How many Picassos does McMaster have?
Where did McMaster get a Monet?
What links First Nations art to Pop art?

The McMaster Museum of Art (MMA) proudly launches two major digital projects that provide unprecedented, in-depth access to McMaster’s art collection. The projects include eMuseum, an online database of the art collection, and its complement, the Curiosity Engine, a virtual gallery for exploring connections between art and artworks. Both intiatives have been generously funded by Dr. John Panabaker and a Museums & Technology Grant from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The eMuseum project makes public an up-to-date searchable database of McMaster’s art collection, thousands of entries, complete with details about each object, its origins and where copyright allows, an image. In launching this project McMaster also becomes part of a network of major art institutions—including the Smithsonian, the Frick Collection, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Our art collection now joins their collective database, accessible by curators and researchers at those galleries.

“This project will be an invaluable resource for McMaster students, visitors and researchers around the globe,” says Museum Director Carol Podedworny. “It has been twenty years since the last comprehensive collection catalogue was published and the Museum has acquired thousands of objects in the interim. The digitization project was a massive undertaking, requiring many hours of staff research, data entry and photography by the late John Tamblyn. McMaster has an outstanding collection of important works of art and now the world will know it.”

The second component, the Curiosity Engine, developed by the media visionaries at Parallel World Labs, is a tool for visitors to explore the connections between artists and artworks through related content and the lenses of culture, history and society. The objective is to offer both an understanding and an emotional relationship to works of art and an understanding of how artists observe our changing world, its past and present, through creative processes.

The beta version begins with a contemporary work by First Nations artist Bob Boyer, going on to explore the stories of the Americas and beyond. The Engine is designed to expand and encompass more of the collection and growing connections over time.