MoMA Art Lab Offers a Digital Art Space for Children Last year the Museum of Modern Art opened its Materials Lab, a small space for children who are ready to stop looking at art and start making some. Judging from a recent weekday visit to the museum, the space is popular, with children using digital painting programs (when they aren't being elbowed away from the screens by their fathers), getting a feel for various materials and generally making a lot of noise. Now there is a digital version of that space, named the MoMA Art Lab, and it is available on the iPad. The app is primarily intended for use at home, but MoMA plans to put iPads in several spaces throughout the museum. This is not the museum's first foray into mobile; it has a nice general app for Apple and Android devices with audio tours and images, and a handy mobile Web site. Art Lab uses drawing exercises to highlight the styles of artists in the museum's collection. The app has six "activities," for which it gives a brief introduction to some aspect of an artist's style and then walks users through an exercise employing that style. I found some of these activities worthwhile, and others rather pointless. One of the better ones is based on the work of Jim Lambie, a Scottish artist who used colorful vinyl tape to create patterns on the museum's floor. The app has a great video of Mr. Lambie installing a piece at the museum, and a short explanation of his work. It then gives users several room layouts to cover in a digital version of the same process. Also satisfying was the game Exquisite Corpse, which takes off on the game originally played by the Surrealists, in which artists each draw a part of a work without seeing what others have draw. It mimics a piece called Figure, created by that process. Once you have created something, it can be saved to your iPad's camera roll, shared or sent to MoMA, which reserves the right to use it however it sees fit. All sharing options are turned off by default. When Art Lab falls short, it does so in the same way that museum technology often does. While it presents itself as a tool for learning about the museum's collection, the educational content is pretty thin. Aside from the video of Mr. Lambie, there is not much about the artists it focuses on. Also, the creative process in some of the activities is more or less just pressing buttons to make noises. The app does have a blank-canvas option, which provides essentially unlimited possibilities. It is possible that a child will start with the structured activities and move on to drawing things from scratch. Then again, there are plenty of drawing apps for the iPad with much richer features than this one, some with lower prices.