Search, Save, and Share Images from the Art Institute’s Online Collections

The Art Institute of Chicago‘s digital collections database offers a feature called “My Collections” that allows users to do several things:

  • Create a user profile and log in
  • Search for and select works of art from their web collection
  • Create multiple My Collections and choose which one you want to save an image to
  • Personalize My Collections by adding descriptive notes
  • Share My Collections with others via an emailed link (and people you’ve shared My Collections with will be able to see your notes!)

For more information, read about My Collections or explore the Art Institute’s Online Collections.

AIC’s Turning the Pages

The Art Institute of Chicago has an extensive resource called Turning the Pages, which utilizes software developed by the British Museum to present fully digitized book-reader objects of select objects in the AIC’s collection. Images can be also zoomed in to view details. So far, 30 objects from various departments in the AIC’s collection and library have been rendered in this software:

Several of the Art Institute of Chicago’s most unique and important artist sketchbooks, manuscripts and rare printed items are now available online. Viewers may page through or zoom in to look closely at the bound volumes, prints, and handscroll paintings from the Department of Prints and Drawings, the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, and the Department of Asian Art.

You’ll need to have Microsoft Silverlight activated on your computer to use Turning the Pages software. If you don’t have it, it can be downloaded for free here.

For more information, visit the AIC’s Interpretive Resource page for Turning the Pages objects.

Via ARTicle

Image from Presentation copy of Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), 1931.

Lichtenstein DotBot from the Art Institute

Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective is now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. To promote this exhibition, the museum has unveiled DotBot — an interactive web application you can use to create a comic panel of yourself, Lichtenstein-style, complete with caption, bright color, and benday dots. All you need is a computer with a webcam!

Write a message, take a snapshot, and send your dotted self to friends and family as a quick hello, birthday greeting, or invitation to come to the Art Institute and see the exhibition. You can even post your DotBot picture on Facebook.

Give it a try here. For more information about Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, click here.

Sketchbooks from AIC’s Prints & Drawings Now Online

The Art Institute of Chicago has digitized several of its most-loved and important holdings from the Department of Prints & Drawings and Ryerson and Burnham Libraries with the help of Turning the Pages software. Website visitors can now peruse sketchbooks by artists like Paul Cézanne and Odilon Redon, as well as manuscripts and other printed materials.

VRC staff member Emilia Mickevicius had the rare opportunity to handle several of these objects while serving as a Metcalf Fellow at the Art Institute in Summer 2010. After each original object had been photographed using a copystand, Emilia used Photoshop to crop and color-correct the images, which were then loaded into Turning the Pages’ software program. The Art Institute hopes to add more materials to this online resource over time.

Contemporary Collecting at the Art Institute of Chicago

The new exhibition Contemporary Collecting: Selections from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection opens today at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit includes Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1111: A Circle with Broken Bands of Color (2003) in the Modern Wing’s Griffin Court. A recent entry on ARTicle, the Art Institute’s blog, documents the installation of this work in photographs and an interview with Matt Stolle, technical painter for the contemporary art department.