A new project called "Send Me SFMOMA" allows anyone with a smartphone to text the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at 572-51 and receive a response that includes a piece of art from its extensive collection.
Send Me SFMOMA lets you send a keyword and get back a corresponding piece of artwork that matches that word. You can send colors, subjects, words describing emotions and even emojis.
The service is powered by SFMOMA’s Collection API, which has data on all of the 35,000+ pieces of art in the collection. When it finds something that matches your request it responds with a image of the piece, artist name, title and date. If more than one work matches the keyword you sent, the number will send a random one each time you send that keyword.
Click here for more information and to watch a video on Send Me SFMOMA
The museum states that their collection is so massive that only about five percent of it can be displayed in the galleries at any given time. But Send me SFMOMA has access to the entire collection – meaning you can actually see more art using this new program than if you visited the museum.
According to the SFMOMA website, studies have shown that the average museum visitor spends approximately seven seconds in front of any piece of artwork. And by spending a mere seven seconds in front of each piece in SFMOMA’s collection, it would take almost three days to see everything on exhibit, which is just a small percentage of the museum's collection.
In an effort to provide a more comprehensive experience of our collection, Send Me SFMOMA was conceived as a way to bring transparency to the collection while engendering further exploration and discussion among users. 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.
