Send a Text Message to SFMOMA, and They’ll Send Works of Art to Your Mobile Phone

The San Fran­cis­co Muse­um of Mod­ern Art–otherwise sim­ply known as SFMOMA–has 34,678 art­works in its col­lec­tions, only 5% of which it can put on dis­play at any giv­en time. That cre­ates an acces­si­bil­i­ty prob­lem. So the muse­um asked itself: “How can we pro­vide a more com­pre­hen­sive expe­ri­ence of our col­lec­tion?” And they devel­oped Send Me SFMOMA in response.

Send Me SFMOMA is “an SMS ser­vice that pro­vides an approach­able, per­son­al, and cre­ative method of shar­ing the breadth of SFMOMA’s col­lec­tion with the pub­lic.”  Here’s how it works:

Text 572–51 with the words “send me” fol­lowed by a key­word, a col­or, or even an emo­ji and you’ll receive a relat­ed art­work image and cap­tion via text mes­sage. For exam­ple “send me the ocean” might get you Pirkle Jones’ Break­ing Wave, Gold­en Gate; “send me some­thing blue” could result in Éponge (SE180) by Yves Klein; and “send me 💐” might return Yasumasa Morimura’s An Inner Dia­logue with Fri­da Kahlo (Col­lar of Thorns). Each text mes­sage trig­gers a query to the SFMOMA col­lec­tion API, which then responds with an art­work match­ing your request.

Give it a spin. See what piece of the SFMOMA col­lec­tion you get.

For more free art, vis­it this meta­col­lec­tion in our archive: 1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online. And don’t miss the items in the Relat­eds below.

via Coudal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 464 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Down­load 200+ Free Mod­ern Art Books from the Guggen­heim Muse­um

School of Visu­al Arts Presents 99 Hours of Free Pho­tog­ra­phy Lec­tures