ARTLENS Gallery is open! Come experience what everyone’s talking about!

ARTLENS Gallery is a multifaceted, innovative experience that allows you, your family, and your friends to look closer, dive deeper, and have fun discovering the museum’s collection using award-winning digital technology. Create your own digital artwork in ArtLens Studio, engage with masterworks of art and touchscreen-free interactives in ArtLens Exhibition, and connect with the museum’s world-renowned collection at ArtLens Wall. Use ArtLens App to save the artworks you learn about and photos you take during your experience, and then map your visit throughout the museum using the app’s responsive wayfinding technology. The primary goal of ARTLENS Gallery is to use innovative technology to provide visitors the tool sets to look closer, dive deeper, and feel comfortable exploring every gallery in the museum.

ArtLens Studio
ArtLens Studio uses innovative technology to give visitors the opportunity to use movement and play to connect to the collection. While visitors of all ages are having fun, they are also looking closer, making connections, and practicing skills that will enhance their experience with art throughout the museum. Reveal and Zoom is a large 4K video wall where visitors use their bodies to reveal artworks or zoom in on an artwork in great detail. The Create Studio, which allows visitors to create their own digital artworks, consists of four stations: Pottery Wheel, Collage Maker, Portrait Maker, and Paint Play. These installations use a combination of time-of-flight depth cameras, custom C++ software, and real-time graphics to create interactive experiences that allow visitors to experiment with traditional artistic techniques in a playful, gesture-based way. Visitors may save creations by sharing them on the museum’s Tumblr site. ArtLens Studio reopened in June 2016.

ArtLens Exhibition
ArtLens Exhibition is an experiential gallery that puts you—the viewer—into conversation with masterpieces of art, encouraging engagement on a personal, emotional level. ArtLens Exhibition features a collection of 20 masterworks of art that rotate every 24 months to provide new, fresh experiences for repeat visitors. There are 16 innovative games, centered on the following themes: Composition, Symbols, Gesture + Emotion, and Purpose. Each artwork in ArtLens Exhibition has two corresponding games in different themes, allowing you to dive deeper into understanding the object. The art selection and barrier-free digital interactives inspire you to approach the museum’s collection with greater curiosity, confidence, and understanding. Transitioning away from touchscreen technology, ArtLens Exhibition interactives use gesture-sensing projections that respond seamlessly to body movement and facial recognition as you approach, immersing you in the experience. The initial iteration of ArtLens Exhibition opened to the public in June 2017. In June 2019, ArtLens Exhibition reopened with a new display of 21 artworks from across the collection—from medieval to decorative arts to contemporary.

ArtLens Wall
The 40-foot interactive, multitouch ArtLens Wall is the only one of its kind and one of the largest in the world. This digital visualization of the collection provides a snapshot of our museum and allows visitors to browse all artworks currently on view, as well as a few selections that are off view. Every 40 seconds, the wall rotates through everything on view, displaying curated selections of artworks grouped in dozens of ways—by type, theme, purpose, shape, color—so you can see how our artworks are related across cultures and time periods. Touch an artwork on the wall that catches your eye to find out what it is and where it is in the museum. Select the medium, time period, or culture in blue text above the artwork to browse across the museum’s collection without moving from your spot. When you find a favorite, let everyone know by touching the heart icon below the artwork.

Use ArtLens App to save on-view artworks from the wall to the “You” section in the app via Bluetooth. After downloading ArtLens App, accept all prompts and place your device on one of the docking stations below the wall. Select “Accept” to connect to the wall and start saving artworks. Consult the app to easily find an artwork’s location, details, additional information, and multimedia content.

ArtLens App
The international award-winning ArtLens App combines the most current technology and innovative design with a wealth of interpretive content for every work of art on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The app’s redesigned interface is clean and intuitive, and the wayfinding map is more responsive, using 240+ iBeacons throughout every gallery in the museum to improve accuracy and eliminate the need for paper maps. ArtLens App uses Bluetooth technology to connect to the museum’s iconic ArtLens Wall and all ArtLens Exhibition interactives. All artworks “favorited” at ArtLens Wall or explored in ArtLens Exhibition game play save seamlessly to the “You” section of the app and appear on the digital beacon at the entrance of ARTLENS Gallery. Photos taken during ArtLens Exhibition game play save directly to a device’s camera roll. ArtLens App enhances the visitor’s museum experience by providing the option to design individual tours, offering tools to better understand artworks through augmented reality, and guiding users with interactive real-time maps. New in June 2019, ArtLens App can now scan 3-D objects in ArtLens Exhibition, an exciting update that provides visitors with even more interpretive content. ArtLens App may be used on-site or from anywhere in the world.

ArtLens App (ArtLens Download Instructions) is available for FREE download on iOS and Android devices from the iTunes App Store or Google Play.

ArtLens Beacon
At the north lobby entrance of ARTLENS Gallery, the 20-foot-wide digital beacon uses whimsical stop-motion to pull live visitor creations from ArtLens Studio, Exhibition, and App and features works of art on view from across the museum’s collection. Visitor portraits and collages from ArtLens Studio decorate the beacon, along with the expressions, poses, and artworks created at Express Yourself, Strike a Pose, and Become an Artwork in ArtLens Exhibition, and visitor-created tours from ArtLens App. From the galleries, the beacon pulls the smallest, heaviest, oldest, and latest artworks. New in June 2019, the beacon has been updated with a new video that showcases even more visitor-generated content from the ArtLens Exhibition games and introduces visitors to the exhibition’s overarching theme: “What can art be?” 

Back End System
The CMA established a standardized, well-documented development environment, including a master application programming interface used for integrating all artwork, artist/creator, and location information; a common framework for defining and testing the content structure and staff workbenches needed to manage both existing and new interactives; a consolidated content-delivery network platform for digital assets for all interactives (in ArtLens App, exhibitions, Collections Online, or any future interactive) for ease of management and troubleshooting; and a single method for connecting interactives to user devices for favorites and saving of user-generated content. The CMA’s custom-built catalogue-management system pulls live content, writes it once, and then updates it everywhere, making any artwork information or interpretive content updated by the curatorial, collections management, or interpretation staff immediately accessible in all digital interactives.

ARTLENS is funded by the Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation.