Category: Museums

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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!

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Museums VRC

Google Art Talks

Google’s ever popular Google Art Project has recently expanded its offerings by adding Google Art Talks on Google Hangout. The talks will feature museum directors, curators, historians, and educators to discuss works represented in the Google Art Project or other topics relevant to the art world today:

An excellent guide often best brings an art gallery or museum’s collections to life. Starting this week, we’re hoping to bring this experience online with “Art Talks,” a series of Hangouts on Air on our Google Art Project Google+ page. Each month, curators, museum directors, historians and educators from some of the world’s most renowned cultural institutions will reveal the hidden stories behind particular works, examine the curation process and provide insights into particular works or artists.

So far, there have been two Art Talks hosted, including one from MoMA (March 3) and one from the National Gallery in London (March 28). The videos of the Google Hangouts have been added to YouTube.

The next talk, on April 15 at noon, will be about Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, which can be viewed as a gigapixel image on Google Art Project.

Google mentions that they have talks planned with the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico and the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar.

Via Official Google Blog

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Images on the Web Innovative Technology Museums

AIC’s Turning the Pages

The Art Institute of Chicago has an extensive resource called Turning the Pages, which utilizes software developed by the British Museum to present fully digitized book-reader objects of select objects in the AIC’s collection. Images can be also zoomed in to view details. So far, 30 objects from various departments in the AIC’s collection and library have been rendered in this software:

Several of the Art Institute of Chicago’s most unique and important artist sketchbooks, manuscripts and rare printed items are now available online. Viewers may page through or zoom in to look closely at the bound volumes, prints, and handscroll paintings from the Department of Prints and Drawings, the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, and the Department of Asian Art.

You’ll need to have Microsoft Silverlight activated on your computer to use Turning the Pages software. If you don’t have it, it can be downloaded for free here.

For more information, visit the AIC’s Interpretive Resource page for Turning the Pages objects.

Via ARTicle

Image from Presentation copy of Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), 1931.

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Image Quality Images on the Web Museums News VRC

New LACMA Collections Website + 20,000 Images to Download

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently launched a new collections website that features a faceted search engine that facilitates both browsing and direct searching of the museum’s objects. Most importantly, however, is LACMA’s initiative to release nearly 20,000 high-quality images of art objects from their collection believed to be in the public domain. Users can freely download the images and use them as they see fit.

In the object view above, we’ve circled the location of the “Download Image” feature to highlight where to find it. After you press the button, the image will immediately download for you to save and use as you see fit, providing it is inline with LACMA’s Terms of Use.

If you want to see all of the public domain objects for which downloading a high-quality image is possible, run a search on your research term and select “Show only unrestricted images” at the top of the page. Alternatively, if you’d like to all 20,000 objects LACMA has made freely downloadable, run a blank search and select “Show only results with unrestricted images” from the top of the page.

For more information, visit the LACMA Collections or consult the Terms of Use.

For even more information, we keep our list of Copyright Lenient Images for Academic Publishing up-to-date.

Via Unframed

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Images on the Web Islamic Museums

ICFA’s Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection

The Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (IFCA) or Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC has recently expanded the images included in their website dedicated to the photographs of Nicholas V. Artamonoff, who photographed Ottoman monuments and daily life in Istanbul during the 1930s and 1940s. Other Turkish cities represented in the collection include Bergama, Bursa, Izmir, Selçuk and Yalova. While the ICFA holds a collection of Artamonoff’s images in their repository, they discovered that other photographs are held in the the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives of the Smithsonian Institution in the Myron Bement Smith Collection. The addition of 477 images from the Smithsonian brings the total number of photographs available in the ICFA’s website to more than 1,000.

The ICFA’s website allows users to browse images individually or by parent institution, historic site, or keywords. There is also a map with plotted points that link to images in the collection to allow users to browse geographically and a “Zoom.it” viewer function.

For more information, visit the Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection.

Image: Nicholas V. Artamonoff. Cityscapes, Istanbul, View of the Atatürk Bridge and Süleymaniye Cami, no date. Myron Bement Smith Collection, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Artamonoff P382.

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Museums News

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Launches Cross-Collections Catalog

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has launched a cross-collections catalog search that provides a single access point across all of the museum’s collections, including Archives, Art & Artifacts, Library, Oral History, and Photo Archives, spanning well over 200,000 records. After performing a keyword search, users will be able to use facets to limit their search results to see specific record types, material in specific languages, and online content.

For more information about the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, visit their website. To explore their newly released catalog, you can access their search features here.
Categories
Images on the Web Innovative Technology Museums News

The Story of the Beautiful: Virtual Tours of Whistler’s “Peacock Room”

A collaborative website—The Story of the Beautiful: Freer, Whistler, and Their Points of Contact—between the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Wayne State University presents a virtual tour of James McNeil Whistler (1834–1903)’s Peacock Room. Users are given the option to visit the room as it existed in London in 1876 or as it appeared after Charles Lang Freer moved the room to Detroit and reassembled it there in 1908. In addition to panning through the 3D interior space of the room, users can click on individual objects for more information as well as supplementary content including maps, timelines, and archival material from the Charles Lang Freer Papers. The team behind the website describes their project:

The site thus functions both as a digital archive and as an immersive virtual environment in which users can explore the room, learn about the objects it has contained, and see how the places and faces associated with the room contributed to its history. Anchored by the two virtual tours, the site offers users a deeply contextualized way to navigate the collections: some 400 digital objects, among them the room itself, the objects it has contained, as well as archival materials such as photographs, bills of sale, and correspondence.

In addition to exploring the Peacock Room virtually, users can browse the obects in the collection and digitized content from the archives separately. For more information, visit the website.

Via ArtDaily.

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Innovative Technology Museums

The Art Institute of Chicago’s Indoor GPS App

Ever find yourself lost and aimlessly wandering around the Art Institute of Chicago?

Now there’s an app for that.

The Art Institute announced Wednesday that it’s the first museum in the world to create a free “indoor GPS app” to make art more accessible to locals, out-of-towners and those who simply can’t find their way around a Degas painting or a Rodin sculpture.

The app provides customized tours that take guests on journeys through the museum. Tours are organized by occasions (such as a first date, family outing), theme (Chicago artists, fashion in art, etc.) and collections (American folk art, contemporary art, African art). Tours are also organized by time, whether guests plan on spending an entire day or just a few hours.

Via DNAInfo.com.

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.