What began as a seemingly simple agenda of keeping the university galleries open in order to keep our community alive and engaged, and to ensure artists and postgraduate candidates had a context to show their work became a slow dawning of possible new futures. We responded directly to such opportunities in a disrupted manner, with the intention of creating new and diverse spaces where the digital and the physical collided. This was not to create a seamless space, rather a site for human connection as the ‘business as usual’ approach as we moved through the pandemic lock-downs was increasingly untenable. In striving to create embodied experiences for audiences and artists alike old technologies were outmoded.  This paper sets out the strategies employed to engage what was then a locked-down public and has now become our modus operandi. What did we learn and how can we develop those pedagogic learnings for the publics, galleries serve? A case study will be analysed to demonstrate how ECU Galleries remained available and relevant to a public and an industry (arts) in crisis and what this might mean for gallery future programming.