Explore Modern Art Project

A Museums for America grant within the federal government's Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has enabled SFMOMA to develop explore
modern art, the centerpiece of our redesigned website launched in November 2008. This online learning environment is an interactive space that integrates our multimedia interpretive programs, collections information, and calendar of public programs and events. It is designed to encourage greater engagement with modern and contemporary art and with SFMOMA.

SFMOMA's Interactive Educational Technologies (IET) team has invested more than a decade in developing interactive features on art displayed at SFMOMA. Altogether gets into something deliver engaging programming on 85 modern and contemporary artists, enabling tourists to find our about the contexts where the artworks are intended, see videos of the artists in their studios, hear first-person explanations of their creative processes, and view high-resolution digital images of the artworks. In Explore Modern Art this substantial repository of interactive digital features, podcasts, and video/audio interviews with artists has been reformatted into more quickly accessible segments and merged with our searchable online database, Collections Access Online. Launched in 2004, this database continues to expand. It currently provides users with information (artist, title, nationality, date, medium) about even more than 9,000 objects from your museum's selection of 27,000 artworks.

The enhanced collection records at the heart of the Explore Modern Art interface combine information about artists in addition to their deal with related multimedia features and also a variety of interpretive texts, including 200 artists' biographies commissioned during the project. These materials are presented alongside timely info on museum programs and events that are proportional to the artist and/or artwork information being viewed. By uniting these many elements, explore modern art provides our online audience with a greater sense of context for the art and artists in the museum's collection, with layered use of different levels of information directed at users with varying interests and variety of knowledge.

Exploremodern art supports lifelong learning by significantly broadening public accessibility museum's rich educational offerings. By contextualizing SFMOMA's collection and exhibitions, it encourages participation inside our public programs. In a sense, the project aims to make the digital equal of a distinctly analog experience: sitting down in a library and casually browsing stacks of titles, familiar and unfamiliar, in a very subject area to your own choosing. explore modern art goes a pace past the library analogy, however, offering a direct and intuitive path from on-screen content to a first-person experience of the artwork and related events on the museum. It's also sufficiently flexible and scalable to allow for an unfolding narrative gradually, mirroring the constantly evolving nature of modern and contemporary art.