Photo via SFGate: SFMomA Text Send Me Art

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has nearly 35,000 piece of art in its collection. According to SFMOMA’s webiste, “If you were to walk past each artwork currently on view, you would walk almost seven miles. To show the museum’s entire collection at once would require the construction of another seventeen SFMOMAs and you would need to walk the equivalent of 121.3 miles to see each piece.”

The museum asks: “In a world oversaturated with information, we asked ourselves: how can we generate personal connections between a diverse cross section of people and the artworks in our collection? How can we provide a more comprehensive experience of our collection?’

According to the SFMOMA website: “Enter Send Me SFMOMA. 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.”

Photo via SFMOMA.org

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.