Category: Subject Areas

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African American Images on the Web Luna

The Georg Stahl Mural Collection Now Publically Available in Luna

In the early 1970s, art historian Georg Stahl extensively researched and documented the Chicago Mural Movement. This material was used to teach a Mural Painting course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the late UChicago Professor Emeritus, Harold Hayden. In late 2014, Stahl graciously reached out to the Visual Resources Center and offered his material to help build our digital collections of Chicago Black Art. Over 600 slides, maps, and charts were digitized and now make up the Georg Stahl Mural Collection. Please visit http://stahl-collection.lib.uchicago.edu to browse the collection!

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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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Modern - Contemporary VRC

Visit “Lost Murals of Chicago” in the Vamonde App

Vamonde is a recently launched urban story telling app that uses curated content and GPS to connect users to significant places.

Rebecca Zorach, a professor of art history at Northwestern University created a module in Vamonde called “Lost Murals of Chicago” in which she takes app users to 8 murals in Chicago and provides information about the artists, how the murals were created, and other signifiant facts about the mural site. Vamonde provides a map with GPS walking directions from a user’s location to the mural site.

Check out the Vamonde app to go on your own walking tour of “Lost Murals of Chicago” or other tours on the app. Right now the app only features content from Chicago, and other tours such as “The Inside Track: Art on CTA” and “Humboldt Park: Jens Jensen’s Experimental Grounds” might be of interest. Vamonde is currently only available at the iTunes App Store and requires users to sign up for a free account.

For more images and information about the community mural movement in Chicago, visit the Public Art Workshop Mural Archive hosted by the VRC in Luna.

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East Asian Images on the Web VRC

Cambridge Publishes Rare Chinese Manuscripts

 

Cambridge University recently announced that they have digitized objects from the Library’s Chinese collections and made them freely available on-line. Digitized items include a collection of oracle bones that display some of the earliest examples for writing anywhere in the world, as well as the manuscript “Manual of Calligraphy and Painting.” This manuscript is incredibly rare and the binding so fragile that many of the prints have never been seen until now. The library has also digitized early printed books and a 14th-century banknote!

The digital images are accompanied by short description of the work and includes metadata in English and Chinese. They can be downloaded under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial license. Reproduction rights can also be requested through the site.

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East Asian Images on the Web

Ukiyo-e.org: Aggregating and Analyzing Digitized Japanese Woodblock Prints

Ukiyo-e Search provides an incredible resource: the ability to run a reverse image search for Japanese woodblock prints and the ability to see similar prints across multiple collections at once. Over 220,000 prints and metadata have been aggregated from a variety of museums, universities, libraries, auction houses and dealers from around the world. The image and text search engine allows multiple copies of the same print to automatically line up with each other and are made viewable in a gallery for easy comparison. The entire website is also available in both English and Japanese. Ukiyo-e.org was created by John Resig, a computer programmer and avid enthusiast of Japanese woodblock prints who recently become a Visiting Researcher at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. This powerful tool is used frequently by UChicago faculty and aided the cataloging of several albums in the Smart Museum’s collection.

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Images on the Web Medieval VRC

The Icons of Mount Sinai

Princeton University, in collaboration with the University of Michigan and the University of Alexandria, have announced the launch of a website documenting icons from the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai.

The icons were documented and photographed on expeditions led by Kurt Weitzmann from Princeton University and George Forsyth from the University of Michigan from 1956 to 1965. Princeton University now holds the color photographs taken of the icons and have digitized them, making them available for viewing. Currently, the website displays about 1,200 transparencies, with another 2,000 in the works.

The images are the copyrighted property of the Regents of the University of Michigan and the Trustees of Princeton University, but can be freely used for  classroom projection, display on computer monitors, and use in class assignments. The images cannot be published without permission, but requesting permission can be easily done through the website.

 

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Innovative Technology Medieval Presentation VRC

Interactive “Garden of Earthly Delights”

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch, the Netherlandish painter best known for his painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” And thanks to the work of a group of art historians, film-makers, and photographers, one no longer needs to travel to the Prado Museum in Spain to get a good look at this amazing painting!

Described as an “online interactive adventure,” the site  allows viewers to either freely move around the painting, zooming on details or take a guided tour. Additionally, there are some 40 recorded audio essays throughout the painting. Click on an icon, and you can zoom into a detail and listen to an explanation of what’s depicted and how it relates to the work overall.

In addition to the interactive painting, there is also a new app allowing viewers to see the garden in “virtual reality.” Bosch VR, produced by BDH Design agency, allows viewer to move through the garden by viewing the painting on an iPad or on an iPhone or Android phone using Google Cardboard.

Google Cardboard viewers are available for use from the VRC during normal operating hours.

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Images on the Web Innovative Technology Islamic Medieval Photography VRC

Qantara

Comprising a website, a traveling exhibition, and book, Qantara is a very rich and interesting resource for studying the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean from Late Antiquity to the 18th century. The website contains over 1500 entries from Western Europe, Byzantium, and Islamic regions that include objects, sites, and monuments. The material can be searched using various intersections such as materials, subjects, or historical period. Each entry has descriptive metadata (size, media, discovery and repository information), a short descriptive essay, and a bibliography.

There are repositories and cultural heritage institutions from nine countries involved in Qantara, and the information has been reviewed by over 200 experts including curators, historians, and researchers.

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Architecture Image Quality Luna Medieval Photography

French Cathedrals in the Lantern Slide Collection

The Visual Resources Center recently added a beautiful group of French medieval cathedrals to the publicly available Lantern Slide Collection. These images are some of the finest examples of large format architectural photography in the collection. We continue to add images to the Luna collection on a regular basis, so check back in to see what’s new!