Awhile back we blogged about ArtBabble, a website created by staff at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The site showcases art content in high-quality video format from a variety of sources and perspectives. Since our last blog post, ArtBabble has partnered with many more institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago and, most recently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click on the image above to watch a video documenting the installation of Catherine Opie’s photographic series Surfers and Icehouses, brought to ArtBabble by the Guggenheim.
Recently Smarthistory.org launched a fundraising campaign using Kickstarter. The goal? To raise $10,000 to fund 100 new art history videos as a free alternative to the traditional and very expensive art history textbook.
For more information or to donate to the project, click here.
via Open Culture.
The project Montada seeks the preservation and revitalization of traditional architecture… in the Maghreb by involving local communities, especially children. Toward that goal, it is developing online games that allow children from 6 to 11 years old to discover the basic principles of a traditional architecture while developing their creativity.
…A new game acts as a virtual workshop that allows children to explore geometric elements and ornaments in the homes of Sale and Marrakech, in Morocco. After finishing, children can print out their results as postcards.
Via Archnet News.
The National Archives has digitised thousands of unique images of Africa and published them on Flickr this week. The collection spans more than 100 years of African history, from as early as the 1860s, including images of people, places, national and imperial events, conflict and natural disasters.
As some of the images have minimal context, the public is invited to contribute to these historical assets by adding comments and captions, filling in knowledge gaps.
The collection is available in Flickr. Via National Archives News.
The Brooklyn Museum’s project Split Second aims to explore how an audience’s initial reaction to a work of art is affected by various factors. It begins with an online, interactive experiment and will culminate in a small installation of Indian paintings from the permanent collection.
Split Second begins with a three-part activity that explores the Museum’s collection of Indian paintings… The first stage explores split-second reactions… Next, participants will be asked to write in their own words about a painting before rating its appeal on a scale. In the third phase, participants will be asked to rate a work of art after being given unlimited time to view it alongside a typical interpretive text. Each part of the exercise aims to examine how a different type of information—or a lack thereof—might affect a person’s reaction to a work of art.
The installation will open on the museum’s second floor on July 13, 2011. To participate, visit the Split Second website.
The exhibition For All the World to See examines the influence of visual culture and images like that of Emmett Till in shaping and transforming the struggle for racial equality by showing… realities of segregation and racial violence, inspiring activists, and fostering African American pride and the Black Power movement.
This traveling exhibit will be open at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago until May 16, 2011. A comprehensive online exhibition is also available.
Via the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Google recently launched its Art Project, a collaborative venture with art museums from around the world. The project aims to provide both virtual tours of museum galleries using Google’s street-view technology as well as high-resolution photography of artworks, allowing for remarkable zoom capability. The site also encourages visitors to sign in and create collections of favorites to share with friends.
For more information, visit the Art Project’s FAQ page.
Categories
VRC Closed February 2-3, 2011
The VRC will be closed Wednesday, February 2nd and Thursday the 3rd due to inclement weather. We will open again when classes resume.
Thank you,
VRC Staff
visualresources@uchicago.edu
We recently updated the VRC’s Other Art Resources Online page with links to several Japanese image resources online. These include a link to the Tokyo National Museum’s website, with a version in English organized by type, region, and what is currently on display at the museum.
Other new links include: Japanese cultural properties, Japanese national treasures in public museums, Kyoto National Museum’s collections database, and Japanese modern art in Japanese public museums.
Questions, or suggestions of other websites to add to the list? Please contact the VRC.
The British Library offers a very high-quality scan of the Lindisfarne Gospels online. Viewers can click and hold the mouse while moving the cursor to the left to “turn” each page. Three buttons at bottom right allow for text description, audio description, and magnification of each page.
A version for dial-up users is also available.