MOCA Goes Live With Free Art Giveaways

Now’s your chance to find out an artist’s process behind a work of art before it lands on a museum’s walls. Taking inspiration from the Andy Warhol expression “15 minutes of fame,” the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art created a new Facebook Live series in which Cleveland-based artists have 15 minutes to create a piece of art on camera. Viewers who comment on weekly videos will be entered into a raffle, and MOCA will send the artwork to the winner for free.

The series began on April 29th with “15 minutes of Justin Michael Will,” a comic who created a playful line drawing with the phrase “Today is going to be” at the bottom, and continued last Wednesday, May 6 with the painter Hannah Ayers, who created a night landscape. The series will continue each Wednesday through the end of June.

“I wanted to go a step deeper and make it more personal than just being able to see the artwork online,” says Lauren Leving, curator of live programming and mastermind behind the Facebook Live series. “I thought it would be really engaging and interesting to get a sneak peek into an artist's practice that even as a curator I don't normally get to see.”

Leving explains that the series makes contemporary art accessible to everyone by breaking barriers between the artist and the viewer.

“You become kind of connected to that person that's making something,” Leving says. “I think it just reduces the barrier of accessibility there because contemporary art is intimidating and that sort of removes it.”

In the comment section, viewers say that they’ve been inspired to make art themselves.

“In this moment you kind of get into your routine of being at home and this is just a way to be like, ‘Oh, I can actually create something new, which makes me happy,’” Leving says. “It just brings joy into a lot of people's lives.”