Last October, I got an email from SFMOMA about a potential project. I was so excited, I hyperventilated for 5 minutes and messaged my sister and friends in all caps. I replied back immediately.

Last June, SFMOMA launched Send Me SFMOMA, a service where individuals could text a variety of requests - “send me love”, “send me hope”, “send me smiles” - and SFMOMA would respond with an artwork that best matched the request. They received over 5 million texts from hundreds of thousands of individuals over the course of a year.

And they've asked me to do something fun with that data.

I’ve chosen five individuals - whom I've named love, happy, smile, cats, and moon - and a week of their interactions to focus my visualization around. Each tree represents a day in that individual’s life, and I love watching the flowers grow as they interact with Send Me SFMOMA. I love coming across little snippets of their lives: when I find a tree blooming full with flowers, I wonder if something good happened that day. When I watch a tree grow in the early hours of the morning, I wonder what’s keeping them up. When I see a week filled with flowers, but suddenly a small tree with leaves of “mourning” and “black” - I wonder what might have happened.

In the months that I’ve been immersed with this dataset, I’ve grown to love it for its beauty and serendipity. And with Send Me Love, I hope you'll also feel that joy - of watching a tree grow and flowers bloom, and of connecting with a perfect stranger over their texts.

Explore a week of love →

Shirley Wu
Independent Creator of Data Visualizations