Art Gallery

A Drupal CMS site template for artists and small galleries. It gives you a working gallery website in one install: artworks, artists and exhibitions with the metadata a gallery actually keeps, listing pages with filters, a lightbox, freeform pages built in Drupal Canvas, and a typography-led black-and-white design with one accent color of your choice. WCAG 2.2 AA is a release criterion, not an afterthought.

It works for a single artist's portfolio as well as for a gallery that represents several artists.

What you get

• Artwork: several images per work, artist(s), year ("c. 1898" is fine), medium, materials, dimensions, edition, series, availability (available, reserved, sold, not for sale, on loan), price with a "show price" switch (off means "price on request"), inventory number, credit line and description.
• Artist: portrait, short and long biography, CV, born/died/based in, links and a sort weight. Artists without a portrait get a monogram placeholder.
• Exhibition: dates, type (solo, group, fair, online, residency), venue and address, opening hours, the artists and the works in hanging order. Current, upcoming and past are worked out from the dates.
• Pages: Home with a hero work, "Now showing", featured works and artists; a filterable Works grid (medium, artist, availability) and a dense index table; Artists; Exhibitions (current, upcoming, past); About; Visit; and an Accessibility statement to adapt. All are Canvas pages you can edit, with Views blocks you can move.
• Detail pages for artworks, artists and exhibitions, rendered by Canvas content templates: wall-label metadata, "more by this artist", works per exhibition, exhibitions per artist and an inquiry button.
• The Art Gallery theme: Archivo display type, IBM Plex Mono labels, gray mats so works are never cropped, a keyboard-operable lightbox (PhotoSwipe, bundled, no CDN), light and dark scheme, and a page ground and accent color from the theme settings, which refuse color pairs below 4.5:1 contrast.
• Drupal CMS features: the base template (SEO, sitemap, editorial workflow, media, accessibility tooling for editors), forms, and multilingual. The site is translation-ready and ships in English.

Sample content

The template installs six Belgian artists (Anna Boch, James Ensor, Léon Spilliaert, Jean Brusselmans, George Minne and Constantin Meunier), eighteen works and four exhibitions, so every page has something on it from the first minute. The artists and works are real and in the public domain. The gallery, inventory numbers, prices, availability, exhibitions and contact details are fictional and meant to be replaced. Nothing else depends on them.

Installation

With the Drupal CMS installer: choose Art Gallery when the installer offers site templates (once the template is listed). With Composer and Drush:

composer create-project drupal/cms my-gallery
cd my-gallery
composer require drupal/art_gallery
./vendor/bin/drush site:install --yes --site-name="My Gallery" ../recipes/art_gallery

Then log in, replace the sample artists and works with your own, edit the About, Visit and Accessibility pages, and set your colors under Appearance → Art Gallery → Settings. The README covers customizing, single-artist sites and the notes for AI coding agents.

Accessibility

Before every release, axe-core (WCAG 2.x A/AA and best-practice rules) runs on all default pages and on an artwork, artist and exhibition page, with 0 violations as the bar. The menu, filters, pager and lightbox are also checked with a keyboard and at phone width. The sample images all have real alt texts, the works filters are native selects with visible labels, and editors get Editoria11y. Your own site still needs real alt texts for your images and an edited Accessibility statement. Details are in the README and in the theme's ACCESSIBILITY.md.

Requirements

Drupal CMS 2.2 or later (Drupal core 11.4+, Canvas 1.x). The template depends on the Drupal CMS base template, accessibility tools, forms and multilingual recipes, the Art Gallery theme and the verf module for the artist filter.

Getting help

Please use the issue queue for bugs and feature requests. Theme issues go to the theme's queue.

Credits

All sample images are public domain, from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons (KMSKA Antwerp, Mu.ZEE Ostend, MSK Ghent, Musea Brugge and others). Only works by artists who died more than 70 years ago were used. The full list per image is in the README.

AI disclosure

This site template was built with AI assistance, but was reviewed, tested and refined by the maintainer.