Google Street View Brings Keith Haring’s Once Upon A Time Mural And Other Masterpieces Online For All To Enjoy
Launched in late January, over 150 historical artifacts from New York City‘s The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center (The Center), (located at 208 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011, +1-212-620-7310), can now be viewed online by people around the world due to a new partnership with the Google Cultural Institute. The Center will launch its collection of exhibits as the first LGBT-specific space featured on the Institute’s growing platform.
Thanks to this new virtual exhibition, users will be able to see The Center’s iconic Keith Haring mural, Once Upon a Time, pieces by David LaChapelle and Barbara Sandler, plus many other Center treasures in just a few clicks at google.com/culturalinstitute. (To learn more about their work, please visit gaycenter.org.)
Established in 1983, New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center empowers people to lead healthy, successful lives. The Center celebrates diversity and advocates for justice and opportunity. Each year, The Center welcomes more than 300,000 visits to their building in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan from people who engage in our life-changing and life-saving activities.
Virtual tour with Street View
Using the Street View feature, people can move around The Center virtually, selecting works that interest them and clicking to discover more or diving into the high resolution images, where available.
A specially designed Street View “trolley” took 360 degree images of selected spaces which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of over 15 rooms within The Center. Highlights include the ground floor Kaplan Assembly Hall where ACT UP famously originated, the Haring bathroom and The Center’s newly-renovated lobby, featuring a café, cyber center and welcoming information desk.
Digital exhibits
Specially curated virtual exhibits have been developed for online visitors who can discover five interactive collections, curated by experts at The Center. The digital exhibitions tell the story of the birth of The Center, the early years of the NYC Pride March, how The Center has fostered LGBT arts, activism and culture throughout the years and more.
Some of the most important items of the online exhibition are:
- Keith Haring’s mural, Once Upon A Time, which celebrates male sexual liberation in the days before the AIDS epidemic.
- Photography of the very first NYC Pride March in 1970. This celebration has grown from 2,000 participants and spectators to over 1.8 million each successive year.
- A snapshot of gay life and leisure from the 1940s, as shown in photos from The Center’s National History Archive.
“We’ve spent the past couple of years renovating our physical space to be the home that LGBT New Yorkers deserve,” said Glennda Testone, Executive Director at The Center. “Now we’re thrilled to partner with the Google Cultural Institute to invite people around the world to experience our building, our history, our home, satisfying their hunger for a connection to the LGBT community and the incredibly rich stories that live within our walls.”
The Google Cultural Institute and its partners are putting the world’s cultural treasures at the fingertips of Internet users and are building tools that allow the cultural sector to share more of its diverse heritage online: Technologies That Make The World’s Culture Accessible To Anyone, Anywhere. Since its inception, The Google Cultural Institute has partnered with more than 1,000 institutions, giving a platform to over 200,000 artworks and a total of 6 million photos, videos, manuscripts and other documents of art, culture and history. Read more here.