All Things Visual: The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center

 The Balboa Park Online Commons features more than 20,000 images of unique materials from 7 San Diego museums: the Mingei International Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the San Diego Air and Space Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Man, the San Diego Natural History Museum, and the Timken Museum of Art.

This unified digital collection allows users to keyword search to retrieve results across institutions or to browse by museum, “featured sets” (thematic groupings of objects), or by user sets. Users can create their own set or collection of objects by creating an account on the website, and there is also a feature to download a PDF of the object record.

For more information, check out the Balboa Park Online Commons.

Via PetaPixel

Just in time for this great weather, Curbed Chicago and the Chicago Public Art Group have created a Google Map identifying great examples of public art underneath Chicago’s overpasses. The map includes several murals that are in Hyde Park, so happy exploring!

For more information about public art resources, see our post about the Public Art Archive.

Via Curbed

With the conclusion of an eight-year long research project, Vincent van Gogh has been in the news quite a bit recently. In 2005, the van Gogh museum teamed up with Shell and the Netherland’s Cultural Heritage Agency to research the materials, tools, techniques, and working processes of the artist. The website for the research project, Van Gogh’s Studio Practice, describes contains blog posts about how the researchers approached their work and describes the aims of their research. The results of the project were not earth-shattering, but the small surprises they discovered do deepen our understanding of van Gogh’s works and his psyche. The most talked about new discovery is the fact that The Bedroom was originally painted with violet walls, but since the red pigment of the paint faded, we know the work as having blue walls.

The new exhibition at the van Gogh Museum benefits from results of this lengthy research project, and is called Van Gogh at Work (May 1, 2013–January 12, 2014). The show will contain 200 works by van Gogh as well as some contemporary artists, as well as archival materials such as letters, sketchbooks, and the artist’s palette and paint tubes. The show will also include a digital re-creation of The Bedroom to show how it would have looked with the original violet walls.

The Van Gogh Museum also has a web portal for van Gogh’s letters (written and received) that contains facsimiles, transcriptions, and detailed object information of some 900 letters and 25 miscellaneous loose sheets or drafts. You can browse the collection by period, correspondent, place, or limit your results to letters that contain sketches. Simple and advanced search features are also available. The website also contains a wealth of contextual essays, biographical information, and research tools including the publication history of van Gogh’s letters, a chronology, and detailed bibliographies of the individual letters. A few years ago, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam released an app called Yours, Vincent: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, which contains digitized versions of van Gogh’s letters, sketches, and paintings as well as audio and video contextual clips.

Via ArtNews and the New York Times. For more information about van Gogh’s archival presence, visit Vincent van Gogh, The Letters or the Yours, Vincent app. You can always stop by the VRC to check it out, too!

Image: Vincent van Gogh. Self-portrait with a Straw Hat (verso: The Potato Peeler), probably 1887. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 67.187.70a. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ARTstor recently added a feature to save searches within the  ARTstor Digital Library. The theory behind this feature is that with ARTstor’s growing collections of content, it’s highly likely that additional results for your search parameters will become available in the future. By saving your search, you can quickly get an updated pool of results when you run it again.

In order to use this feature, you must be logged into your ARTstor account.  For more information on creating an ARTstor account, click here. ARTstor describes how to save your searches:

After you perform a search, you will see an option to Save this search in the upper right of the thumbnail page of search results. Click on it, then click Save and enter a name for your saved search. You can save up to 30 searches.

To run a saved search record, click My saved searches near the search box on the front page of the Digital Library or on a search results page.

Done with a particular saved search? To delete it, click on My saved searches, then click on the X next to the search you want to delete. You’ll see a prompt asking if you want to delete it; click Yes and you’re finished.

Via ARTstor Blog

Attorney Donn Zaretsky of John Silberman Associates maintains The Art Law Blog, which discusses current and topical issues pertaining to art law, including intellectual property rights, copyright and permissions, social media, censorship, artists’ estates and foundations, auctions, and more. For example, the blog has recently been covering the Prince-Cariou case—it’s a great round-up of national art law cases and news for sure.

For more information, visit The Art Law Blog.

The Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford has recently released Reel to Real, a digital collection pertaining to sound and video from ethnomusicology research. “The content of the recordings ranges from spirits singing in the rainforests of the Central African Republic to children’s songs and games in playgrounds throughout Europe.”

The website features playlists of curated material along with archival photographs taken at the same time the recordings were made.

To learn more, explore the Reel to Real collection.

