Consolati, MART member for several years, have been organizing Slow Art monthly meetings in addition to the annual events. And, due to the pandemic, April 2 was the first time they ran an in-person slow looking session – and they did great!

We very much look forward to what they come up with for 2023.

– Jessica Jane, Phyl, Johanna, and Ashley

What’s in a Name? Titles and Emotions at MART

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On April 10th, the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART) in Rovereto, Italy, organized a virtual Slow Art Day event that focused on re-titling artworks based on participants’ emotional experiences of slow looking.

Images of three artworks from the MART collection were emailed to the 15 registered participants ahead of joining a Zoom session. Once in the virtual session, participants were given 45 minutes to look slowly at three artworks. They then split into 3 discussion groups, each led by a coordinator, that focused on the emotions and observations of the participants while viewing the works. Participants were then asked to give each artwork their own title based on emotions experienced during the slow looking. The day after the session, participants were sent a brief profile of each artwork that included the emotional titles, the actual title, and the name of the artist, date, and art movement.

Below is one of the artworks along with a word cloud of the emotional titles given by the participants. Some of these translate to: “Disgust”, “Towards tomorrow?”, “Artist’s self-portrait”, “Who am I?”.

Arnulf Rainer, Splitter, 1971
Pastel and oil on photography, cm 60,5 x 50,5, Mart
Titles assigned to the artwork by the participants.

The event was well recieved by all the attendees, with one participant commenting:

“See how this way of following art stimulates a lot of creativity in us. Beautiful. We are like amateur jazz improvisers, extemporizing on a score!”

Participant Quote

That’s right. Slow looking is like jazz improvisation. We love this design of MART’s first official Slow Art Day event and hope that others decide to copy this.

Note that their Slow Art Day was not their first slow looking series. In 2020, local art enthusiast and MART member Piero Consolati approached Denise Bernabe, the Membership Coordinator at MART, about the possibility of organizing slow art sessions. Thanks to their initiative, MART has hosted nine slow art sessions since May 2020, which are now held monthly at the museum (so far, mostly virtually).

At Slow Art Day HQ we are delighted that slow looking has become a staple activity for the MART Museum. Denise Bernabe and Piero Consolati share updates with us about the status of slow art at MART throughout the year.

We look forward to MART’s continued events throughout the year, and their celebration of Slow Art Day in 2022.

– Johanna, Jessica and Ashley