Category: Museums

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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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Moving Images Museums News

ICFA’s 16mm Film Collection Online

The Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C. recently digitized fourteen 16mm films from its collection. The 14 films include footage of the Dumbarton Oaks grounds from the mid-1920s to the 1940s, as well as films made by the Byzantine Institute during the 1930s and 1940s that document conservation efforts on site at the Red Sea Monastery of Saint Anthony (Egypt), Hagia Sophia (Istanbul), and Kariye Camii (Istanbul). Several of the films are in color, giving viewers a chance to see “the process of cleaning, restoration, and preservation in great detail, as well as the quality and visual impression of the mosaics in their most shining state.”

The digitized films have been made available through the video streaming service Vimeo, and can be embedded into websites.

For more information, explore the Moving Image Collection at Dumbarton Oaks and the collection accompanying archival materials in The Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks Fieldwork Records and Papers.

Via ICFA Blog

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Images on the Web Museums News

Balboa Park Online Commons

 The Balboa Park Online Commons features more than 20,000 images of unique materials from 7 San Diego museums: the Mingei International Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the San Diego Air and Space Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Man, the San Diego Natural History Museum, and the Timken Museum of Art.

This unified digital collection allows users to keyword search to retrieve results across institutions or to browse by museum, “featured sets” (thematic groupings of objects), or by user sets. Users can create their own set or collection of objects by creating an account on the website, and there is also a feature to download a PDF of the object record.

For more information, check out the Balboa Park Online Commons.

Via PetaPixel

 

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Innovative Technology Museums VRC

Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms

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.

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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.

Categories
Modern - Contemporary Museums Renaissance - Baroque

The Art of the Sublime at the Tate

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.

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Images on the Web Museums VRC

JMW Turner Resources at the Tate

The Tate has two in-depth online resources focused on the career of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851). Turner Worldwide is a project to provide the most comprehensive online catalog of works by Turner, including works that are owned by the Tate as well as nearly 2,500 works by Turner that are in other collections around the world.

 

 

J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Watercolors is a thematic module that presents a catalog of Turner’s works on paper, organized chronologically and by subject. “Entries on the groupings include commentaries, exhibition and publication histories, and information about the media and materials used.” The sketchbooks included have been digitized in their entirety.

For more information, visit the Tate’s page on J.M.W. Turner.

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American Museums

James McNeill Whistler Papers Now Available Digitally

The James McNeill Whistler collection (1863–1906, ca. 1940) at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art is now available online, having been digitized in its entirety in 2012.

The 307 images online include various documents pertaining to the career of Whistler, who was born in the US but worked in London. There are:

39 items from Whistler to various recipients, including 25 letters, 9 telegraphs, 3 invitations, one thank you card and a postcard. The collection also contains 4 letters from others, 7 catalogs of Whistler exhibitions, a note from the back of Whistler’s painting The Beach at Selsey Bill, and a 1906 copy of Wilde v. Whistler: being an acromonious correspondence on art between Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler, a pamphlet containing letters originally published in London newspapers between 1885 and 1890.

Several of the items in the collection are signed with Whistler’s butterfly mark. To view digital images from the archive, or to find out more, visit the James McNeill Whistler Collection.

Image source: James McNeill Whistler collection, 1863-1906, circa 1940. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Categories
Image Quality Images on the Web Museums

George Eastman House Joins Google Art Project

Founded in 1949, the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY is the world’s oldest museum of photography and recently announced that it will be the first photography museum to join the Google Art Project:

So far, 50 high-resolution images from their collection—encompassing the birth of photography to the late 20th century—have been added to the Google Art Project website with zooming capabilities and robust cataloging information, and much of the object data was previously unavailable online. More photographs will eventually be added, and the GEH is also partnering with Google Maps Street View to provide 360º views of their galleries and grounds.

For more information, visit the George Eastman House in Google Art Project or read the GEH Press Release.

Via PetaPixel

Categories
Modern - Contemporary Museums VRC

post—Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe

post Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe is an interactive platform hosted by the Museum of Modern Art that encourages participation in a wide variety of discussions pertaining to the contemporary art and archives. This began as the public face for MoMA’s research program C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative):

post is a site for encounters between the established and experimental, the historical and emerging, the local and global, the scholarly and artistic. An online journal, archive, exhibition space, and open forum that takes advantage of the nonhierarchical nature of the Internet, post seeks to spark in-depth explorations of the ways in which modernism is being redefined. The site’s contents are intended to build nuanced understandings of the histories that shape the practices of artists and institutions today. As a networked platform, post aims to provide an alternative to the model of a unified art historical

For more information, visit post.