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!

Chicago Architecture Biennial

This weekend marks the opening of the 3 month long Chicago Architecture Biennial. With a mission of creating an international forum on architecture and urbanism, the Biennial “seeks to convene the world’s leading practitioners, theorists, and commentators in the field of architecture and urbanism to explore, debate, and demonstrate the significance of architecture to contemporary society.” The calendar is overflowing with events, including free tours of the Frank Lloyd Wright’s S.C. Johnson Wax headquarters and the UChicago campus, as well as the opening of the Stony Island Arts Bank, all happening this weekend.

 

Open House Chicago This Weekend, October 18-19

Don’t miss the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s fourth annual Open House Chicago, a free public festival that offers behind-the-scenes access to 150 buildings across Chicago. Explore repurposed mansions, hidden rooms, sacred spaces, private clubs, iconic theaters, hotels and more.  Highlights include an airstream trailer on top of a roof between the Montrose and Damen Brown Line stations, a meticulously restored Frank Lloyd Wright home in Rogers Park, and a former meatpacking warehouse turned vertical urban farm.

Public Art Workshop Mural Archive Now Available in LUNA

In collaboration with Art History Professor Rebecca Zorach and Chicago artist, Mark Rogovin, the VRC is happy to announce the “Public Art Workshop Mural Archive“, a new collection in our LUNA database.
The collection contains images of murals and public projects of the Public Art Workshop, along with documentation of the workshop’s activities and images of other murals created in Chicago from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

To read more about Mark Rogovin, please visit Never the Same.

Largest Film Camera in the World in Chicago

The world’s largest film camera is currently at Two North Riverside Plaza, and will be there through Thursday, October 31. The camera was built in order to be used in a project by photographer Dennis Manarchy, from Rockford, IL, called Butterflies & Buffalo: Tales of American Culture.

The camera is 35 feet long, and makes photographs that are larger than life size—more than six feet tall and four feet wide! Manarchy’s project is to make portraits to document at least 50 distinct cultural groups in the United States and plans to travel more than 20,000 miles in order to capture such wide diversity. I’m curious about how they’ll make a darkroom big enough to develop a piece of film that’s bigger than they are!

For more information, visit the Butterflies & Buffalo website, watch the preview for the project on Vimeo, follow them on Facebook or Twitter, or swing by the West Loop to see the camera for yourself.

Via Chicagoist

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.

The Chicagoan Digital Archive

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.

The Chicago Aerial Photo Services Collection at UIC

Local blog Chicagoist recently posted about a Flickr set that UIC posted of the Chicago Aerial Photo Services Collection. You can check out the Flickr set, or explore the entire digital collection hosted by UIC. They describe the project:

The Chicago Aerial Photo Services (CAPS) collection has a number of aerial photographs from 1929 through the late 1940s. Primarily the photographs are of the Chicago area though there are some images from other areas of the state. They provide detailed images of both urban areas as well as countryside that would become suburbs in the future.

UIC’s digital collections also hosts several other collections pertaining to Chicago architecture, including the C. William Brubaker Collection of mid-to-late 20th century color photographs. For more information, visit the Chicago Aerial Photo Services (CAPS) collection or the C. William Brubaker Collection.
Via Chicagoist

The Renaissance Society Archive Now Available in ARTstor

Last summer we announced that the Renaissance Society Archive was made publicly available through LUNA, and now we are pleased to announce that as of this week, it is now available in ARTstor as well.

ARTstor and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago are sharing nearly 2,400 images of contemporary art and exhibition installation views in the Digital Library. This collection features painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance, and multi-media work by seminal contemporary artists who exhibited at the Renaissance Society, including Nancy Spero, Raymond Pettibon, Francis Alÿs, Eva Hesse, Kerry James Marshall, Shahzia Sikander, and others.

From its opening in 1915, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago has been a leading space for innovative contemporary art and programming, exhibiting important and challenging work by leading contemporary artists, often early in their careers, before they are shown in major museums and galleries.

You can view the collection in ARTstor or LUNA, and click here for more information on the ARTstor collection or about the Renaissance Society generally.

Via ARTstor Blog

Above image: Thomas Struth. Hörder Brückenstrasse, Dortmund, 1985. Exhibited at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.