Social media push art appreciation beyond museum walls

September 18, 2011|By James H. Burnett III, Globe Staff

Jennifer Isakowitz is an art lover. Give her a minute, and she can rattle off a list of favorite works, artists, and styles, as well as museums she’s visited in the past.

But in spite of her passion, until recently, the 21-year-old Boston University public relations major had never visited Boston’s acclaimed Museum of Fine Arts.

Then she heard through the digital grapevines of Facebook and Twitter that the MFA was kicking off a new program on Thursday nights called Drawing in the Galleries, allowing visitors to mingle socially and sketch drawings of models.

“I saw tweets about it and retweeted it to my Twitter followers. If not for that feed and the Facebook follow, I probably wouldn’t have gone,’’ Isakowitz says.

In a month in which the MFA has launched an Internet social media effort aimed at reaching a potential new fan base and retaining patrons who increasingly manage their social lives on computers, Isakowitz’s words are music to the museum boss’s ears.

“It was inevitable that we move in this direction,’’ says Malcolm Rogers, director of the MFA. “We have to go to where the people are. It’s immensely important to connect with them in a way they’re most comfortable with. And perhaps after we make that connection, they’ll come to us and allow us to make them comfortable with museum tradition.’’

Experts say the MFA’s campaign puts the museum’s social media on par with the likes of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose web “Connections’’ gives visitors insider information on exhibits and more via staff videos, and London’s Victoria and Albert museum, which offers a comprehensive online learning center.

As part of the MFA’s digital ramp-up, Rogers joined Twitter on Monday and engaged folks online in the first of a weekly one-hour Malcolm Tweets series. Week one found Rogers answering questions about the MFA’s new contemporary wing.

“There was a time it was unheard of in museum culture to ask patrons and visitors what they thought or to entertain their opinions. But again, it’s [now] necessary,’’ Rogers says.

Like other museums, the MFA has maintained a Web presence for years. But this week, as part of the new campaign, the museum also launched its Ask Us Anything series, a live Q&A between online visitors and curators about the MFA and the art realm in general. Next week a crowd-sourced art “class’’ will launch, urging online visitors to study Ellsworth Kelly’s famous 1968 painting “Blue Green Yellow Orange Red,’’ and post to the MFA’s Facebook page their own art and photographs inspired by the Kelly work.

But the biggest addition to the museum’s new digital repertoire is an interactive magazine - built for the iPad but accessible across all digital platforms.