COLUMBUS, Ohio — The museum challenge first started in the Netherlands, and it went viral after a tweet from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

The rules are simple: select your favorite work of art, pick three things lying around your home, and recreate it. 

• During this era of social distancing, museums across the country are asking people to recreate their favorite famous painting
• The movement started in the Netherlands and picked up steam in the U.S. after the Getty Museum’s post in late March 
• The Museum Challenge has yielded some interesting results both locally and countrywide 

Youngstown State’s McDonough Museum of Art Coordinator Claudia Berlinski says participation has been great from all ages and it's been the perfect way to keep the community engaged while the museum is shut down. 

“People are reproducing artworks is just so fun, I think. And it's a good distraction and I think it's great for the arts because people become more familiar with master artwork if they hadn't been in the past,” said McDonough Museum Coordinator Claudia Berlinski. 

Katie DeToro put her art skills into action, recreating a painting using marketing materials from her company Pizza Joe's.

She says it was a fun way to keep the arts alive during these difficult times.

“I was intrigued from the start and then I got real excited when McDonough posted. Colleagues were not quite getting my vision that I had in my brain. I believe it's a painting, but it just happens to look more like a mosaic. And then just putting all those pieces back together wasn't easy. And to have that nice little pop of red and yellow, and I was like, oh yeah, that can be our pizzas,” said DeToro. 

The museum challenge has also given four roommates from Connecticut their 15 minutes of fame, though an Instagram page called Covidclassics. They currently have almost 90,000 followers. 

Both Berlinski and DeToro agree the Museum challenge has helped folks find creative avenues using imagination, architecture and the STEM aspects of education. 

“Some of these people really take it seriously and they're amazing. And some of them are just so laugh-out-loud funny because they, you know, the people have a satirical side to them,” said Berlinski. 

“Hopefully people are latching on to those and they'll remember when all this is over, that maybe they should be doing those things more frequently then they were,” said DeToro.