Virtual Museum Visits in a Pandemic: Older Adults Discuss Experiences of Art, Culture and Social Connection

This paper focuses on a series of guided virtual museum visits designed for older adults over the COVID-19 pandemic. The visits were undertaken as part of a research project in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and brought together small groups of older adults for weekly guided visits facilitated by trained guides. The visits were held for twelve weeks between March and May 2021. We conducted a qualitative study on the visits, which includedweekly observations as well as interviews with the older tour participants, the guides and the research and museum staff to understand the experiences of the virtual guided museum tours from the perspective of older adults. We explore how virtual museum tours provide opportunities for engagement with art, technologies and people, especially during the pandemicwhen visits to the museumwere limited by social distancing measures. We bring these findings into conversation with our previous work with on-site museum visits and reflect on questions related to accessibility of virtual museum visits as well as the challenges for socialization.