Recently my family and I saw the Van Gogh exhibit in Sacramento, California. This show is an interactive exhibit that has locations across the United States. The previews for the show looked amazing, so we wanted to take advantage of it.

The show uses multimedia in a very effective way. There are paintings and signage on the walls—projections of his images onto surfaces that create an immersive experience. In one room, there is a large three-dimensional flower pot on a wall that projects different Van Gogh flower paintings on the wall. The transitions between images are magical as they fade or dissolve into the next piece.

The exhibit has music specific to each area and audio narrations. At this point, it was a standard museum visit. That all changed as you went into the largest room of the exhibit. There were chairs, fences, and areas to sit on the floor in this room. It looked like people were there for a picnic. As we got our bearings, we realized that his paintings or parts of his paintings were projected on different walls simultaneously. The music, words, images, and transitions tell a story of the artist’s life and work. Seeing a hand-drawn interior come to life as paint began to appear in different areas was stunning. The same image on each wall made other choices of where o apply the paint. The viewer(us) is mesmerized by the different possible approaches that Van Gogh made while painting.

The transitions and the scenes in this room transformed us into a tapestry of time and space specific to Van Gogh’s world People would gather and stay there for an hour or more. Even if you saw a moment before, there was always something new to see as it cycled through again.

That could have been the exhibit. I felt dread leaving the room, wondering if it was over. A flash of joy as we exited into a new space that had a table with crayons. There were coloring book-style pages of van Gogh’s work that people could color and hang on the walls.
The last room of the exhibit had Virtual Reality goggles. You enter into a world of the artist’s paintings narrated by an actor portraying Vincent Van Gogh. In the artist’s own words, you travel through his work and his opinions on painting. You could look above, below, to your sides, or even behind you with the VR. It didn’t matter. There was something to see everywhere.

The journey ended with a passage through the gift shop. There were prints, mugs, and books with Van Gog’s art. It was a moment of irony to realize the artist suffered so much in life, and to see his paintings on teddy bears was jarring. This a lesson for artists who seek to “make it.” If you do “make it,” someone will ultimately profit from your work. The question then is, who you rather profit from your work, yourself or someone else hundred of years from now?

The show glossed over some of the darker details of Van Gogh’s life to comfortably share it with a larger market. The augmented reality was transformative. This innovative exhibit will surely be the new norm for destination art exhibits. It was different than looking at his work in a book, on a laptop, or even in a gallery. The space came alive. Thoughts I wrestled with on the way home were how the overlooked graphic designers, VR, and CGI artists brought this to life. Their talents could make the most pedestrian of us look heroic. Their storytelling through various media is beginning to eclipse the artist himself.