SHERA (the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture) recently launched a new website which boasts a news blog and a directory of more than 100 relevant art and architecture resources.
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The Oriental Institute Museum will begin the Lunchtime Traveler lecture series tomorrow, Thursday, September 5, with a gallery talk on the Khorsabad Court. The talk is led by Karen Wilson, PhD, Research Associate at the Oriental Institute and begins at 12:15 in the Edgar and Deborah Jannotta Mesopotamian Gallery and lasts 45 minutes.
The series will recur on the first Thursday of every month. October’s offering on October 3 at 12:15 pm features Martha T. Roth, Dean of Humanities Division and the Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago, who will speak about the Hammurabi Stela.
For more information, visit the Oriental Institute’s Events and Programs.
Image: Oriental Institute, Exhibit Area 10, 1931. Archival Photographic Files, University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center, apf2-05453.
Mummies are being imaged with CT scanners and 3D scanning technology to capture the interior as well as the exterior surfaces, colors, and textures of the mummy as well as the cartonnage and sarcophagus. Eventually these images will result in an interactive exhibition. The Guardian describes the project as such:
The Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities (Medelhavsmuseet) in Stockholm, FARO and Autodesk have teamed up in a mummy visualisation project. The collection will be digitised using the latest 3D reality capture techniques and made available to museum visitors through an interactive exhibition experience.
Via The Guardian.
Sixty Inches From Center is a not-for-profit organization that documents and engages visual arts in Chicago, and they feature a lot of the documentary material they capture and create on their website, the Chicago Arts Archive.
In addition to providing a lot of news and blog content about upcoming arts events in Chicago, they also include “video, audio, photography, editorial essays, and interviews to document artists and arts events that exist outside of the city’s mainstream cultural institutions.”
For more information, check out the Chicago Arts Archive by Sixty Inches From Center.
In the early 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency hired more than 70 freelance photographers to take pictures of life in the United States as it intersected with the environment for the Project DOCUMERICA (1971–77). The National Archives has digitized more than 15,000 images from the project, and they are available online via NARA’s online catalog or though a Flickr collection that is much easier to browse.
You can browse by image topic, location, or photographer—and that’s where things start to get really interesting. Photographers hired for the project include Danny Lyon (AB ’63) and photojournalist John H. White (born 1945) who worked for the Chicago Defender and was recently laid off from the Chicago Sun Times along with the rest of their staff photographers.
Because the project was funded by the federal government, there are no copyright restrictions on the images, and users can download 300 dpi original size files from the Flickr collection. For more information and to explore the collection, visit Flickr and the National Archives.
Via Peta Pixel
Image: Danny Lyon. Albuquerque Speedway Park, One of Three Stock Car Race Tracks in Albuquerque, May 1972. 412-DA-2825. Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S), National Archives at College Park, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD, 20740-6001.
SFMOMA recently launched a new web module, the Rauschenberg Research Project, which presents more than 85 works by the artist along with related contextual and archival materials. SFMOMA holds the premier collection of Rauschenberg’s work, spanning his career from 1949–98, including combines, sculptures, paintings, photographs, prints, and works on paper.
Each artwork record includes robust cataloging data based on up-t0-date research by SFMOMA, multiple views of the object with conservation notes, contextual essays on the object’s creation and life, and ownership, exhibition, and publication histories. There are also links to related archival materials including interview videos, curatorial documents and museum files, and related artworks.
Users have the option to download content from the website, including images that are of suitable size and quality for PowerPoint presentations and PDFs of the work catalog records and the contextual essay, as well as the option to download all available materials in a zipped folder.
The project was developed by SFMOMA in conjunction with the Getty’s Online Scholarly Catalog Initiative and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
For more information and to explore the online collection, check out the Rauschenberg Research Project.
Via ArtDaily and Iris (The Getty).
During the Jazz Age, The Chicagoan magazine was published as a rip-off of the New Yorker, but for the Second City set. Although its writing was less-than-stellar, the magazine covers and interior illustrations were more than. Neil Harris, Preston & Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History and of Art History began researching the magazine in the late 1980s when he stumbled across it in the Regenstein library, and now a near-complete run is digitally available through the University of Chicago Library in The Chicagoan digital archive. The magazine’s run can be browsed on the web by date or by volume, and is also full-text searchable. In 2008, Harris published a book about the magazine, which folded in 1935, called The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.
For more information, check out The Chicagoan digital archive and Harris’ book The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.
Via Chicago Reader
Image: The Chicagoan, June 14, 1926 (vol. 1, no. 1), cover. Copyright The Quigley Publishing Company, a Division of QP Media, Inc.
In June 2013, the Council of Library and Information Resources in conjunction with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation published the report Images of Works of Art in Museum Collections: The Experience of Open Access. The report, written by Kristin Kelly, examined the policies, websites, and procedures of 11 large museums to get determine the state of open access to images.
The report has been added to our web page about Copyright Resources for Academic Publishing, which provides a list of general guides and resources as well as lists repositories that have copyright-free or copyright-lenient policies towards letting users download high quality image files of works of art. We try to keep this web page up-to-date, so if you’re aware of any collections that should be included, please don’t hesitate to let us know!
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
The Museum at FIT has a comprehensive list of Costume and Textile Collections Online, with annotations about what you’ll expect to find in the database and other information about each particular collection. Their list includes collections from all over the world and highlights some of the best images of textiles and garments online.
In addition to these websites, there are several other collections and databases that could be useful for researching fashion, textile, and costume:
In LUNA:
- Pratt Institute Fashion Plate Collection (as well as the Pratt Institute Archives Negative and Photograph Collections).
In ARTstor:
- Gazette du Bon Ton (Minneapolis College of Art and Design)
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Brooklyn Museum Costumes
- Magnum Photos: Contemporary Photojournalism
At the University of Chicago Library
Image credit: Elsa Schiaparelli. Doll, Fashion (Evening Ensemble), 1949. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Syndicat de la Couture de Paris; Photographed by Lolly Koon. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.