All Things Visual: The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center

ARTstor and the Guggenheim recently released more than 5,000 installation views from some of the Guggenheim’s landmark exhibitions from the 1990s to the present. In addition, 1,000 installation views from the Guggenheim locations in Bilbao and Venice will be added. 200 contemporary and historic images of the three museums’ architecture will join the installation views.

Search Tip: There are many other installation and exhibition views available in ARTstor, and to search for them, try adding different keywords to your search terms, including “installation view” or “exhibition [and the exhibition's title].”

Via ARTstor Blog

In 2009, the Tate published The Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms and followed it with an iPad and iPhone app released in March 2012. The app defines more than 300 terms pertaining to modern art themes, movements, media, and art practices, and many definitions are illustrated with artwork examples.

The app interface allows users to search for terms or browse by image gallery or category. Users can also create a list of “favorite” art terms.

To learn more about the Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms, check out the iTunes App Store, the Tate, or visit the VRC to try it on our iPad. You can also browse the physical copy in the Regenstein reference section.

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

The British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) recently released a set of guidelines for citing audiovisual materials. The goal of the BUFVC Guidelines for Referencing Moving Image and Sound is to:

… Establish an authoritative and accessible set of guidelines that is applicable to a wide range of different users across all disciplines. Covering film, television programmes, radio programmes, audio recordings, DVD extras, clips, trailers, adverts, idents, non-broadcast, amateur and archive materials, podcasts, vodcasts and games, it also includes style guidance on citations in reference lists and in-text citation.

Since there aren’t really any uniform expectations for how AV materials should be cited in academic writing, this guide provides good examples of a wide variety of instances of AV materials you might encounter in your research, including how to cite digitized AV material.

For more information, see the BUFVC press release or view/download a PDF of the guidelines.

And as always, if the VRC can help with your research (and citation) questions, please contact us!

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.

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.

The Tate has two in-depth online resources focused on the career of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851). Turner Worldwide is a project to provide the most comprehensive online catalog of works by Turner, including works that are owned by the Tate as well as nearly 2,500 works by Turner that are in other collections around the world.

J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Watercolors is a thematic module that presents a catalog of Turner’s works on paper, organized chronologically and by subject. “Entries on the groupings include commentaries, exhibition and publication histories, and information about the media and materials used.” The sketchbooks included have been digitized in their entirety.

For more information, visit the Tate’s page on J.M.W. Turner.

The issue of image copyright and the Google Books project remains an ongoing concern for many photographers, as their copyright images may be digitized and made available through Google Books without their permission. The NPPA and several other plaintiffs are bringing a suit against Google Book Search, arguing:

Google’s acts have caused, and unless restrained, will continue to cause irreparable injuries to Lead Plaintiffs and the Class members through: continued copyright infringement and/or the effectuation of new and further infringements of the Visual Works contained in Books and Periodicals; diminution of the value and ability to license and sell their Visual Works; lost profits and/or opportunities; and damage to their goodwill and reputation.

Plaintiffs include the American Society of Media Photographers, Graphic Artists Guild, Picture Archive Council of America, North American Nature Photography Association, Professional Photographers of America, American Photographic Artists, and several individual photographers.

Via PetaPixel and NPPA

Susan M. Bielstein, the executive editor for art, architecture, classical studies, and film at the University of Chicago Press, wrote Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property (2006), which explores issues related to obtaining permissions and licenses to publish visual images. This useful and interesting book describes the process of obtaining permission to publish images in academic texts, using a variety of examples and includes sample letters for requesting permission.

It is available in the University Library in hard copy and also as an e-book (click here for the proxy link to the e-book).

For more information on obtaining permission to publish images, please refer to our page on Copyright Lenient Images for Academic Publishing, which has a section for general resources and guides.

For more information about the book, visit the University of Chicago Press.