CLEVELAND, Ohio — Jane Alexander, the chief digital information officer for the Cleveland Museum of Art, was jazzed.
She and staff members staged a dry run last March for immersive digital displays designed for an upcoming exhibition on the restoration of the museum’s monumental Cambodian sculpture of the Hindu god Krishna saving humanity from a deluge by holding a mountain overhead like a giant umbrella.
“The team was really excited,’’ Alexander said, adding that the extensive use of digital technology in the exhibit was going to be “something no other museum had done.”
Within days, however, the museum announced it would close in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Krishna exhibition? Postponed 13 months from October 2020 to November, 2021.
Rather than sulk, Alexander did a high-tech 180. With exhibits on hold, she realized the museum could ramp up online offerings that viewers could access for free while the museum was closed.
“You know what?’’ she said she thought at the time, “this is really an opportunity.”
Since March, the museum has focused its formidable resources on packing its website with hours of fresh programming that increase every week.
With the museum now closed a second time in response to the pandemic, the online content is more relevant than ever as a way to keep restive art lovers and families connected to great art during the holidays and the dark winter that lies ahead.
Easily accessible through the museum’s revamped home page, the offerings include videos in which museum staffers describe individual works in the collection or conservators discuss how they preserve artworks. There’s also a digital photographic and audio archive, and a weekly blog.
In the conservation series, Chief Conservator Sarah Scaturro introduces a three-minute video on how conservators clean paintings including Orazio Gentilesch’s “Danae,’’ an image of a beautiful mortal woman who reclines nude on her bed as Zeus (or Jupiter in the Roman telling) pays an amorous visit disguised as a shower of golden coins. The painting will be the focus of an exhibition scheduled to open April 11 — if the calendar holds.
The archive includes historical gems such as a recording of an hourlong 1993 lecture by Robert P. Bergman, the revered director of the museum from 1993 to 1999, in which he speaks about ” Art Museums for a Democratic Society.”
“Behind the Beat,’’ another online series, features conversations between Tom Welsh, the museum’s director of performing arts, music and film, and composers such as Courtney Bryan and Kaija Saariaho.
A newly expanded 3D tool allows you to twirl selected sculptures, decorative objects and pieces of medieval armor in virtual space. Using the tool, you can take a spin around masterpieces such as the museum’s 1907 Carlo Bugatti inlaid mahogany tea table and its companion tea and coffee service, made of gilt silver festooned with ivory tusks.
In “Engage and Create,’’ visitors can peruse suggestions and prompts for creative projects such as drawing an artwork in the collection, or using tape, toothpicks, rice or dried beans to make an at-home version of widely admired sculptures or paintings. The website throws down new challenges weekly.
New additions to the website since March include ArtLens AI, a tool that allows users to upload their own photos and then search the museum’s website for similar works in the permanent collection.
As an example, the museum shared a snapshot of Digital Project Manager Anna Faxon on vacation in Venice standing in front of a famous 17th-century church overlooking the Grand Canal.
Using the photo, the ArtLens AI software found an image of the exact same church, depicted in a 1910 etching by English artist Mortimer Menpes. The app allows users to share such pairings with the museum’s online audience.
Alexander said she views the tool, which is also available via Twitter, as a fun point of entry to the museum’s resources.
The tool draws on the strength of the museum’s extensive online documentation of its collection of more than 61,000 objects. Images of nearly all works have been loaded onto the website.
Last year, the museum waived digital rights to roughly half of its collection through its Open Access program, which encourages viewers to download, share and repurpose the images.
By some measures, traffic on the museum’s main website is down, which Alexander explains as a consequence of the museum being closed. There’s no reason to plan visits or book tickets for events, normally big reasons why people visit the website.
Total sessions on the museum’s address, clevelandart.org, or cma.org, fell 27.5 percent from 1.25 million visitors between March 14 and Dec. 1 in 2019 to 911,200 during the same period this year.
But Alexander noted that video traffic on the museum’s YouTube channel increased 54 percent this year, reaching more than 85,500 views.
Traffic also increased 30 percent on the Collections Online portion of the website, reaching nearly 200,000 sessions between March 14 and Dec. 1. Those sessions represented more than 630,000 individual views of the museum’s artworks — a 68 percent increase over the same period in 2019. More people were looking at more artworks.
Alexander pointed out that the museum’s main address actually comprises five individual websites, some of which are seeing much heavier traffic. Artworks in the collection also generate millions of views through other sites, such as Wikipedia.
A new dashboard on the website allows visitors to see data about how many people are looking at what through which points of access.
For example, between May 2019 and Dec. 20, 2020, artworks in the museum’s collection generated more than 76 million views on Wikipedia. But different artworks appeal to different audiences, depending on how they find them.
The most popular work viewed on Wikipedia over the past year-and-a-half was “Stele with Sakyamuni and Bodhisattvas,’’ a Chinese sculpture created in 537. It drew a whopping 5.7 million views.
Yet the dashboard also showed that the Collections Online page on the museum’s own website drew nearly 1.3 million views between Jan. 1, 2019 and Dec. 16, 2020 – a more modest sum than the Wikipedia tally.
In that slice of data, perhaps reflecting local tastes, the most popular work was Frederic Edwin Church’s 1860 “Twilight in the Wilderness,’’ a panorama of a blazing Maine sunset that some scholars view as a premonition of the Civil War.
The painting drew more than 7,000 hits, placing it just ahead of popular works by Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh.
At the same time, a tab on the dashboard showed that images viewed through the museum’s Open Access program were downloaded 10 million times this year and last.
The most popular downloaded work was “Elegant Pleasures of the Four Seasons,’’ a 1782 woodblock print by the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro depicting kimono clad women enjoying domestic pursuits during winter.
The Utamaro was downloaded more than 28,000 times. In fact, the top four images downloaded through Open Access are Japanese.
To Alexander, such data confirm two things. One is that the museum’s Asian collection is widely admired. The second is that the museum’s online offerings, particularly images of the works in its collection, are reaching a growing global audience.
Alexander has zero worries about whether the museum’s digital offerings would ultimately convince viewers after the pandemic that they had no need to see the real thing.
“Aren’t you dying to get back to a show or a concert or the museum?’’ she said. “Getting familiar with an artwork and having a relationship [with it online] makes you want to see it for real.’’
But she said the ultimate strength behind traffic generated by works in the collection derives from their artistic quality.
“If that wasn’t there,’’ she said, “you wouldn’t be seeing those numbers.’’