In the summer of 2018, the Norman Rockwell Museum celebrated the 75thanniversary of Rockwell’s iconic “Four Freedoms” illustrations by opening a major international traveling exhibition titled “Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms.”
The exhibition focuses on a comprehensive slice of Rockwell’s work portraying important milestones of our country’s democracy from World War 2 through the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.
As a compliment to the exhibition, the Museum partnered with the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California to produce a virtual reality or VR experience that would examine the exhibition and the context of its material through a different lens by literally taking people into each of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings.
In Freedom from Fear, we explore the time and place of the 1940’s in the United States and how many Americans lived under the specter a world war and the daily things they would do to support the war effort. In Freedom of Worship, we learn about Norman Rockwell’s artistic process of taking abstract concepts like “Freedom” and translating them into images the world would embrace. In Freedom from Want, we look at what is arguably one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century and how it and many of Rockwell’s illustrations have influenced our society, most notably in the appropriation of his images in contemporary cultural contexts. Last we investigate the ideals of the Four Freedoms by looking at a setting that served as Rockwell’s real-world inspiration for Freedom of Speech, the New England Annual Town Meeting.
This VR experience took approximately 24 months to complete and during this time, the project team endured three evolutions of VR technology, starting with the Oculus Rift, migrating to mobile phone technology, and ultimately settling with the Oculus Go headset.
Six different schools at the Academy of Art University collaborated with the Museum’s Digital team to develop this VR experience. In total 45 students and faculty designed and developed the experience, however more than 40 additional people served as researchers, actors, and video producers on the project.
The reception to the VR experience has been tremendous, with tens of thousands of users embracing it at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan alone and most recently for members of Congress and their staffers in Washington DC.
With over 6 hours of material to explore, we will release the VR experience in the coming weeks as a standalone mobile app on Android and iOS devices so that anyone can discover this content offline. This experience will be a vital resource to support curriculum available on our new learning web portal that will service teachers and students worldwide.
While there is no substitute for seeing the exhibition firsthand, this virtual reality experience offers an opportunity to explore the content in a new way employing immersive elements to drive home the context and importance of the Four Freedoms today.