Technology, Art

San Francisco MOMA

Izzy Ashton

Deputy Editor, BITE Creativebrief

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San Francisco MOMA - Send Me

Finding the time to visit a museum is hard. You can’t always get there after work; you need to cook your dinner/wash your shirts/hoover the house. And when you do get there, more often than not on a weekend, you have to contend with the hordes of children on their obligatory day out.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) has set out to solve this with the launch of Send Me, a text service that sends you pieces of art in response to a keyword. In the museum’s physical galleries, only 5% of the whole art collection is on display at any one time, while the rest is kept in storage for months, sometimes years. To show the entire collection, you would have to build 17 new, equivalent SFMOMAs.

Users can text the number 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, colour or even an emoji. They then receive an artwork from the museum’s collection of over 34,000 pieces, as well as a corresponding, descriptive caption via SMS. The service gives the public unparalleled access to the art through their mobile phone.

Send Me connects people to works of art in a simple way, making the pieces easily discoverable for an audience and giving them a personal connection to the art. You might be sent an artwork that hasn’t been seen for decades; you may be sent one you already know. But it'll give you an insight into the artworks of the SFMOMA, all at the ‘whoop’ of a message send sound.

Visit the SFMOMA’s website to find out more.

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