Category: News

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Images on the Web Luna Modern - Contemporary News

Public Art at the University of Chicago

The University of Chicago has recently released a new web resource called Public Art on Campus which seeks to catalog, document, and provide contextual and critical information about the works of art on campus. There is an accompanying video which provides an overview of the works on campus. The website allows users to browse works by location, artist, and title and for selected works users can read an artist bibliography and an essay about the work. These selected works also include archival images and documents relevant to the work.

The VRC supports this project by maintaining the UChicago Public Art Collection and Archive in collaboration with the Smart Museum of Art, UChicago Arts, and Christine Mehring of the Department of Art History. This dedicated, password-protected collection is accessible to all on-campus users and off-campus users who have a CNetID and password. If you’d like to explore more, the Luna collection contains archival photographs, audio, video, conservation information, and other ephemeral documentation pertaining to the public works on campus.

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East Asian Images on the Web News VRC

The Illustrated Life of Ippen and the Visibility of Karma in Medieval Japan

The Archives of Asian Art has just published an article by Assistant Professor Chelsea Foxwell!  Titled “The Illustrated Life of Ippen and the Visibility of Karma in Medieval Japan,” Foxwell examines the scenes of the Illustrated Life of Ippen, 1299 by En’i and suggests that rather than “a biographical narrative, it can also be seen as an ink landscape journey in handscroll form.”  This journey is beautifully described throughout the article and is accompanied by over 25 color details. Scroll 7 of the Illustrated Life of Ippen is publicly available on the Digital Scrolling Paintings Project website, which features annotations and a live scrolling feature. Visit both sites linked above to learn more!

Image: En’i, Ippen hijiri-e (Ippen shōnin eden), 1299, scroll 7, scene 3. Nenbutsu dancing at the Kūya hall, Ichitani, near Kyoto. Ink and color on silk (handscroll), h: 38.2 cm. Tokyo National Museum.

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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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Images on the Web Museums News Photography VRC

The Robert Frank Collection Online at the National Gallery of Art

The Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art is the largest repository of materials related to renowned photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Spanning Frank’s career from 1937 to 2005, the collection includes vintage and later prints, contact sheets, work prints, negatives, three bound books of original photographs, technical material, and various papers, books, and recordings.

For a complete account of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection, see Robert Frank photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection. The spreadsheet lists subjects photographed by Frank, in chronological order, along with the corresponding number of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection and the accession number of each object.

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Modern - Contemporary News

Record Sales at Christie’s

Christie’s Auction House brought in the highest total for an auction in history last night, grossing $852.9 million at the contemporary sale in New York.  New records were also set for 11 artists, among them Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Peter Doig, Martin Klippenberger, and Seth Price. The stars of the night were Andy Warhol’s Triple Elvis [Ferus Type](1960) and Four Marlons (1966), which sold early going for $81.9 million and $69.6 million, respectively.  “By the time the second figure was reached, the crowd—whether reeling from the action or no longer capable of being surprised or just no longer impressed by anything under $80 million—forgot to clap,” says Dan Duray from ArtNews. Although the prior nights’ Sotheby’s sale was a disappointment bringing in only $343.6 million, the two weeks of sales at both auction houses took in a total of some $2 billion, comforting many that the art market is alive and kicking.

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Images on the Web News

Digitized Manuscripts from the Vatican Apostolic Library

 

The Vatican Apolostic Library has been working on a project to digitize more than 80,000 documents in its collection. Currently there are nearly 4,500 manuscripts online and there is hope that they’ll have 15,000 manuscripts available by 2018.

The collection features a variety of important and early manuscripts and books, including Pre-Columbian manuscripts, early Greek and Latin texts, Islamic manuscripts, and even some Japanese paintings.

You can browse some of the materials at DigitaVaticana here as well as on the website of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Images can be downloaded from the digital library, but they come with a watermark and copyright statement.

Image: Sandro Botticelli, Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy performed by Lorenzi il Magnifico in the 15th century. Folio 101 recto with a section of the Inferno. Reg.lat.1896A.

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Luna News VRC

Public Art Workshop Mural Archive Now Available in LUNA

In collaboration with Art History Professor Rebecca Zorach and Chicago artist, Mark Rogovin, the VRC is happy to announce the “Public Art Workshop Mural Archive“, a new collection in our LUNA database.
The collection contains images of murals and public projects of the Public Art Workshop, along with documentation of the workshop’s activities and images of other murals created in Chicago from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

To read more about Mark Rogovin, please visit Never the Same.

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Images on the Web News

Met Releases 400,000 Digital Images for Use

On May 16, the Metropolitan Museum announced a new initiative called the Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) and released more than 400,000 images of public domain works on their website. Users can download the high-resolution files directly from the website for any non-commercial use, including scholarly publications. Users do not need to pay a fee and will not need to seek permission from the museum. Per the Met’s press release, “the number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis.”

The Met joins several other institutions in making high-resolution digital image files of collection objects free available on the web, including Rijksmuseum, LACMA, and the Getty. The Met was one of the first participants in ARTstor’s Images for Academic Publishing initiative, but in order to use those images, the user needed to be affiliated with an institution that had an ARTstor subscription or request a temporary password. The new OASC program makes the images available directly to the public from the museum’s collections website.

For more information, visit the Met’s FAQ about the OASC initiative or explore their collections website. Images included in the initiative will be indicated

Via the Metropolitan Museum Press Room.

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Islamic News

Simpson Islamic Manuscript Record Archive Online at University of Michigan

The Visual Resources Collections at the University of Michigan just announced that the Simpson Islamic Manuscript Record Archive is available online. They write, “Dr. Simpson served as Curator of Islamic Near Eastern Art at the Freer/Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Islamic Art at the Walters Art Museum, and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (2005).”

The website for the Simpson Islamic Manuscript Record Archive contains more than 500 documentation records and approximately 4,800 images (in a variety of media including prints, color slides, digital images, and microfilm). The Simpson Archive “is organized by repository name and manuscript accession number or shelf mark (for example, “British Library Add. 7622”)” and each record contains robust cataloging information about the manuscript.

This collection is related to the Islamic Art Archives at the University of Michigan, which has more than 900 digitized manuscripts available in HathiTrust.

 

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Innovative Technology Museums News

30 Years of Tate’s ‘Audio Arts’ Online

The Tate recently released 30 years of Audio Arts, the “innovative audio cassette-magazine … established by Bill Furlong in 1972.”

Users can browse by category, chronology, or contributor, including inimitable figures such as Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovc, Bruce McLean, Gehrard Richter, and more.

Check out the Audio Arts archive online!