Eleven months in the making, an online redesign takes the museum “into the future.”
By visually letting much of its striking artwork speak for itself, the National Museum of Women in the Arts revamped its website after almost a year’s worth of effort. The new website launch, developed with creative agency Purple Rock Scissors and Prime Access Consulting, spotlights both the museum’s cross-genre holdings and its programming geared toward social change.
As “the only major museum in the world solely dedicated to championing women through the arts,” the National Museum of Women in the Arts advocates for female representation in the art world by amplifying the voices of women artists past and present.
With an eye to ease navigation, the website’s new layout brings to the forefront the gender inequalities the museum seeks to dismantle. A box on the main page, for example, brings attention to the fact that “just 11% of all acquisitions at prominent American museums over the past decade were of work by women artists.” And new pages on the museum’s advocacy initiatives present their responses to these disparities, including the “#5WomenArtists” campaign (can you name five women artists?
) designed for social media.
New exhibition details and artist profiles offer a miniature tour of the museum’s international works, with a glimpse into each piece’s inspiration and milieu.
Whether or not a visitor can make it to the New York Avenue building for a closer look, however, an “In Your Region” page recognizes current exhibitions by women artists all over the world that are available for viewing. Presently, the featured exhibitions are all virtual ones.
“As the museum’s profile has expanded over the past few years with groundbreaking contemporary exhibitions, award-winning digital campaigns and a thorough rebrand, so too has our website traffic and engagement,” said museum director Susan Fisher Sterling in a statement. “The new site offers a welcoming introduction to the museum and is now capable of growing with us into the future.”
Of course, not to overlook an important source of revenue and exposure to goods by women artists and women-owned businesses, the design team switched the museum’s online store to a Shopify platform for more straightforward navigation. So your engagement with women in the arts doesn’t have to end when you leave the building — or rather, when you click away.
