By Aten Design Group on

BORROW ART. SUPPORT ARTISTS. LIVE ARTFULLY.

If you’re interested in experiencing contemporary art by local artists, you go to your city’s contemporary art museum or maybe your local art gallery. A fortunate minority might buy an original piece for their home. The rest of us spend a few hours at the museum, take in what we can, and leave the art where it hangs until we visit next time.

MCA Denver’s Octopus Initiative is flipping the classic museum experience upside down – or perhaps more accurately, turning it inside out. The Octopus Initiative puts local art in the hands of Denver residents through an art loan system. The museum has commissioned local artists for pieces of art, and users can browse and select their favorites. Through a lottery system, selected winners are able to borrow the work for ten months.

How it works:

  • The Octopus Initiative commissions local artists to create original art.
  • Pieces are added to the program’s collection and listed on its website.
  • The public is invited to browse artworks online or in person, and “heart” the ones they love.
  • Each quarter, an automated lottery runs to select the winners to take home original works of art.
Visit octopus.mcadenver.org →
Why Drupal was chosen: 

MCA Denver was already using Drupal 8 for its main website. Beyond maximizing its investment in Drupal, MCA Denver wanted to build a platform for the Octopus Initiative that would be flexible and easy to manage. Even more important: MCA Denver had a vision for sharing the Octopus Initiative with other museums across the country and wanted to build a solution that could be easily packaged and distributed as a software product. Drupal’s support for product-centric architecture, coupled with Pantheon’s upstream capabilities, were a perfect fit.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

The Octopus Initiative is all about putting art into the hands of many through a lottery and loan system. It seeks to engage the community in transformative ways, connecting artists and art lovers. For Octopus Initiative to work, it needed to:

  • Allow MCA staff to easily add and manage artist profiles and distinct works of art.
  • Deliver a compelling experience for end users to browse – and favorite – the art.
  • Run an automated lottery every three months, matching winning users with the art they favorited.
  • Provide simple workflow and communication tools for managing delivery of art to winning participants.

So far, there have been 2300 users registered in the system. Users can register and add works of art to their favorites list on devices provided at the museum or remotely through the website. In the two monthly lotteries thus far, there have been 8600 heart entries for 15 works of art in the first round and 6500 heart entries for 20 works of art in the second round.

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used: 
GraphQL
Mandrill
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Mandrill
The Transactional email service for MailChimp. The client was already using MailChimp for newsletters, so it made sense to them to add on the Mandrill service which let them build templates in a system they were already familiar with. The Mandrill module was implemented with some custom code to take node field values and pass along with the selected template to send out mail to lottery winners.

GraphQL
This module provides a schema for all node content types and custom entities which makes building complex custom queries very simple. With a single GraphQL request we could return a javascript object which just the fields and entities used in a React app to display dashboard data to an admin. The module also has a Plugin system so creating a custom “mutation” for letting the React dashboard update specific entity values was simple too.

Organizations involved: 
Aten Design Group
Sectors: 
Arts