Long-distance learners can get up close with the new Visual Experience Platform licensed by the Penn Museum.
One evening in early September, Megan C. Kassabaum, Penn Museum’s Weingarten Associate Curator for North America, not only offered a sneak peek at a long-awaited refresh of a key exhibition but did so by previewing a new video platform for delivering classes and lectures. “Throughout the presentation,” she explained, “I’ll be switching between Focus mode, where I’m in charge of what you’re seeing, and Explore mode, where you’re in charge of what you’re seeing, and you can use your mouse or your trackpad to zoom in.”
Kassabaum began with a rendering of the museum’s new Native North America Gallery, which opens on November 22 and reimagines the Native American Voices: The People—Here and Now exhibition installed more than a decade ago [“Know That We Are Still Here,” Jul|Aug 2014]. Switching viewers’ screens to Explore mode, she encouraged them to virtually roam around the gallery entrance, suggesting what they should look for as they moved their cursor to the right, then zoomed in, then pulled back. Returning the screen to Focus mode, the curator next led viewers through some of the specific components of the exhibition, including maps, illustrations, and utilitarian objects like building tools and cooking utensils.
The interactive demonstration represented the first public presentation of the new Visual Experience Platform (VXP), a distance learning technology developed by the Barnes Foundation after the pandemic forced its array of in-person classes to move online.
The Barnes started with programs like Microsoft Teams and PowerPoint, but those fell short, says Martha Lucy, the art and educational institution’s deputy director for research, interpretation, and education. “They may be fine for fields that are not especially visually oriented, but because we’re so much about close focus, we wanted something that would help the viewer get a sense of not only the details in a painting or an object but a sense of its materiality,” she says. “So we worked with our in-house tech office to develop something that would really get at that idea of experiential learning. And that’s why we’re excited to have Penn Museum be the first institution to license the technology—because so much of what they do is about investigation.”
The Penn Museum had been “looking for a way to broaden the reach of our online programming,” says Jennifer Brehm, the Merle-Smith Director of Learning and Public Engagement. “This new platform presents a great opportunity to bring in new features and methods of engagement.”
This fall, the museum’s two online offerings, The Deep Dig, which debuted during the pandemic with one course and 55 virtual students and has since grown to six courses and nearly 600 participants, and Archaeology in Action, a series of nine lectures that typically draws 1,000 attendees, will be enhanced by the technology, allowing viewers to benefit from new perspectives—literally.
Brehm says her task mainly concerned teaching the museum’s experts and content providers how to “think about conveying to laypeople the wonder and discovery of archaeology and anthropology. They’re used to traditional slide presentations and lecture formats, so it was about figuring out when they should step back and encourage the audience to look on their own, to enjoy a moment of reflection, and then have a back-and-forth rhythm where they become the researcher and they’re looking really closely for evidence and comparisons.”
The Deep Dig kicked off its fall 2025 season with an inaugural VXP course, Conserving the Great Buddhist Murals of Shanxi, which was scheduled to stream live for four weeks in October. (Paid registrants also had access to session recordings, along with supplemental research, readings, and videos.) Adam Smith, associate curator of Asian art, presented two 90-minute sessions on the design and motifs of the two multi-panel Chinese murals dating from around the 14th century, and their trajectory to Philadelphia. Then Morgan Burgess, art and objects conservator, offered two sessions filled with inside looks at the conservation of the monumental pieces, which were deinstalled almost a decade ago.
Viewers who tuned in to Kassabaum’s presentation in September were privy to a demonstration of just how the platform might get into the nitty gritty of looking at such objects. After her introduction to the new Native North America Gallery, for example, she zoomed in on a suite of images related to the conservation of a specific item to be displayed there. On the left side, viewers could make out a tag with scrawled notes: Delaware—skin ornament worn tied at back of neck to trail down behind. Worn at Social Dance. On the right, they saw a photo of the exhibition team reviewing a 1930s illustration of a Delaware (Lenape) tribal gathering. Kassabaum homed in on a group of women who sat separately from the men, pointing out the shawls they wore, remarking on their similarity to the one identified in the tag.
Next, she showed a photo of a student intern who had worked during the summer to help conservators figure out the material and processes involved in making such shawls. “You can see her pointing at the cloth backer of the collar,” Kassebaum said. Switching to Explore mode, she encouraged viewers to “look around and see how many moth holes there are and then go back to the spot she’s pointing to. You’ll get a sense of how effective our conservation is.” The mend, carefully made from the underside of the piece, was invisible and the fabric appeared untouched.
Nearly as hard to detect was another challenge Kassabaum issued: scroll beyond the intern’s finger and see if you can identify something called the “humility bead,” a bead of a different color, purposely placed into a design to demonstrate the imperfection of the maker.
At first, it was difficult to locate. Suddenly, though, there it was: inside of a beaded flower with concentric rows of burgundy, red, and pink petals appeared just one incongruous but barely noticeable black bead. A little something extra, brought to life.
—JoAnn Greco
