#MuseumFromHome

As I write this, five months have passed since the first COVID-19 case was recorded in New York State. Governor Cuomo declared a disaster emergency on March 7, 2020. On March 16, he announced restrictions on public gatherings. The NY on Pause Executive Order closing all nonessential businesses statewide was issued on March 20. The governor's NY Forward reopening plan designated museums as "attractive nuisances," unable to open until a region safely reached phase four. Recent upticks in the spread of the virus and the expansion of infection rates in densely populated areas has slowed the opening of museums. Although we are still gathering data, MANY's most recent COVID-19 impact study indicates that half of New York's museums have reopened, 40 percent plan to open in August or September, and 10 percent will not be opening in 2020. New York's museums have lost more than $500 million in earned income since closing their gallery doors.

Museum professionals creatively combine practice from business, art, tourism, academia, and cultural sectors to share the stories embodied in collections. The pace at which museum professionals leveraged these combined skills and refocused their work to deliver content digitally is astonishing. The economic and health care crisis caused by the insufficient response to this worldwide pandemic required a shift for which most were unprepared. Those museums who had resources prior to the pandemic to invest in robust web-sites, a library of digital images of their collections, and dedicated social media staff were well positioned to leverage their staff's creativity to reach beyond their walls with digital programming. Eighty-one percent of museums who responded to MANY's first COVID-19 Impact Survey (report issued May 27, 2020; https://nysmuseums.org/COVID19resources) increased their social media within the first month of NY on Pause. The Museum Computer Network (https://mcn.edu/a-guide-to-virtual-museum-resources/) has a comprehensive list of virtual museum resources. American Alliance of Museums has compiled a

section on their website about how museums have gone virtual (see https://www.aam-us.org/category/covid-19/), and selected examples of best practices are available on the MANY website (https://nysmuseums.org/COVID19resources#digitalengagement). This article is a more personal perspective on how, under the pressure of a pandemic, museums combined staff talent and creativity with virtual program delivery and digital images to extend their reach beyond most of our imaginations.

I was fortunate to spend two days as part of a group of photography students at the birth of MIT's Media Lab thirty-five years ago (see https://www.media.mit.edu/about/history/). We stood around a room with a computer the size of five refrigerators at the center and watched as the image on a Kodachrome slide was read by the computer, pixelated and projected on a small screen. The operator then changed the color and density of the image pixel by pixel. What took hours, now takes seconds, formerly room-size equipment fits in our hands, and although the investment in professionally digitized images remains unachievable for many museums, few of us hesitate to take out our mobile devices and capture what we see to create personal visual libraries shared across time and space.

As digital technologies became more accessible in the late 1990s, museums expanded access to their collections through websites. Virtual galleries became substitute display spaces for curators, homepages transformed into alternative visitor entranceways, and educators used virtual learning platforms to reach students in classes beyond the districts in which the museums were located. At the time I was seeking support for greater funding for digital initiatives, my mantra became "many more people will never walk through your doors than will ever walk through your doors." I could not imagine the path we would travel to reach the tipping point that defines our operational "new normal."

#MuseumFromHome blossomed in the cultural soil tilled by French author and art critic André Malraux (1901–76) who wrote of an "imaginary museum," a dislocated place where one could assemble a collection from the world...