Museums Everywhere
Mark Walhimer  ·  museumplanning.com  ·  2026
Digital Humanities Project

The museum visit
does not end
at the door.

Tell me what you are looking at — a cup of coffee, light on a wall, a stranger's hands — and I will show you the thread connecting it to something a museum has been holding for you.

Not facts. Not a label. The thing underneath. The reason it caught your eye.

Museums Everywhere connects ordinary observation to the interpretive power of open museum collections worldwide — making informal learning continuous, ambient, and alive in daily life.

"Outside of churches and museums, where do we still share space as strangers?"
35
Hand-curated connections, Phase 1
1M+
Museum objects accessible via open APIs
4
Interpretive domains: Visual · Writing · Material · Digital
Try it — type what you see, or choose a word below
Coffee is the most complete demo · Visual Arts shows the Liotard connection · Material Culture shows the Ottoman coffee sets
Domain : Light hitting a wall → James Turrell. A cup of coffee → Dutch still life.
What are you looking at right now?
Tell me what is in front of you.
Not what it is. What you notice. Something this morning. A detail on the street. Anything that caught your eye — anywhere.
+ Attach a photo (optional)
Try one of these
or pick a word from the curated dictionary
The spark
The museum visit does not end when you walk out the door.
Tell me what you are looking at and I will show you the thread that connects it to something a museum has been holding for you.

Not facts. Not a label. The thing underneath — the reason it caught your eye.
Tell me more
Finding the connection…
The connection
From the open collections
If you want to follow this
Where the connections come from
Hand-curated dictionary · Open museum APIs · Seven institutions worldwide
Metropolitan Museum of Art Live
New York. 500,000+ objects. Egyptian antiquities, European masters, Islamic art, arms and armor. Open access, no key required.
Cleveland Museum of Art Live
Ohio. 64,000+ objects with images. Exceptional Asian art, medieval European, and American holdings. Open access, no key required.
Rijksmuseum Live
Amsterdam. 700,000+ objects. Dutch Golden Age — Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals. The definitive collection for 17th-century European painting.
Smithsonian Institution Live
Washington DC. 5.1 million+ items across 21 museums — natural history, American history, African American history, air and space, the National Zoo.
Harvard Art Museums Live
Cambridge. 250,000+ objects across Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Arthur M. Sackler museums. Exceptional scholarly documentation and provenance.
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design
New York. 210,000+ objects. Wallpapers, textiles, industrial design, decorative arts. The collection most directly tied to material culture.
Europeana Live
Pan-European. 50 million+ objects from 3,000+ institutions across 36 countries. EU-funded, the broadest single aggregated source.

The reason someone takes a child to a science museum is not to transfer facts. It is to produce the feeling — that sudden opening when a concept becomes real, when curiosity ignites on its own. That is informal learning. That is what museums do.

Museums Everywhere asks: what if that effect did not require being inside a building? What if the interpretive power of a great institution could follow you — to a café table, a city street, a park bench — and connect what you are looking at right now to something it has been holding for you?

Phase 1 consists of 35 hand-curated words — each with specific connections across visual art, poetry, material culture, and digital media. The curation is the work. Phase 2 will use this corpus to train the AI to extend the framework across any word.

"The innovation is not technical. It is the decision that informal education should meet people where they are — in front of a cup of coffee, watching rain, noticing a stranger's hands."

— Mark Walhimer, museumplanning.com