Category: Museums

Categories
Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary Museums

Smart Museum to Screen David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly

David Wojnarowicz’s 1986–87 video A Fire in My Belly is a poetic, unfinished tribute to the artist’s friend and colleague, Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS.

An excerpt of the work was recently removed from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture following protests by a religious group and conservative politicians. In response to the Smithsonian’s decision to pull the work, institutions around the country have joined together to host screenings as a way to draw attention to its removal and to foster discussion around the work and issues of censorship.

The Smart Museum will be screening the original, 13-minute version of the film edited by Wojnarowicz in 1986–87 followed by a 7-minute additional chapter that was later found in his collection. It will be playing on continuous loop in a black box screening area.

The film will be screened from January 4 – February 6, 2011. Via Smart Museum of Art.

Categories
Modern - Contemporary Museums

“Degenerate” Sculptures Rediscovered in Berlin

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.

Categories
East Asian Exhibitions Innovative Technology Museums

Highlighting the Smart Museum’s Buddhist Caves Exhibit

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.

Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology Museums Renaissance - Baroque

Uffizi Images in High Resolution

Via Open Culture:

This past week, an Italian web site (Haltadefinizione) placed online six works from the famous Uffizi Gallery in Florence, all in super high resolution. Each image is packed with close to 28 billion pixels, a resolution 3,000 times greater than your normal digital photo. And this gives art connoisseurs everywhere the ability to zoom in and explore these paintings in exquisitely fine detail – to see strokes and details not normally seen even by visitors to the Uffizi.

These digital reproductions will be available online for free until January 29, 2011.

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Museums News

“New” Work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder Identified

The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, currently owned by a Spanish private collector, has been now been identified as a work by 16th century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It has been attributed to the artist by the Museo del Prado following several months of study and the restoration (restoration work included a right to purchase option). If acquired by the Museo del Prado, this would double the number of works by Bruegel in Spain (the only other being Triumph of Death, located at the Prado).

Click here for more information.

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Images on the Web Museums

Digital Images from the British Museum

The British Museum offers free online delivery of images in the collection for print non-commercial use. Register for free; requests are delivered as jpeg attachments, and are limited to 100 per month. This service is available for print use (non-commercial publication, less than 4,000 copies) only, but all images from their website are available for educational non-commercial use (including projection in the classroom).

Please read full terms of use.

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Exhibitions Museums News

UofC Lantern Slides Featured in Milwaukee Art Installation

University of Chicago’s Theaster Gates currently has an installation in the Milwaukee Art Museum titled To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter. During Fall 2009, the Art History Department’s lantern slide collection was relocated to Gates’ Dorchester Project house for “reuse as performance material, research and speculation.” Part of that reuse includes the To Speculate Darkly installation, with the glass ceiling entrance as pictured above. For more information about the installation, see this article recently published by the Wisconsin Gazette.

Categories
Museums Photography

The “Lost Souls” of Lena Herzog

A new book of photographs by artist Lena Herzog documents the cabinets of curiosities, or wunderkammern, created during the 16th and 17th centuries. As an article from Science Friday explains:

Some of these early wunderkammern still exist today in museums and private collections. Between 2001 and 2008, Herzog visited 15 of these collections to photograph their displays. Her subjects are often infants born with genetic defects that prevented their survival, preserved as scientific specimens. Herzog’s haunting, tender images capture not only the content but also the intent of wunderkammern: as she says, “to see, and to know.”

A slide show including representative photographs and commentary by the artist is also available on the Science Friday website.

Categories
Exhibitions Modern - Contemporary Museums

Contemporary Collecting at the Art Institute of Chicago

The new exhibition Contemporary Collecting: Selections from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection opens today at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit includes Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1111: A Circle with Broken Bands of Color (2003) in the Modern Wing’s Griffin Court. A recent entry on ARTicle, the Art Institute’s blog, documents the installation of this work in photographs and an interview with Matt Stolle, technical painter for the contemporary art department.

Categories
Images on the Web Museums

NYARC: The New York Art Resources Consortium

In 2006, the Met, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Frick Collection teamed up to create NYARC: the New York Art Resources Consortium, a system which unites the resources and libraries of these institutions and makes them more accessible to both scholars and the general public. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, NYARC seeks to extend library and archive resources, services, and programming to a wider audience, and to facilitate collaboration between leading art research institutions.

Through NYARC’s website you can access the 800,000-record ARCADE database, which serves as a cohesive online source for the combined holdings of the Frick, MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum. There is also a portal for WATSONLINE, the online catalog for the Museum of Modern Art. Finally, links to news posts alert you to current projects like the JSTOR Auction Catalog Pilot Project and new holdings in the NYARC museums.

To view the New York Times’ profile of NYARC, refer to this article from March 14th, 2010.

This blog post was contributed by student staff member Emilia Mickevicius.