Tag: archives

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East Asian Images on the Web

The Mary Griggs Burke Collection Online

Recently, Chelsea Foxwell, Assistant Professor of Art History and the College, brought a new on-line resource for Japanese art to our attention.

The Mary Griggs Burke Collection, a major new database for Japanese art, along with some Chinese and Korean art, has recently launched. During her lifetime, Mary Griggs Burke had one of the best collections of Japanese art outside of Japan, and her collection has since been donated to several museums.

This website presents the highlights of her collection, with more than 1,000 high-quality photographs and cataloging data displayed online. You can browse the website by collecting area, artist, format, and period or do keyword searches of the collection. Users are able to zoom and pan enlarged images, and you can save a medium quality image by right clicking in the view and selecting “Save Image As.”

This site, along with many others that provide images of art and architecture, can be found on the VRC’s Other Art Resources Online page.

Categories
Images on the Web Luna Photography VRC

The Robert Sengstacke Photography Archive Now Available in LUNA

The VRC is excited to announce its new publicly available LUNA collection, Images of Black Chicago: The Robert Sengstacke Photography Archive.  Born in Chicago on May 29, 1943, Robert “Bobby” Sengstacke is one of the city’s most prolific documentary photographers who is best known for capturing the African American experience.  Having grown up in the newspaper business (he is the grand-nephew of Robert Sengstacke Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender), Sengstacke was able to learn from established African American photographers at a young age and had unique access to important events and people.  With the help of Art History Professor Rebecca Zorach, the VRC has scanned over 3,000 negatives featuring the artistic community and street life of Chicago’s South Side in the late 1960’s. To obtain high resolution images and permission contact Robert A. Sengstacke (robert.sengstacke@gmail.com or 773-744-7487).

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary News VRC

Access to 15,000+ Comics at the Digital Comic Museum

The Digital Comic Museum has digitized more than 15,000 comic books from the Golden Age of comics, or in the years before 1959. The DCM has a forum for users to submit historical research and commentary on the comics. While you won’t find any Marvel superheroes here, there’s a wide variety of themes within the comic world, including romance, Westerns, combat, crime, supernatural, and horror. Users have to create an account to download images.

Check out the Digital Comic Museum for more information and to download images.

Via Open Culture.

Categories
Museums News VRC

Dumbarton Oaks Launches New Online Inventory

Dumbarton Oaks’ Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives has launched a new online inventory called AtoM@DO, which brings together the holdings from the ICFA as well as a selection from teh Dumbarton Oaks Archives for users to search for related materials across the institution.

The ICFA contains materials pertaining to Byzantine and Medieval art, architecture and archaeology; Pre-Columbian cultural heritage, and the Garden & Landscape collections.

For more information, search AtoM@DO or visit the ICFA.

Categories
News Photography

Hundreds of Images of Historic London Published for First Time

The archives manager at Bishopsgate Institute recently discovered boxes containing more than 3,000 slides depicting London’s landmarks including churches, statues, buildings, and social scenes from the Victorian period to the early 20th century.

In 2007, a project to digitize the images launched, some of which can be seen here. More than 600 images were digitized, and in October 2013 were published in a book called The Gentle Author’s London Album.

For more information, visit the Spitalfield’s page on the album. To view a sampling of images, visit the ITV News article about the project.

Image: Traffic on Tower Bridge, 1905 Credit: Bishopsgate Institute

Categories
East Asian Innovative Technology News

Dunhuang Research Redux

The New Yorker recently ran a story about the Dunhuang Library and the efforts to digitize the large cache of materials originally discovered in a cave outside Dunhuang, in the Gobi Desert in western China in 1900. That original discovery revealed a chamber with more than five hundred cubic feet of bundled manuscripts in 17 languages and 24 scripts. The sheer size of the find is not its only extraordinary feature. Other significant discoveries were revealed, including the oldest known example of a printed book—out dating Gutenberg’s press for sure.

In 1994, the British Library created a team with partners in China, France, Germany, Japan, and Korea to digitize the cache of Dunhuang library materials. Called the International Dunhuang Project, its efforts are two-fold: they want to make the documents accessible to researchers around the world in addition to preserving them. The International Dunhuang Project’s database is freely accessible and provides high quality images of manuscripts ad other materials along with robust cataloging information.

Another fantastic research pertaining to Dunhuang is the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive avaialble in ARTstor. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, a team from Northwestern university photographed (in extremely high resolution) more than 40 of the cave grottos at Dunhuang. The photographs they took were stitched together to create 2-and 3-D representations of the caves that can be viewed using QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) technology.

Via the New Yorker.

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary Museums News Photography

Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Makes Gift of Shunk and Kender Archives

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation recently announced that it is donating nearly 200,000 items from the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Archives to five international institutions. The archival materials include black-and-white prints, color prints, negatives, contact sheets, and color transparencies, and will be distributed to the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of the Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate. The Foundation’s gift marks the first time an artist’s foundation has devoted its resources to the work of other artists.

Harry Shunk (1924–2006, born in Germany) and János [Jean] Kender (1937–2009, born in Hungary) made the bulk of their images from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, documenting more than 400 artists in their studios, at openings, and during performances, making this collection an important documentary collection of the modern art and art history. Artists depicted include Roy Lichtenstein, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Alexander Calder, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Man Ray, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol among many others.

After Shunk died in 2006, the Foundation began acquiring the archive by purchase between 2008 and 2012. After acquiring the images, the Foundation “preserved, cataloged, and digitized the images” and made them available in an online collection on their website. You can view the archive’s list of artists to view PDFs of thumbnails that depict that specific artist. For information about using the images in scholarly publications, contact Shunk-Copyright@lichtensteinfoundation.org.

For more information or to check out the collection, visit the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Photography Archives.

Via ArtDaily.

Categories
Innovative Technology VRC

Europeana Open Culture App

This summer, the Europeana digital library launched its first app, Open Culture, which includes a selection of 350,000 images from its online collection of cultural objects from Europe’s institutions. The app is organizied around five curated themes, including Maps and Plans, Treasures of Art, Treasures of the Past, Treasures of Nature, and Images of the Past.

Users can perform keyword searches in the app, or browse through a visual wall of image thumbnails. You can also save favorites, add comments, and share object records on Facebook or Twitter. Perhaps best of all: the images included in the Europeana Open Culture app are either in the public domain or openly licensed, so they may be used for any publishing purpose.

For more information, stop by the VRC to explore Open Culture on our iPad, or visit the App Store.

Via Europeana Blog

Categories
Images on the Web Modern - Contemporary News VRC

DOCUMERICA Photos from the 1970s

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.

Categories
Images on the Web Photography

University of Chicago Photographic Archive

The University of Chicago Photographic Archive has a digital collection that contains images from five series encompassing the University’s history, including individuals and groups, buildings and grounds, events, student activities, sports, the Yerkes observatory, and the Chicago Maroon student newspaper.

This is a great resource for school pride and nostalgia and also a stellar resource for studying the development of campus architecture.

Image credit: Cochrane Woods Art Center I. University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf02108, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.