ArtLens Reimagined

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For more than a decade, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s ArtLens gallery has explored how innovation can create new entry points into art and the museum’s collection, making the museum more approachable and reducing the intimidation people may feel about visiting an art museum or knowing how to engage with art.

Evaluation of previous iterations demonstrated something more significant: visitors who experienced ArtLens before entering the museum’s core galleries had more meaningful encounters with the collection and satisfied a greater number of the museum’s interpretive objectives.

That evidence became an important foundation for ArtLens Reimagined, a new 10,000-square-foot experiential gallery designed not simply to engage visitors with technology, but to help them build relationships with art that extend throughout the museum. Rather than starting with technology or specific interactives, CMA began with workshops bringing together curatorial, conservation, education, design, and technology staff with interactive designers and inclusive design specialists. Together, they defined the goals: build on the core principles of ArtLens while creating more immersive and inclusive ways to explore the collection and tell the broader life stories of artworks.

Rather than organizing ArtLens around technologies, the gallery is organized around five modes of engagement: Relate, Investigate, Create, Explore, and Observe. Twenty-one experiences invite visitors to encounter the collection through conversation, observation, movement, gesture, touch, sound, experimentation, and play. Each provides a different way into art, from personal connection and close looking to creativity, conservation, and discovery.

ArtLens Reimagined

A defining innovation of ArtLens Reimagined is its integrated ecosystem of physical, digital, mobile, and multisensory experiences. Technology is intentionally embedded within each experience, allowing visitors to focus on artworks, creativity, and discovery rather than the technology itself. ArtLens encourages active participation while helping visitors build confidence, curiosity, and emotional connections that continue into the museum’s galleries.

Inclusive design was embedded throughout the project from the beginning, creating multiple ways to perceive, understand, navigate, and participate. CMA’s approach recognizes that inclusive design does not simply provide alternative access; it increases the number and diversity of ways everyone can engage. ArtLens seeks to remove barriers related to age, background, education, art experience, and ability, making art both relatable to all and able to be experienced by all.

ArtLens Reimagined also leverages advancements in artificial intelligence to make art meaningful in new ways. CMA has used AI since 2012 as a mission-aligned tool to enhance access, understanding, and engagement while honoring the creativity, scholarship, and lived experiences that define the museum. AI is not a replacement for human expertise, but one of many technologies used in service of art, audiences, and learning.

Throughout ArtLens, AI supports a range of experiences. In Relate, Art in Arm’s Reach uses AI-powered vision technology to track the distance between visitors’ hands and reveal artworks at their true scale, while Strike a Pose and Hand Model use real-time tracking to connect visitors’ movements with artworks. In Create, Art Morph uses generative AI trained exclusively on selected public-domain CMA artworks to transform everyday materials into new compositions.

In Investigate, Talk to the Art combines AI tools to transcribe questions, interpret meaning, and generate responses that allow visitors to converse with an artwork. What Does Art Sound Like? uses AI-generated descriptions as a starting point for content development, followed by extensive curatorial review and revision before becoming part of a multisensory experience.

In Explore, Community Mural uses AI-assisted tools to isolate elements from open-access artworks so visitors can focus on creating collaborative digital collages. Infinite Landscape uses AI to imagine what might exist beyond the frames of landscape paintings, connecting multiple artworks into a continuous immersive environment.

What makes ArtLens Reimagined distinctive is not any single technology, but how technologies, disciplines, and inclusive design practices work together to support meaningful engagement with art. AI models run locally within the museum and use CMA artworks and content, allowing CMA to maintain control over data, reliability, computing, and responsible AI practices.

By placing human connection and relationships with art at the center of every technological decision, ArtLens Reimagined demonstrates how experiential technology can encourage participation, discovery, creativity, and learning while creating meaningful new ways for visitors to engage with art.