An online classroom for looking at art together
When the Barnes moved adult classes online in 2020, nothing off the shelf could carry the Barnes method. Zoom lets you show a painting. It doesn't let a student explore brushstrokes at their own pace while an instructor guides the group's attention across a composition.
So we wrote down what the method requires and built to it: shared attention, instructor-led pacing, deep zoom that doesn't degrade, bounded exploration, accessibility from the start, and reliability. Those constraints produced Focus and Explore: when an instructor focuses the group, everyone sees the same view of a work, and when they release control, students zoom around on their own at full resolution. We moved away from slides early and designed around the rhythm of a Barnes class instead.
As of 2026, since 2023 more than 7,000 students and event attendees have learned on the VXP, across 36,800 hours of online teaching and more than 110 classes. One in five users has been a scholarship recipient or an Art for All Community Pass holder. Research keeps shaping what we build. In 2023, course evaluations showed 42% of students watching flat recordings of live classes, so nineteen research sessions and an A/B test produced Replay, a recording that keeps the canvas explorable, and five learner types we still design for. Replay opened up on-demand courses. Students tell us it works: 80% report high or extremely high impact on critical thinking about art, and 91% say it inspired them to keep learning. This year we also built an AI pipeline that takes an educator's PowerPoint, finds higher-resolution images of the artworks, and turns it into a IIIF presentation they can teach from.
In 2025 the Penn Museum became the first institution to license the platform, and a graduate program with Saint Joseph's University runs on it too. A year of supporting another institution showed us where to scale, so fifteen interviews and an effort-by-impact matrix produced the roadmap for VXP 2.0, which shipped in September 2026 with a redesigned admin experience. One platform now supports live courses, on-demand courses, and licensing, and together they fund our mission and access. I built the pricing, onboarding, and support model behind that licensing.
Read more: Designing and Building a Platform for Close Looking, Scaling the Visual Experience Platform
