The Rosenbach has unveiled a new Gallery Gateway online exhibitions portal that will make content from exhibitions mounted onsite at the museum available to all via the Internet. The first Gallery Gateway to debut online presents The Rosenbach’s current exhibition, American Voyager: Herman Melville at 200. A second Gallery Gateway, which has recently made its debut, shares content from The Rosenbach’s upcoming exhibition Manjiro: Drifting, 1841 – 2020. Other newly-added Gallery Gateways showcase treasures from The Rosenbach’s Robert Burns collection and selections from the institution’s vast holdings of early Americana. Visit the Online Exhibitions Portal at https://rosenbach.org/gallery-gateway/ to explore current offerings, and check back soon to discover new content as it becomes available.
A “Gallery Gateway” is a cross between traditional, printed museum exhibition catalogues and web-based virtual exhibitions, which have become popular in recent years. They are optimized to present the types of artifacts most often showcased in Rosenbach exhibitions: rare books, manuscripts, documents, and other text-based objects, in addition to flat works of art and three-dimensional artifacts. Gallery Gateways generally provide all of the content presented on-site in The Rosenbach’s exhibition galleries via an easily-accessible, easy-to-print, online format.
The purpose of the Gallery Gateway is to make exhibition content available to those who cannot visit The Rosenbach in person, and to create a permanent record of the information shared in exhibitions. Gallery Gateways present a large amount of visual and text-based content in a PDF format that makes exhibition content as accessible as possible across audiences and digital interfaces.
The Rosenbach makes Gallery Gateways available on its Gallery Gateway Online Exhibition Portal. The Gateways can be viewed online or downloaded to a personal device for viewing and printing. Gallery Gateways also include online-only special features, as well as information about how to continue your Rosenbach journey after experiencing the exhibition. On the Portal, for example, you will find special features including American Voyager’s gallery sound effects uploaded for web listening. The Manjiro Gallery Gateway comes complete with an interactive feature that allows visitors to page through rare, recently-discovered Japanese manuscripts. Check the Portal for enhanced digital features as more Gallery Gateways go live.
The name “Gallery Gateway” was inspired by an iconic Rosenbach artifact: wrought-iron gates crafted by Philadelphia metalworker Samuel Yellin, which now greet visitors to 2010 Delancey Place. These gates provide a grand welcome to all who enter The Rosenbach historic house, and their intricate design inspired the Gallery Gateway cover art. We hope that our Gallery Gateways make The Rosenbach’s iconic collections more accessible than ever before to audiences around the world, and that The Rosenbach will be your gateway to new worlds of history, art, literature, and culture.
Explore the Gallery Gateways:
- American Voyager: Herman Melville at 200
- Manjiro: Drifting, 1841–2020
- The Rights of Woman: Gender in Robert Burns’s Enlightenment
- Out of Many, One: Diversity and the American Experiment
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