For years, MoMA has been programming various online courses with the aim of disseminating its art collection and thus bringing its treasures to millions of virtual visitors around the world. That in these weeks of confinement makes more sense than ever. A few days ago we echoed the various virtual tours offered by several museums around the world. Well, today we want to look at the online courses of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
A course at MoMA, without visiting MoMA (Unsplash / Alex Palmer).
Enjoy MoMA remotely and for free
MoMA’s online courses are accessible to everyone free of charge through the specialized training platform coursera.org. They involve curators from the New York museum itself, as well as renowned artists and designers. These are training programs that everyone can adjust to their time availability and at zero cost, although if students finally wish to have a diploma accrediting their online attendance, they must pay for it.
In short, MoMA’s proposals invite you to take advantage of this quarantine time to learn a little about different disciplines and styles of contemporary art. And obviously this learning is done by taking a stroll through the museum’s collections. A good remedy now that it is not possible to travel to its charismatic headquarters in Manhattan, a stone’s throw from Central Park, Carnegie Hall or Rockefeller Center.
MoMA in the Big Apple (Unsplash / Khara Woods)
Variety of courses
The diversity of the courses offered is logical if the promoter is MoMA. One only has to discover the variety of MoMA’s collections or its heterogeneous temporary exhibitions, which we have talked about on more than one occasion in our monthly highlights. Thus, you can choose between several courses on art, always contemporary, but also on the history of other creative disciplines such as photography or fashion design.
Art courses
Being proposals of online courses conceived by curators, curators and educational offices of MoMA it is logical that most of them are about art. There is one that is the best for delving into its collections and the last decades of artistic production. It is its course What is contemporary art? With it you can take a tour of more than 70 works of the museum made from 1980 to today, discovering them in many cases in the company of their creators.
Learning to see contemporary art (Unsplash / Edgar Chaparro)
But there are other courses on current art that are equally interesting. For example there is one that focuses on the works of the New York School, so well represented in the MoMA collection. It is the In the studio: Postwar Abstract Painting course. These are great courses for art enthusiasts, but also for teachers who can draw inspiration for their classes from a wide variety of proposals such as the course: Art & Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies For Your Classroom. To get an idea you can check out its didactic and audiovisual contribution on MoMA’s own website..
If anyone is wondering, all the materials of these MoMA courses, videos, interviews, websites, etc., are in English. But the vast majority are subtitled in Spanish.
Discover another way to see the art of MoMA (Unsplash / Robert Bye).
A course for photography lovers
Another very interesting proposal is the online course Seeing Through Photographs given by Sarah Meister, the senior curator of photography at MoMA. She and her team take us on a tour through the history of photography and through the collection held by the museum, so that we can learn how to look at a photo. We can all do it, more so today, but thanks to this course we will be able to understand the many things we show in an image, sometimes without realizing it.
Fashion and design at MoMA
The last of MoMA’s online courses is entitled Fashion and Design. With it you discover what’s behind popular jeans or behind the most avant-garde creation in 3D printed dresses. To cite just two examples of design creations that articulate this course in which we visit creative studios of the hand of great designers, who capture the whole universe of fashion, much larger, complex and diverse than it appears.
In short, the COVID-19 expansion has locked us indoors. And we all want it to be as short as possible. But in the meantime, let’s think positive and take advantage of this valuable time in the most productive and enriching way possible.
