Search Tips

To find galleries, click on Explore, then choose the Galleries tab.

Select a subject if desired and/or a grade.

You can enter a keyword if you like to narrow your search. See the example to the left for how to construct your search.

Notice that you can limit your search to all published galleries or only those created by the staff of the MFA’s School Programs team.

You can enter keywords such as “claude monet” or “african sculpture” to retrieve items from the MFA’s collection. This search only finds artwork owned by the MFA.

A classification, such as Textiles, can be selected to further limit your results.

If you’re planning a visit, you may want to check if artwork is on view in the galleries. To do this, check the “Only On View” box when you perform your search.

Clicking on the name of an artwork that appears in your search results will take you to the Artwork Detail page.

On this page, you can view the “official” MFA image information for the artwork, including curatorial notes, medium, and other data.

You can enlarge or zoom the artwork to get a closer look, and even get On View information with a pop-up gallery map showing the location of the artwork.

Keywords can be added that will help describe this artwork in a user-friendly, accessible way for other site users. For this artwork, keywords such as “lily pad” or “pond” or “reflective” could be helpful additions.

When searching for artwork to use in your gallery, you can also try the global site search in the site header.

This search will find both artwork and galleries that match the terms you enter.

To find matches for your own keywords – the ones you entered to help describe galleries or artwork – click on “search everything tagged with….”

From within a gallery, you can also perform a quick search for Artwork. Enter terms in the “All MFA Media” keyword box and click the red button to continue. Your results can be dragged directly into your work-in-progress gallery.