Google
Arts & Culture

Google Arts & Culture is both a website and an iOS or Android app that provides free access to art, culture, and historical collections from around the world. The site is well-organized and easy to navigate. It allows users to explore by specific museums' collections or themes, and to filter by movement, artist, historical event, historical figure, medium, and more. Some resources can be browsed by geographic location on a map, by dominant color, or in a timeline, allowing students to easily compare works from the same time period. There's plenty here to explore with your family or class, from Impressionism to civil rights to fossils.

In addition to more conventional museum holdings, the site includes the ability to tour famous sites and landmarks and visit outdoor art installations, as well as non-art locations, such as CERN. Users can also visit many works inside the museums using Google's Street View. Some items include the Explore Connections option, which is almost like a two-dimensional stream of consciousness array, linking images by criteria such as location, material, style, time period, etc.

The site includes the latest news related to museums, collections, and events as well as nearby places to visit in person (with media of their collections). There are layers and layers of resources, from visual media of artifacts to virtual tours to "stories," which provide written context to a series of artifacts. When students dig into a historical event, for instance, they'll find curated stories, images, artifacts, and timelines from a wide range of collections. The site also includes links to interactive experiments that demonstrate the interplay between technology, art, and science. Beyond just exploring, users can "favorite" any of the resources on the site and easily access them all from the Favorites page. In addition, they can create different galleries of their favorited resources -- based on any theme they like -- and share those with others, which could align with a specific classroom activity or assignment. Though the collection is impressive, it's not comprehensive, and teachers or students might notice some gaps even with major artists.