All Things Visual: The University of Chicago Visual Resources Center

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).

Tags: NATO, protest, WorldImages

This weekend marks the grand opening of the exhibition On the Edge: Medieval Margins and the Margins of Academic Life. It will be on display at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center Exhibition Gallery. The grand opening celebration will take place on Monday, May 21st from 5-7pm, with the curator’s introduction to the exhibit at 6pm. Refreshments will be served and the celebration is open to the public.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) by University of Chicago art history professor Michael Camille (1958-2002), a work that looks at the playful and parodic images in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. Inspired by Camille’s work, the exhibition explores the symmetry between medieval margins and the modern margins of academic life.  Camille studied the uncommon: the strange, remarkable, and extraordinary images at the edges of the medieval world, bringing to light to the confluence of the serious and the playful, the sacred and the profane. The serious and the playful also converge at the University of Chicago, and “On the Edge” features medieval manuscript marginalia paired with student photographs that capture the margins of campus life. The photographs show what happens outside of the classroom at the University, highlighting quintessential traditions such as the Scavenger Hunt.

“On the Edge” invites viewers to contemplate the juxtaposition of manuscripts and photographs of campus life, to compare one margin to another, and to discover how the medieval resonates with the modern.

On the Edge will be on view from May 19 – August 10, 2012.

More information is available here.

Tags: marginalia, Medieval, Special Collections Research Center

Carl Pyrdum of Got Medieval (with a little help from Mario) makes a clever argument for the illustration of gravity in the margins of medieval manuscripts:

In order to keep the man and his goat in the middle from falling right on through the bottom of the page, the artist draws in little patches of ground beneath them. Mario, no stranger to platforms that hang in the air as if bolted to the background, would feel right at home with this arrangement.

See the original blog post here.

Tags: just for fun, manuscripts, marginalia, Mario

On Thursday, May 31, 2012 the Getty Research Institute will launch the Getty Research Portal, an unprecedented resource that will provide universal access to digitized texts in the field of art and architectural history.

The Getty Research Portal is a free online search gateway that aggregates descriptive metadata of digitized art history texts, with links to fully digitized copies that are free to download. Art historians, curators, students, or anyone who is culturally curious can unearth these valuable sources of research without traveling from place to place to browse the stacks of the world’s art libraries. There will be no restrictions to use the Getty Research Portal; all anyone needs is access to the internet.

Tags: art history, digitization projects, free downloads, Getty, texts

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.

Tags: New Yorker, Theaster Gates

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland has donated more than 19,000 freely-licensed images of artworks to Wikimedia Commons. The Walters’ collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art and Old Master and 19th-century paintings. The images and their associated information will join [a] collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files, which serves as the repository for the 285 language editions of Wikipedia.

Via Wikimedia Foundation Blog.

Tags: free images, Wikimedia Commons

The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University shares its digital archive of early American images with LUNA Commons. With over 7,000 images, this collection includes:

graphic representations of the colonial Americas, from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego, drawn entirely from primary sources printed or created between 1492 and ca. 1825.

LUNA Commons collections are contributed by partnering institutions from around the world. Please contact the VRC for a LUNA tutorial.

Tags: archives, Early American Art, Luna

Pinterest isn’t just for bookmarking your home decorating inspirations and favorite recipes. It’s an online “pinboard” that allows users to organize and share images, video, and other web-based information, and could be used as an organizational tool for research.

How it works: once you’ve requested and signed up for an account, you can create various boards for organizing your pins. Boards act a bit like folders, because they keep images and sites together. Boards could be based on themes, research interests, current projects, and so on.

Once you’ve created a board or two, start pinning! Make sure to include the link to the original source, both for your own reference and for copyright reasons. Keep in mind that all boards on Pinterest are currently public. See Pinterest’s copyright page for more information.

While Pinterest is great for visually organizing web-based research and fostering ideas, it does not automatically capture sufficient citation information and should be used in conjunction with a robust citation management tool like Zotero. For more information about citation management tools, visit Regenstein’s Endnote, Zotero, and RefWorks spring quarter office hours on Mondays at 3pm at the TECHB@R.

Tags: citation management, Pinterest, research

[The College Art Association] has received a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the next ARTspace, taking place during the 101st Annual Conference in New York, February 13–16, 2013.

The grant, which is the NEA’s fourth consecutive award to CAA for ARTspace programming, will help fund, among other things, ARTexchange, a popular open-portfolio event for artists, as well as [Meta] Mentors programming, which has covered topics such as do-it-yourself curatorial and exhibition practices, international networks for artists, and assistance with grants, taxes, and promotion.

Via CAA News.

Tags: CAA, College Art Association, conferences, grants, professional development, students

More than 16,000 images of architecture, landscape design, and the built environment from the Society of Architectural Historians’ (SAH) SAHARA project are now available in the ARTstor Digital Library. SAHARA (Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive) is a community-built archive of digital images for teaching and research in the field of architectural history.

View the collection here. Via the ARTstor Blog.

Tags: Architecture, SAHARA