Category: Modern – Contemporary

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Materia, an International Materials Database

We often post about new image collections and other scholarly resources pertaining to art history, but the building blocks are just as important. Based in the Netherlands, Materia is an art and architecture materials library that maintains an extensive collection of modern products in a database called Material Explorer that can be freely searched if you register for an account. They provide detailed information about product specs and contact information for the manufacturer, and users can download a PDF about the product, add it to a list of favorites, or suggest a new material to be included in the database.

Via Pixels

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Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art

The Gallery of Lost Art is an online exhibition that tells the stories of artworks that have disappeared. Destroyed, stolen, discarded, rejected, erased, ephemeral—some of the most significant artworks of the last 100 years have been lost and can no longer be seen.

This virtual year-long exhibition explores the sometimes extraordinary and sometimes banal circumstances behind the loss of major works of art. Archival images, films, interviews, blogs and essays are laid out for visitors to examine, relating to the loss of works by over 40 artists across the twentieth century, including such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Willem de Kooning, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin.

Jennifer Mundy, curator of The Gallery of Lost Art, says: “Art history tends to be the history of what has survived. But loss has shaped our sense of art’s history in ways that we are often not aware of. Museums normally tell stories through the objects they have in their collections. But this exhibition focuses on significant works that cannot be seen.”

 

The virtual exhibition launched on July 2, 2012, and will be available online for only one year before it too is “lost.” A new artwork will be added each week for 6 months.

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ARTstor to Add More Modern and Contemporary Artists

ARTstor has signed an Online Art Agreement (OLA) with Artists Rights Society (ARS) on behalf of six additional international visual arts organizations covering more than 10,000 new artists from six countries. This substantially expands the ARTstor Digital Library’s modern and contemporary artworks for subscribers.

The agreements cover the following affiliates of ARS:

VISCOPY – Australia

SODRAC – Canada

VBK – Austria

KUVASTO – Finland

SOMAAP – Mexico

AUTVIS – Brazil

Dr. Theodore Feder, President of the Artists Rights Society, said “We are very pleased to further expand our collaboration and to contribute to the many authorized images offered by ARTstor for the important purposes of teaching, research, and study.

Above: Jose Clemente Orozco, one of the artists to be included in this new agreement, photographed by Edward Weston.

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Are You a Chicago-based Artist?

Image from "pause" by 2011/12 Artist-in-Residence Faheem Majeed

Does your work deal critically with issues of race and ethnicity? If so, you might consider applying for this 2012-13 Artists-in-Residence program at the University of Chicago:

The Arts + Public Life Initiative and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture invite applications for their joint 2012/13 Artist-in-Residence Program beginning November 2012 and culminating in a public exhibition at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts in August 2013. The program awards a ten-month residency to outstanding Chicago-based artists and collaboratives—with an emphasis on those whose work critically engages issues of race and ethnicity—and provides the opportunity to (1) draw on the University of Chicago’s resources, critical faculty, and student body to develop, advance, and disseminate their work; (2) deepen individual practices through critique, public engagement, skills and knowledge sharing; and (3) create a space where personal inquiry and collaborative relationships can flourish.

Please see the program description for more information.

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Images of Protest

Preoccupied with the NATO Summit in Chicago this weekend and its associated protests? You might be interested in over 200 images of protest that are now available from WorldImages, including photographs of Occupy protestors in New York’s Zucotti Park. Images from earlier protests around the world put the the occupiers (and those occupying the NATO proceedings this weekend) in context. Protest images are available here.

Web images are free for educational use. High-resolution images can be licensed for $1 each for jpegs or $3 for tiffs with a minimum of 100 images. For more information about licensing from WorldImages, click here.

You may also be interested in images of protest available in LUNA. (Note: to access this link, you must be affiliated with the University of Chicago).

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Performance Art Broadcast Online

BMW Tate Live: Performance Room is an innovative series of performances broadcast… online around the globe, as they happen.

The global audience [is] encouraged to chat with other viewers via social media channels during the performance and to put questions to the artists or curator… using Tate’s social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and the Twitter hashtag #BMWTateLive.

US residents, enter the BMW Tate Live: Performance Room via Tate’s YouTube channel at 3pm on the designated dates below to experience the performances in real time. Artists who will perform include: Pablo Bronstein (April 26), Emily Roysdon (May 31), Harrell Fletcher (June 28), and Joan Jonas (date TBD).

Via Derivative Image.

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Public Art Archive

The Public Art Archive™, a new project of the Western States Arts Federation, or WESTAF (www.westaf.org), is a sophisticated searchable database of public art in the United States. The Archive makes public art and its processes more accessible to the public, displaying images of each piece alongside an extensive description, including audio and video supplementary files when available.

Google maps has been integrated into the Public Art Archive™. Users can see works on a map, get driving or walking directions, and save the map for later use. Cultural tourists can create a map of works that they wish to visit and use a mobile device to access information about a piece while physically standing in front of it.

 

 

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New York Times: The Lively Morgue

The New York Times recently began posting digitized photographs from their “morgue” (or archive) on Tumblr, including the reverse sides with notes from the photographers, notes about how the photograph was used, captions, and more.

We’re eager to share historical riches that have been locked away from public view, and have been awaiting a platform like Tumblr that makes it easy to do so. We hope you’ll enjoy the serendipity of discovery, that you’ll know something of the thrill we feel when we unlock the door of the morgue and walk into a treasure house made of filing cabinets, index cards, manila folders and more 8-by-10s than anyone can count.

A diagram of possibilities for deciphering the reverse-side notes can be found here (near the bottom of the page). Creators of the project plan to post several photographs on Tumblr every week.

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