Maya painters used a blue paint that proved to be very durable—its hue remains vivid today—on murals, ceramics, and in their codices and manuscripts. While the ingredients of the blue paint have been known for years, scientists in Spain recently discovered that the method of preparation “cooked” the mixture of pigments and clay to stabilize the paint.

Scientists have long known the two chief ingredients of the intense blue pigment: indigo, a plant dye that’s used today to color denim; and palygorskite, a type of clay. But how the Maya cooked up the unfading paint remained a mystery. Now Spanish researchers report that they found traces of another pigment in Maya Blue, which they say gives clues about how the color was made.

“We detected a second pigment in the samples, dehydroindigo, which must have formed through oxidation of the indigo when it underwent exposure to the heat that is required to prepare Maya Blue,” Antonio Doménech, a researcher from the University of Valencia, said in a statement.

The VRC is often adding new groups Mayan and Mesoamerican images to our LUNA database, so be sure to check it out our resources for murals, pottery, and more!

Via A Blog About History and LiveScience.

Image credit: Bonampak Murals. Copy. 692. Harvard University. Peabody Museum. ©Kathleen Cohen. Copy by Antonio Teleda in 1948.

In November 2012 the MIT press published Digital_Humanities, and recently, an open access PDF of the publication was made freely available online as a PDF, which you can read on your computer or e-reader. If your research is taking you in the direction of digital humanities techniques or if you’re considering future projects, this book is a great resource on the state of the field:

Digital_Humanities is a compact, game-changing report on the state of contemporary knowledge production. Answering the question, “What is digital humanities?,” it provides an in-depth examination of an emerging field. This collaboratively authored and visually compelling volume explores methodologies and techniques unfamiliar to traditional modes of humanistic inquiry–including geospatial analysis, data mining, corpus linguistics, visualization, and simulation–to show their relevance for contemporary culture.

Included are chapters on the basics, on emerging methods and genres, and on the social life of the digital humanities, along with “case studies,” “provocations,” and “advisories.” These persuasively crafted interventions offer a descriptive toolkit for anyone involved in the design, production, oversight, and review of digital projects. The authors argue that the digital humanities offers a revitalization of the liberal arts tradition in the electronically inflected, design-driven, multimedia language of the twenty-first century.

Written by five leading practitioner-theorists whose varied backgrounds embody the intellectual and creative diversity of the field, Digital_Humanities is a vision statement for the future, an invitation to engage, and a critical tool for understanding the shape of new scholarship.

For more information, visit the MIT Press or click here to download the PDF—for free! You can also stop by the VRC—we have a copy of the PDF on our iPad.

Oxford Art Online dramatically expanded their coverage of photography in April 2014:

This season Grove Art Online is pleased to present a group of more than 60 new and significantly updated articles on the topic of photography, developed in part in response to frequent reader requests for more expansive coverage of the history and practice of photography in Grove. The centerpiece of the project is a group of 16 new and significantly updated articles on key movements and concepts, including important pieces on documentary photography, digital photography, and the worker photography movement. The update also includes a set of 44 new biographies, South African photographer Ernest Cole, female portraitist Zaida Ben-Yosuf, 19th-century critic Francis Wey, and 20th-century curator John Szarkowski. Filling out this season’s update are another 90 photography-related articles with fully updated bibliographies to incorporate the latest research. Many thanks are due to the dedicated and accomplished scholars who contributed to this update, as well as to the institutions and individuals who generously provided over 120 stunning new illustrations to promote understanding of the texts. This new material complements Grove’s existing coverage of photography around the globe, and sets the stage for continued growth in coming years.

For access to Oxford Art Online (University of Chicago affiliates only), click here. To go directly to the newly updated Photography content, click here.

The University for the Creative Arts recently launched a digital collection of material from Zandra Rhodes‘ personal archive of fashion materials. Rhodes was a student of UCA  The press release notes that contextual and didactic content has been put on the website in addition to the

… 500 dresses and garments that have been painstakingly prepared, catalogued and photographed over the past 18 months for the Collection which has been created for the education community through a collaborative project between UCA and the Zandra Rhodes Studio, with funding from Jisc.

The robust digital collection features photographs and detail views of 500 finished garment (with fully cataloged descriptions), more than 100 pages of fashion drawings presented as fully digitized sketchbooks (using Turning the Pages software), and many videos of Rhodes speaking about her working process and career.

For more information and to explore the website, visit the Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection.