All Things Visual: The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center

MoMA recently opened a new exhibition, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, and this ground-breaking survey is accompanied by an equally ground-breaking website. The exhibition takes a multidisciplinary look at the development of abstraction and as such:

The exhibition brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction’s early history and covers a wide range of artistic production, including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance, to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years.

In the October, ARTnews reported that the Leah Dickerman, curator of the exhibition, was collaborating with Paul Ingram of Columbia University’s business school because he specializes in social network analysis. Dickerman wanted to visually display connections and friendships among the artists and creators involved in the genesis of abstraction, and she and her team, along with their business school partners, began mapping connections in an Excel spreadsheet. The project then turned into a dynamic network of artists and other creative types connected by vectors. They liken the project to a Facebook or LinkedIn network for the abstract vanguard.

In the ARTnews article, Paul Ingram “explains that the quality of ‘between-ness’ in the network—being on multiple paths between others—is associated with creativity. According to this measure, he says, Kandinsky is the most central figure in MoMA’s history of abstraction.” The interactive chart highlights key players in red, and for each artist represented on the chart, more information about their role, interests, and works is provided.

And as an aside, the ARTnews article mentions several other charts or family trees that had been created to document relationships (either sincerely or snarkily) in modern art movements—be sure to check out the very famous Barr’s Chart! These genealogical charts differ greatly from the social vectors described in the new MoMA chart, but provided the initial inspiration for the website’s diagram. Another “genealogical” example comes from the Irving Penn Archives, housed at the Art Institute of Chicago: Penn drew an a family tree, titled “An Immodest Claim to Artistic Roots,” in which he lists several of the artists included in MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction exhibition including Fernand Léger, El Lissitzky, and Man Ray. You can view his tree here.

The VRC will be adding images from the exhibition to our LUNA collection soon!

Via ARTnews

The Henry Moore Foundation recently launched an online catalog of Moore’s artwork, beginning with works owned by the Foundation. The catalog is searchable by genre, including drawings, graphics, sculptures, tapestries, and textiles as well as by thematic categories such as mother and child and reclining figures.

Users can download an enlarged image at 72 dpi, which will project well in CWAC classrooms.

For more information, visit the online catalog of Henry Moore Artworks.

We often post about new image collections and other scholarly resources pertaining to art history, but the building blocks are just as important. Based in the Netherlands, Materia is an art and architecture materials library that maintains an extensive collection of modern products in a database called Material Explorer that can be freely searched if you register for an account. They provide detailed information about product specs and contact information for the manufacturer, and users can download a PDF about the product, add it to a list of favorites, or suggest a new material to be included in the database.

Via Pixels

The Gallery of Lost Art is an online exhibition that tells the stories of artworks that have disappeared. Destroyed, stolen, discarded, rejected, erased, ephemeral—some of the most significant artworks of the last 100 years have been lost and can no longer be seen.

This virtual year-long exhibition explores the sometimes extraordinary and sometimes banal circumstances behind the loss of major works of art. Archival images, films, interviews, blogs and essays are laid out for visitors to examine, relating to the loss of works by over 40 artists across the twentieth century, including such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Willem de Kooning, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin.

Jennifer Mundy, curator of The Gallery of Lost Art, says: “Art history tends to be the history of what has survived. But loss has shaped our sense of art’s history in ways that we are often not aware of. Museums normally tell stories through the objects they have in their collections. But this exhibition focuses on significant works that cannot be seen.”

 

The virtual exhibition launched on July 2, 2012, and will be available online for only one year before it too is “lost.” A new artwork will be added each week for 6 months.

ARTstor has signed an Online Art Agreement (OLA) with Artists Rights Society (ARS) on behalf of six additional international visual arts organizations covering more than 10,000 new artists from six countries. This substantially expands the ARTstor Digital Library’s modern and contemporary artworks for subscribers.

The agreements cover the following affiliates of ARS:

VISCOPY – Australia

SODRAC – Canada

VBK – Austria

KUVASTO – Finland

SOMAAP – Mexico

AUTVIS – Brazil

Dr. Theodore Feder, President of the Artists Rights Society, said “We are very pleased to further expand our collaboration and to contribute to the many authorized images offered by ARTstor for the important purposes of teaching, research, and study.

Above: Jose Clemente Orozco, one of the artists to be included in this new agreement, photographed by Edward Weston.

Does your work deal critically with issues of race and ethnicity? If so, you might consider applying for this 2012-13 Artists-in-Residence program at the University of Chicago:

The Arts + Public Life Initiative and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture invite applications for their joint 2012/13 Artist-in-Residence Program beginning November 2012 and culminating in a public exhibition at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts in August 2013. The program awards a ten-month residency to outstanding Chicago-based artists and collaboratives—with an emphasis on those whose work critically engages issues of race and ethnicity—and provides the opportunity to (1) draw on the University of Chicago’s resources, critical faculty, and student body to develop, advance, and disseminate their work; (2) deepen individual practices through critique, public engagement, skills and knowledge sharing; and (3) create a space where personal inquiry and collaborative relationships can flourish.

Please see the program description for more information.

Preoccupied with the NATO Summit in Chicago this weekend and its associated protests? You might be interested in over 200 images of protest that are now available from WorldImages, including photographs of Occupy protestors in New York’s Zucotti Park. Images from earlier protests around the world put the the occupiers (and those occupying the NATO proceedings this weekend) in context. Protest images are available here.

Web images are free for educational use. High-resolution images can be licensed for $1 each for jpegs or $3 for tiffs with a minimum of 100 images. For more information about licensing from WorldImages, click here.

You may also be interested in images of protest available in LUNA. (Note: to access this link, you must be affiliated with the University of Chicago).

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Chicago artist Theaster Gates is featured in a discussion of “shows that are changing the art world.”

Visit Theaster Gates’ website, and read more about his projects utilizing slide donations from the UofC Visual Resources Center here.

BMW Tate Live: Performance Room is an innovative series of performances broadcast… online around the globe, as they happen.

The global audience [is] encouraged to chat with other viewers via social media channels during the performance and to put questions to the artists or curator… using Tate’s social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and the Twitter hashtag #BMWTateLive.

US residents, enter the BMW Tate Live: Performance Room via Tate’s YouTube channel at 3pm on the designated dates below to experience the performances in real time. Artists who will perform include: Pablo Bronstein (April 26), Emily Roysdon (May 31), Harrell Fletcher (June 28), and Joan Jonas (date TBD).

Via Derivative Image.

The Public Art Archive™, a new project of the Western States Arts Federation, or WESTAF (www.westaf.org), is a sophisticated searchable database of public art in the United States. The Archive makes public art and its processes more accessible to the public, displaying images of each piece alongside an extensive description, including audio and video supplementary files when available.

Google maps has been integrated into the Public Art Archive™. Users can see works on a map, get driving or walking directions, and save the map for later use. Cultural tourists can create a map of works that they wish to visit and use a mobile device to access information about a piece while physically standing in front of it.