The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a leader in the field of art on YouTube, with 602.3K subscribers as of Dec 31, 2025. Our tagline is "Passionate perspectives on art," and our videos aim to make accessible and deepen knowledge of art history and artists. Our video program spans documentaries, artist profiles, demonstrations of art techniques, live streams, and animated videos. Online, we reach a wider and more diverse audience than the museum can. Some of our viewers will never make it to MoMA, or may only come for a once-in-a-lifetime visit, but can stay connected, learn from, and engage with the museum on a regular basis via our free channel. In 2025 we focused on reaching children with a new series "Once Upon an Artwork," developing an intimate artist profile series, and archival short documentaries on individual artists. We also launched YouTube Shorts on the channel, making videos for this new format on the platform and bringing attention to longform videos on the channel.
In 2025 we created a trailer for our YouTube channel to feature at the top of our homepage. It shows the range of videos on the channel and aims to inspire viewers.
With a desire to reach children on YouTube Kids in 2025, we released three episodes of a new series "Once Upon an Artwork", an animated video series that uses works of art in MoMA’s collection as a jumping off point for children to imagine, play, seek adventure, and create worlds. We record kids looking at works of art and then an animator brings their unique vision and storytelling to life. The YouTube Kids team appreciated the quality of the series and placed it on the "Explore" tab of the YouTube Kids homepage for two weeks, which helped the series gather nearly a million views.
This year we also saw great engagement with our "How to See" series, releasing two short documentaries on artists who are underrecognized, Jack Whitten and Wifredo Lam. Both feautured interviews with the artists' family members as well as MoMA's curators and conservators. Many viewers commented on being moved by the storytelling and archival materials.
Every other month, we release a profile of a living artist in our Art for All series, visiting their studios for intimate portraits covering themes between art and life.
This year we also continued our ongoing tutorial series, "In the Studio," with two new episodes on Portrait Photography and Drawing en Plein Air.
MoMA's YouTube channel is a vital part of the mission for the museum, to connect people from around the world to the art of our time, acting as a catalyst for experimentation, learning, and creativity. As of December 31, 2025, the channel had 602.3K subscribers and in 2025 we had 4.9M views, with our top three videos ranging from an animated video for kids (801K views) to an artist profile with John Wilson (260K views), to an archival documentary on artist Jack Whitten (250K views). Our channel has a lively and thoughtful comments section, where viewers often write about how emotionally impactful the videos are, the quality of the filmmaking and storytelling, and express that they're learning about new artists through the channel. Below is a selection of comments.
From our Draw en Plein Air tutorial: "Than you Biz! You have inspired me to take drawing materials on my travels instead of just a camera. What a wonderful way to slow down and experience a place...and create a life experience rather than just a quick image to lok at "later."
