How The Art Institute of Chicago extended its exhibition beyond the museum into the city
By Nick Petit
Chief Marketing Officer/Vamonde
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Anijo Mathew
Founder and Chief Experience Officer/Vamonde + Academic Director of the Ed Kaplan Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship/IllinoisTech Chicago
Every year, the Art Institute of Chicago hosts a blockbuster exhibition in the summer — an experience that every art connoisseur in Chicago looks forward to. This past year, it was Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist, focused on the work of Paul Gauguin, a Post-Impressionist. The exhibition looked at how he challenged cultural, geographic, and material boundaries through his creativity.
As part of the exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago’s marketing team wanted to engage with downtown Chicago outside of its own walls. They accomplished this through Project Windows: a major collaboration with leading Chicago retailers on Michigan Avenue and State Street.Art Institute of Chicago worked with the retailers to design and produce storefront windows that interpreted elements of the Gauguin exhibit. The public then voted for their favorite windows. Public could vote for their favorite window and the best windows would get recognized and awarded. This was the fifth year that Art Institute of Chicago had done Project Windows, and the collaboration extended to media outlets such as Michigan Ave magazine and designers such as Oak Street Design. Project Windows allowed Art Institute of Chicago to achieve two things: one, engage Chicago’s hotel and retail community into the event; and two, extend the exhibition experience outside their museum to activate the city’s residents.
While the designs of the windows themselves were outstanding (some were stunningly innovative), the Art Institute of Chicago team realized a problem. Few people, upon seeing the windows, made the connection from the windows back to the artist Gauguin or the exhibition at Art Institute of Chicago. At this, point the Art Institute of Chicago team asked the team at Vamonde for help. Our (then small) team at Vamonde worked with the Art Institute of Chicago team to design two mobile adventures for Project Windows. The goal of these adventures were to connect the windows back to Art Institute of Chicago and the Gauguin exhibit. By telling the story of each window’s inspiration and creation, Art Institute of Chicago was able to connect the displays back to the museum, raise awareness, and sell tickets for the exhibition. All on your phone as you were in front of the storefront window.
Engaging Technology to build on physical experiences
The combined Art Institute of Chicago and Vamonde team worked with 11 incredible retailers ranging from Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, AT&T, Saks 5th Avenue, Crate and Barrel, the Intercontinental Hotel, Chicago London House and many others. The retailers designed and built their own windows. Based on the design of the window, the retailer was empowered to document and tell their story as they saw fit. The team at Vamonde worked with each retailer to gather assets, help with the storytelling, and construct the narratives. We then collated 11 different stories into two thematic adventures under an Art Institute channel on the Vamonde platform.
Each adventure had the following components:
1. The Story of the Exhibition
The adventures started with a story about Art Institute of Chicago and the exhibition. The overview page featured video and audio from the curator alongside images of the different Gauguin work that patrons could see at the museum. This broad overview set the tone for each adventure from the perspective of Art Institute of Chicago and the curatorial staff, as well as informed users about where Project Windows drew its inspiration from.
2. The Story of Each Window
Of course, the stars of each adventure were the individual retail windows. Each retailer got their own post, complete with a mapping of their location, a narrative with text, images, videos, and audio. Each post had a story about the window — what inspired it, how it was designed and implemented, and how it connected back to Gauguin.
Retailers took advantage of multimedia storytelling to describe not just the windows but also the process by which their artists and designers got to the end result. Saks 5th Avenue posted a time lapse video showing how their artists created the whole window in just one day. Neiman Marcus used it to show how the fashion designer Naeem Khan’s work drew from Gauguin colors and textures and pulled up a video of his runway show.
3. An Active Map
Since the retailers that participated in Project Windows were spread all around the city, there was no way to connect the windows back to the exhibition or the exhibition to these windows. Vamonde automatically maps out the location of each post and positions the closest story on top of the adventure — so a user can pull out his or her phone to discover the story behind the window right in front of them. Or if you are interested in a particular story, Vamonde also gives users directions on how to get there.
4. Augmented Reality — AR
Three retailers, including AT&T, made use of Vamonde’s latest Augmented Reality technology as part of their stories. The AT&T window took a Gauguin quote — “If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue” to create several blue colored trees inter-spaced with Gauguin portraits (remember AT&T’s identity themed blue). In between a sea of Gauguin pictures was one very special portrait. If you raised your phone and looked at the portrait, you saw an AT&T video, specially “Gauguinized” on Vamonde. The best part of the experience — AR is baked right into the adventure — all AT&T had to do is connect the video file to the image file and Vamonde technology took care of the rest.
5. Call-to-Action
One of Art Institute of Chicago’s primary objective was to drive window viewers back to the museum to buy tickets for the exhibition. A key feature of a Vamonde post is what we call Call-To-Action buttons. These are special embeds in each story that enables organizations to provide links out from the app to any site or portal they choose. In this case, the adventures brought users directly to the ticket page on the Art Institute of Chicago website and encouraged them to purchase tickets for the exhibition from their phone while they were at one of the windows, when the subject was fresh in their mind.
The response by the retailers to the Vamonde adventures and the technology was overwhelming. We started the project with one adventure but quickly added a second in order to cover all of the retailers, who wanted to be on the platform. Combinations of physical signage and digital content at each window pushed the adventures to passer-bys and core patrons of Art Institute of Chicago and the retailers. The AT&T store, which used AR as part of their experience, drove traffic into their flagship store on Michigan Avenue just to see AR first-hand on their devices.
In the end, The Art Institute of Chicago used Vamonde’s digital publishing platform to bring Gauguin’s work to life in a tangible, unexpected, and modern way. The staff at Art Institute of Chicago were all thrilled with the experience and believed it helped them do things they could not have done without Vamonde’s technology.
