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
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.
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
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!
The Art of the Sublime is a research module that explores the concept of the sublime during several artistic movements, including the Baroque, the Romantic, the Victorian, and the modern. The project contains essays and case studies, illustrated by works of art from the Tate’s collection as well as literary examples. More about the project:
In 2008 Tate initiated a project to explore the history and current relevance of the sublime, particularly as reflected in Tate’s collection of historic and modern works of art. Supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project embraced a range of activities and outputs, including an exhibition and display at Tate Britain, conferences and specially made films.
To explore the project, visit the Art of the Sublime.
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.
The Lee Miller Archives, located in East Sussex, England, is a privately run archive that maintains the legacy and career of the artist, including “60,000 negatives, mainly black and white, most of her manuscripts, captions, notes, letters and ephemeral material, her cameras, and some of her personal effects such as her US Army uniform.” Their website boasts an image collection of more than 3,000 of Lee Miller’s photographs, including final images as well as contact prints:
Following the exciting launch of our long-awaited online picture library over three thousand of Lee Miller’s photographs can now be seen together for the first time. Many of the images, converted from the original negatives or vintage prints into digital format, have not previously been in circulation and are a fascinating addition to the published work. All aspects of Lee’s remarkable career are represented, including her Surrealist images, World War II photo-journalism, 20th century fashion photography and celebrity portraiture!
Lee Miller was an icon of photography—both as a model and a photographer in her own right—beginning in the 1920s when she began modeling for Vogue staff photographers including Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene. She moved to Paris in 1929 and studied under Surrealist photographer Man Ray (the pair discovered the photographic technique of solarisation during this time), and soon after opened her own studio in New York. During World War II she served as a war photojournalist. After the war, her career remained closely tied to photography and the arts, and she died at the Farley Farm House in 1977, where the Lee Miller Archives is now located.
For more information, visit the Lee Miller Archives.
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.