Category: Exhibitions

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Exhibitions Images on the Web Museums

MoMA Releases Digital Archive of More Than 30,000 Exhibition Images

First MoMA Exhibition: Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, 1929

The Museum of Modern Art has released an extensive digital archive that chronicles its exhibitions from when the museum opened its doors in 1929 to today.  The archive features more than thirty-five hundred exhibitions and more than thirty-three thousand installation photographs, as well as primary documents such as press releases, checklists, catalogues, and artist lists.   MoMA said, “By making these unique resources available at no charge, the exhibition history digital archive directly aligns with the museum’s mission of encouraging an ever-deeper understanding of modern and contemporary art and fostering scholarship.” Explore the digital archive on MoMA’s website!

 

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Architecture Exhibitions Museums News

Chicago Architecture Biennial

This weekend marks the opening of the 3 month long Chicago Architecture Biennial. With a mission of creating an international forum on architecture and urbanism, the Biennial “seeks to convene the world’s leading practitioners, theorists, and commentators in the field of architecture and urbanism to explore, debate, and demonstrate the significance of architecture to contemporary society.” The calendar is overflowing with events, including free tours of the Frank Lloyd Wright’s S.C. Johnson Wax headquarters and the UChicago campus, as well as the opening of the Stony Island Arts Bank, all happening this weekend.

 

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Exhibitions VRC

Digital Stories at the Wellcome Collection

The Wellcome Collection in London explores connections between medicine, life and art through both physical and digital exhibitions. Mindcraft is a new Digital Story that explores a century of madness, murder and mental healing, from the arrival in Paris of Franz Anton Mesmer with his theories of ‘animal magnetism’ to the therapeutic power of hypnotism used by Freud.  Through an immersive scrolling interface including image galleries, video, and interactives, the Wellcome Collection asks who really is in control of their own mind, and where does the mind’s power to harm or heal end?

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Exhibitions VRC

En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I

A new exhibition has opened at the Special Collections Research Center Exhibition Gallery in the Regenstein Library.

On the centenary of the Great War’s commencement, En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I explores the conflict through French graphic illustration of the period. The exhibition presents themes essential to a deeper understanding of the war in France: patriotism, propaganda, the soldier’s experience, as well as the mobilization of the home front as seen through fashion, humor, and children’s literature.

Organized by Professor Neil Harris and Dr. Teri J. Edelstein for the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library, the exhibition features more than one hundred and thirty examples of the colorful work of French illustrators. En Guerre reaffirms the persuasive role that art can play in servicing or challenging political and military power.

A website accompanies the exhibit and a catalog is available for purchase through the University of Chicago Press.

 

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Exhibitions Images by Subscription Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary Museums News VRC

AFRICOBRA in Chicago (and in LUNA)

Tomorrow, the Philosophy show of the three-part AFRICOBRA in Chicago exhibition opens at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. AFRICOBRA in Chicago presents three current and upcoming shows in Chicago take a deserved look at the Black Arts Movement in Chicago and the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AFRICOBRA), which was founded in 1968 by a group of Chicago artists. The three parts of the AFRICOBRA in Chicago exhibition are as follows:

  • Prologue, South Side Community Art Center, May 10–July 7, 2013 (curated by UChicago students)
  • Philosophy, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, June 28–August 7, 2013 (curated by Rebecca Zorach)
  • Art and Impact, DuSable Museum, July 26–September 29, 2013

Many works from the exhibitions are from the collection of the South Side Community Art Center. The VRC is proud to include over 350 images from the SSCAC publicly in our online LUNA database.

For more information about the exhibits, visit the AFRICOBRA in Chicago website.

Via UChicago News

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Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary Museums News

A Van Gogh Research Round-Up

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.

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Exhibitions Innovative Technology Museums

The Getty’s Life of Art App

To accompany their recently opened exhibition The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display, the Getty released a mobile app of the same name. The exhibition, which opened in February, looks at only four objects in the museum’s collection, but it does so in extreme detail to encourage users to consider the entire “life” of the object, long before it entered the museum’s collection.

Their app of the same name allows iPad users to explore the same four objects in the installation, providing a 360-degree view of the objects as well as information about the technique used in the objects creation, the history and cultural context of the style, and any damage that came from the object’s use over time.

For more information, visit the Life of Art app or stop by the VRC to check out this app and many other art apps on our iPad 2.

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Exhibitions Museums Renaissance - Baroque VRC

The Getty’s Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance App

The Getty launched an app to go along with its exhibition Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance, which ran from November 2012–February 2013. The app explores 7 objects from the exhibition in depth, including slide shows, animations, X-Ray and UV photographs, and pan and zoom functionality.

For more information, visit the Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance iPad app, or stop by the VRC to check ours out!

Categories
Exhibitions Images on the Web Innovative Technology Museums

Royal Academy of Arts Winter Exhibition Catalogues (1870–1939) Now Online

The Royal Academy of Arts has digitized and made freely available their Winter loan exhibition catalogs from the program’s beginning in 1879 to 1939. 

The exhibition catalogs have been made available on the Royal Academy of Art’s collections search page where they can be browsed or searched for terms including artists, titles, and lenders. The catalogs included in this project present essays by several prominent art historians of the early 19th century as well as reproductions of the 3,000 artworks included in the exhibitions. Thumbnail images of artworks have been included with links to the related pages from the institutional repositories where the objects are held, many of which are now held in collections such as the Tate, the National Gallery or Ireland, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Wallace Collection. The Royal Academy has also digitized related installation photographs to provide historical context for the exhibitions.

For more information, visit the Royal Academy of Arts Collections page here or browse the collection here.

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Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary Museums

100th Anniversary of the Armory Show and New Web Resources

In 1913, a landmark exhibition—the International Exhibition of Modern Art—also known as the Armory Show toured the country, first in New York at the 69th Regiment Armory (February 17–March 15), in Chicago at the Art Institute of Chicago (March 24–April 16), and Boston, at the Copley Society (April 23–May 14). For the first time ever, European modern and avant-garde artists such Brancusi, Duchamp, Matisse, and Picass were exhibited to the US public. And while New York and Boston each had presentations of the exhibition, Chicago was the only venue to exhibit the works in a fine art museum. And in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show, there are new web resources that explore the development, installation, and reception of the

The Art Institute of Chicago has a web module about their presentation of the Armory Show, including background information about the individuals responsible for bring the Armory Show to the US, in situ gallery installation photographs mapped onto present day gallery spaces at the museum, PDFs of the original exhibition catalog, and other contextual information.

The Archives of American Art at he Smithsonian Institute has a timeline of the Armory Show, “The Story in Primary Sources,” that presents digitized documents pertaining to the watershed exhibition in chronological order. The project description describes how the various primary source materials provide context for the exhibition:

Together the letters, sales records, printed ephemera, and personal diaries paint a picture of the Armory Show that is as dynamic as the stunning diversity of works on display.

Both websites also include detailed bibliographic information for further research. For more information, explore the Art Institute’s website or the Archives of American Art’s website.