Museum of Modern Art Offers Art-Making iPad App

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) introduces the MoMA Art Lab app for the Apple iPad, the Museum’s first art-making app.

Inspired by MoMA Art Labs, a series of interactive spaces at the Museum where kids and adults can engage with art through hands-on activities, the app offers an open-ended exploration of the various ways in which simple shapes and lines can be transformed into art.

Through diverse learning activities and prompts for creative ideas, the Art Lab app encourages kids ages seven and up to think about artistic processes and experiment with shapes, lines, and colors—inspiring digital play.

Activities, inspired by modern and contemporary artworks from MoMA’s collection, include using virtual scissors to cut out shapes in the spirit of collages by Henri Matisse; shaking digital scraps of paper across the screen in homage to Jean (Hans) Arp’s chance collages; covering rooms in colorful line designs, as in the work of Jim Lambie; and creating a sound composition based on art by Elizabeth Murray.

Art Lab’s drawing pad includes shapes that can be stretched, rotated, and shrunk using zoom and pinch motions, tools to create straight or freeform lines in differing widths, and a palette of over a hundred vibrant colors.

For extra inspiration, the app offers fun suggestions such as creating an entire city using only geometric shapes, making a person or an animal using only straight lines, creating a design using only circles or only triangles, and much more.

Artworks can be saved to the iPad’s Camera Roll, or shared with friends and family or with MoMA by e-mail or Twitter. Using Art Lab at home or at MoMA, children, families, artists, and designers will find inspiration and new ways of connecting with the Museum’s collection.

Introduced Thursday, June 7, MoMA Art Lab was produced by The Museum of Modern Art and designed and developed by RenderMonkey Design. It is available through the iTunes App Store for $4.99.