A screen grab of the Object:Photo website showing a map of selected events in László Moholy-Nagy’s life

When MoMA’s departments of Photography and Conservation set out to make a website to showcase the 341 photographs in the Thomas Walther Collection, the goal was to create an innovative resource that would take full advantage of the Internet’s interactivity. In December, MoMA launched Object:Photo, a digital research platform featuring four data visualizations that allow visitors to explore the materials, techniques, and art historical context of these 341 modernist photographs.

Sketching from Life drawing sessions at MoMA inspired by The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters. All photos by Manuel Molina Martagon. © 2015 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

In 2014, MoMA’s education, curatorial, graphic design, exhibition design, and marketing departments collaborated to develop an interactive learning space adjacent to the exhibition The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters. This is the third interactive space we’ve developed in relation to an exhibition, following the success of Performing John Cage and the Polke Pop-Up Activity Space. This café-like space offers activities and resources to connect participants with Lautrec’s life and artistic process using both unfacilitated and facilitated approaches.

Since February is the shortest month it’s important to pack in as much as possible, and this week is especially busy at MoMA, with a final-weekend Matisse blitz, a critical discussion on art and free speech, films that celebrate women in cinema, and so much more. You won’t want to miss these programs:

The artists featured in The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World all draw inspiration from a dizzying array of art-historical styles and processes. Two years ago, in conjunction with the exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, MoMA asked contemporary artists to discuss works in the show that they found compelling. We thought it might be fun and enlightening to revisit this approach and invite several artists from The Forever Now into the Museum’s collection galleries to see which works pique their interest.

Installation view, Painting and Sculpture Galleries, The Museum of Modern Art. Shown: all works by Henri Matisse. © 2015 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As the groundbreaking exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs enters its final weeks, visitors can rest assured that there’s more Matisse to discover at MoMA. Head to the fifth-floor Painting and Sculpture Galleries, where you’ll encounter an entire room devoted to Matisse’s early-20th-century work—an especially fertile period for this modern master—with an unexpected twist.

Leo Fender, George Fullerton, Freddie Tavares. Left: Fender Stratocaster Electric Guitar. Designed 1954, this example 1957. Wood, metal, and plastic. Right: Fender Bassman amplifier. 1959. Wood, metal, and plastic. Committee on Architecture and Design Funds

As a curatorial assistant at MoMA, one of the most fun aspects of my job is researching and facilitating new acquisitions for the Museum’s collection. In the Architecture and Design department, we collect a range of materials, from architectural models to video game interfaces. And then there’s the time we acquired a 1957 Fender Stratocaster

Installation view of Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 13, 2014–April 19, 2015. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar. © 2015 The Museum of Modern Art

On the Museum’s third floor, Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Dive (1934), a gelatin silver print roughly 12 inches high and 10 inches wide, is on display in the exhibition Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949. On the related Object:Photo website, the same photograph is shown reproduced in the July 1935 issue of Sovetskoe foto (Soviet photo), a state-sanctioned, Moscow-based journal founded in 1926 dedicated to photography and photographic techniques.

Harry Callahan. Weeds in Snow, Detroit. 1943. Gelatin silver print, 3 1/4 x 4 7/16″ (8.2 x 11.3 cm). Gift of the photographer. © 2015 The Estate of Harry Callahan

With a storm on the way that may leave New Yorkers snowed in, it’s an ideal time to take the long view on making plans. Here’s what’s on the horizon this week:

All works by David Horvitz. 2015. Courtesy of Chert, Berlin

In advance of The Making of Mail Art, an artist-led MoMA Class taking place on February 21, the instructors—Zanna Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints, and David Horvitz, an artist—answered a few questions about their personal experiences with mail art, the unique elements of this art form, and the collection of mail art that Horvitz has sent to Gilbert at MoMA over the past two years.

Installation view of Jean Dubuffet: Soul of the Underground, The Museum of Modern Art, October 18, 2014–April 5, 2015. Photograph by John Wronn

In July of 1963 the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) declared of his radical lithographs, “Sometimes I took imprints of every chance element that might even suggest something: the ground, walls, stones, old suitcases, any or every sort of object—I even went so far as to do them from the naked skin of a friend’s back—and sometimes I obtained astonishing images…that I had sprinkled with tiny elements such as wires, crumbs, bits of torn paper, and all sorts of debris….”