Assistant Director, Visual Resources Collection, University of Chicago
THATCamp Organizer
Art labeled “degenerate” and thought destroyed during the Nazi regime was recently rediscovered during construction activity in Berlin.
In digs carried out throughout this year, archeologists have unearthed 11 sculptures thought to have been lost forever — valuable works of art that disappeared during World War II after having been included on the Nazis’ list of degenerate art. Most of them have now been identified and have been put on display in Berlin’s Neues Museum.
Via Spiegel Online.
Electrical engineer and light sculptor Jim Campbell creates outdoor installations that quietly play with ideas of technological advancement and images. One work, called Scattered Light was recently installed in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park and comprises 1,600 lightbulbs fitted with LED bulbs. From afar, each bulb creates a kind of pixel, appearing flat as the shadows of people walking around the sculpture move through the light.
As the artist states in a videotaped interview:
“I see the work as an homage to the lightbulb, in a way… I like the light bulb shape. So I’m saying goodbye to it.”
For more information, please see the artist’s website.
Via Deep Focus.
In honor of the upcoming holiday weekend, check out the Farber Gravestone Collection in LUNA Commons:
The Farber Gravestone Collection is an unusual resource documenting the sculpture on over 9,000 gravestones most of which were made prior to 1800… These early stones are both a significant form of artistic creation and precious records of biographical information, now subject to vandalism and to deterioration from the environment.
Or get costume-inspired by browsing images in ARTstor. Marilyn Monroe? Spooky bride? Witch teacher? Zombie/punk on the CTA? Cat/sad pumpkin? The possibilities are endless!
(Please note: links will not work unless you are on the University of Chicago campus or have logged into LUNA/ARTstor remotely).
Emergency scans are any images needed in less than two weeks. For the Fall 2010 quarter, emergency scanning hours are from 2pm-4pm, Monday through Friday. These are the hours during which students and staff are guaranteed to be available for rush orders. Please keep in mind that emergency scans are limited to ten per requester, per week. They will be delivered via an emailed link to Webshare.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact the VRC.
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A new collection, Postcard Collection of Colonial Korea, is now available in LUNA. Included are over 7,500 postcard images of Korea during the first half of the 20th century from the Busan Museum.
The most recent University of Chicago newsletter highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the Smart Museum‘s current exhibition, Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan:
Visitors can step inside re-creations of spaces and groupings of sculptural images that no longer exist today. The displays combine digital imagery of the caves with physical artifacts such as three-foot-tall limestone heads of bodhisattvas and the Buddha. The exhibition’s centerpiece is a multimedia installation known as a “digital cave,” designed by artist Jason Salavon, Assistant Professor in Visual Arts and the Computation Institute. Salavon conceived of the cave as an immersive experience, using multiple screens to give visitors a glimpse inside the largest temple at Xiangtangshan.
The article also discusses at length the extensive research undertaken by The University of Chicago’s Katherine Tsiang (exhibition curator) and Wu Hung, among others. This Sunday at 2pm, Jason Salavon will discuss the components of his installation in an Artist Talk at the Smart.
The exhibition will be open from September 30, 2010 to January 16, 2011 and, like all Smart Museum exhibitions, is free.
All four episodes of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing are available on UbuWeb:
Ways of Seeing was a BBC television series consisting of visual essays that raise questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series gave rise to a later book of the same name written by John Berger.
About UbuWeb:
UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. All materials on UbuWeb are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights belong to the author(s). UbuWeb is completely free.
Join your colleagues on Saturday, October 23rd for a day of discussions, lectures, tours, screenings, and exhibitions in celebration of the 32nd annual Humanities Day at the University of Chicago. All programs are free and open to the public. The Department of Art History’s Katherine Taylor will be giving her lecture Robie House, 100 Years New during session three at Breasted Hall, at 3:30pm on Saturday. See the online program for full schedule details and additional information, and go here to register.
ARTstor has partnered with the Visual Resources Collections at Skidmore College’s Lucy Scribner Library to digitize approximately 850 images of Pre-Columbian objects and sites from the Southwest United States, Central America, South America, Europe, and Egypt. These images were selected from a collection of over 8,000 slides created by alumna Moreen O’Brien Maser (Class of 1926). From 1938-1970, Maser traveled with her husband, Herman, to various archaeological sites and modern cities in the American Southwest, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, Greece, Italy, and Egypt. Of particular note are the Mesoamerican images, which provide documentary evidence for sites that have been more fully excavated and/or damaged due to environmental and human degradation since being photographed by the Masers more than 50 years ago.
To browse the Moreen O’Brien Maser Memorial Collection, click here.
The New York Times recently published an article about 3-D printing technology and its impact on several industries, including design and architecture. 3-D printing technology may eventually advance from the creation of architectural models to the construction of actual buildings:
A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.
For a demonstration of the kinds of products manufactured with this technology see the video included in the NYT story.