Although the Museum of Modern Art in New York may have physically closed its doors in March, that doesn’t mean the institution isn’t giving art lovers the opportunity to access its vast collection virtually. 

Along with holding digital tours of its esteemed array of contemporary artworks, the museum is now offering free online courses, to help to keep our cultural intake afloat during quarantine. 

With five courses available, the online initiative will give participants a chance to learn more about contemporary art, fashion, and photography, while also giving a deeper understanding of the institution’s history. 

With three of the courses looking at the contemporary art world in general, one course will be entitled, “What is Contemporary Art?”, where you will be given the chance to analyse 70 works made between 1980 to the present day; another is called “Modern Art and Ideas” which will give a deeper understanding of how an artist works, detailing how they are inspired and how they respond to sociocultural issues, while the last course in this arena will look at the lives and work of seven artists from the New York School, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Agnes Martin. This will be called, “In the Studio: Post-War Abstract Painting”.

The other two courses, which focus on photography and fashion, are called “Fashion as Design”, where designers, historians, and other style experts will discuss 70 different garments and accessories, and “Seeing Through Photography”, where a selection of photos from the last 180 years will be analysed to help us understand the difference between seeing and understanding an image.

Allowing participants to “hear directly from artists and designers”, the courses will all look closely at collections and exhibitions, giving people the opportunity to “join a community of learners unlike any other”. 

With courses taking between 16-27 hours to complete, the teaching will be angled towards beginners and will come with corresponding readings and exercises. Meaning that when we are allowed out into the real world, we can be that person in a gallery taking about the delicacy of the brush stroke and how it relates to the decaying state of the world, or something to that effect.

This is the latest initiative put forward by a creative institution to keep people stimulated during coronavirus. Elsewhere, LA Museum, The Broad, is streaming one of Yayoi Kusama’s infamous Infinity Mirrored Rooms, while the Fondazione Prada in Milan is offering a range of cultural activities in a hope to transform “a period of crisis into an opportunity for study and analysis”.