Imaging the Imagists at the Smart Museum

The Smart Museum of Art received a grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation to greatly expand access and preservation of its collection of Chicago Imagist works on paper. The Smart was able to mount, conserve, and/or photograph 437 works, add 407 new images to their online collections database, expand 51 artwork texts (which can be now viewed in the online catalog records) and interview 3 artists.

The interviews with artists Barbara Rossi, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum are available online through the Smart’s Vimeo channel (and also on an iPad in the Joan and Robert Feitler Gallery for Contemporary Art through August 2014).

To view the newly added images in the Smart’s collections website, the best way to search is by artist name. After completing the grant work, the following Imagist artists are represented on their website:

Roger Brown, Art Green, Philip Hanson, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Suellen Rocca, Barbara Rossi, Karl Wirsum, Don Baum, and the Hairy Who.

If you’re in the area, be sure to visit the current exhibition at the Smart, State of Mind and sister show Bridging California and Chicago which features Chicago Imagist works.

The Morgan Begins Digitizing 10,000 Drawings

The Morgan Library and Museum in New York recently announced that it is embarking on a year-long program to digitize its collection of more than 10,000 drawings (including 2,000 versos) dating from the 14th to 21st centuries. The images will be available in a digital library that will provide a robust catalog record with a high resolution image. The digital library will be open to the public, and images will be available for download for use in non-commercial situations including “classroom presentations, dissertations, and educational websites devoted to the fine arts.”

So, get excited about the new digital library, which will hopefully be ready for launch in October 2014. The Morgan has future plans to digitize their print collection, which would be another fantastic resource.

For more information about the project, check out the Morgan’s press release. In the meantime, don’t forget that the Morgan has other valuable online resources available now, including Collection Highlights, Online Exhibitions, and Music Manuscripts.

Via ArtDaily

Penn Museum’s Digital Resources for Archaeology and Anthropology

The Penn Museum in Philadelphia, the University of Pennslyvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, recently launched two new digital endeavors for researchers.

The newly revamped Collections Database includes more than 690,000 objects and more than 95,000 images. The database records are robust, with links to related objects and bibliographic citations of where the image has been published.

The Penn Museum also allows users to download data files of its object records under a Creative Commons license. You can download datasets on all objects or by cultural group, including African, American, Asian, Egyptian, European, Historic, Mediterranean, Near Eastern, and Oceanian. The datasets include physical information, its provenance, and materialiaty but not images of the objects and the objects’ publication and exhibition histories.

The Research Map and Timeline provides interactive documentation and information about the museum’s research expeditions and projects since the 1880s. Users can browse projects geographically or chronologically, and the website provides a record of the dates, researchers, and time period studied as well as a brief description of the work done and key discoveries.

Via ArtDaily

Princeton’s Campus Art Website

Princeton University holds a stellar collection of modern sculpture by artists such as Alexander Calder, Frank Gehry, Sol LeWitt, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, and Louis Comfort Tiffany to name only a few. These works are installed on Princeton’s campus, and the Princeton University Art Museum recently launched a new mobile website called Campus Art to facilitate users who wish to explore their outdoor works in situ.

The website explains the goal of the web project:

Campus Art at Princeton enhances the educational and visceral experience of art and sculpture on campus for students, the local community, and visitors alike. Visitors can hear the voices of Museum curators and experts involved behind the scenes, including fabricators, installers, conservators, and photographers. For some of the works, architects and historians contextualize the art in relation to surrounding architecture and University history. Users can browse a light box of images or take walking tours using an interactive map divided into five campus neighborhoods. As new works are installed and new perspectives added, the site will continue to evolve.

The website allows users to browse through thumbnails of installation photography, by artist name, or by “neighborhood” (the five different geographic areas of Princeton’s campus). The record for each artwork in the collection includes robust data about the work, some historical context, a map of its location, and an audio file of a curator narrating something significant about the work.

For more information, explore Princeton’s Campus Art project.

Via ArtDaily

The Getty Adds Special Collections Materials to Open Content Program

In mid-October, the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections announced that it has added 5,400 artwork images from special collections to the Open Content Program, which brings the total number of images that are freely available without copyright restrictions to more than 10,000.

The newly added content includes “artist’ sketchbooks, drawings and watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks, and early photographs of the Middle East and Asia.” For example, there are more than thirty early photographs from Mayan archaeological sites.

For more information, check out our previous blog post on the Getty’s Open Content Program, or explore the 10,000 public domain images here!

Via The Getty Iris

Image: [Nunnery complex (Uxmal, Mexico): detail of facade frieze], 1882, GRI Digital Collections, 94-F125.

From the Archives: Guggenheim’s Online Exhibition Catalogs

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has made nearly 100 exhibition catalogs freely available online as part of a digitized collection called “From the Archives.” Their offering of catalogs includes single-artist exhibitions as well as multi-artist exhibitions about movements or styles, and some stand alone essays published by the museum.

The Guggenheim has made other library resources available digitally in the collection Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century: Digitized Highlights from the Libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently made a trove of digitized exhibition catalogs available in MetPublications.

 

 

 

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts’ New eMuseum Collection

In July, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts launched a new digital collections website in eMuseum, which allows users to view more than 4,000 of the museum’s works online. The museum focuses on “American painting, sculpture, and ceramics; American and European works on paper (16th century and later); and photography.”

To explore the KIA’s 4,200 works on the web, search or browse their Collections website. The website allows users to view an enlarged version of the work and provides basic catalog records.

For more information on eMuseum, visit our previous blog post on the topic, or conduct a federated search on the collections of more than 600 cultural institutions that host their collections in Gallery Systems’ eMuseum software.

Via ArtDaily

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.

OI’s Lunchtime Traveler Series Begins Tomorrow

The Oriental Institute Museum will begin the Lunchtime Traveler lecture series tomorrow, Thursday, September 5, with a gallery talk on the Khorsabad Court. The talk is led by Karen Wilson, PhD, Research Associate at the Oriental Institute and begins at 12:15 in the Edgar and Deborah Jannotta Mesopotamian Gallery and lasts 45 minutes.

The series will recur on the first Thursday of every month. October’s offering on October 3 at 12:15 pm features Martha T. Roth, Dean of Humanities Division and the Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago, who will speak about the Hammurabi Stela.

For more information, visit the Oriental Institute’s Events and Programs.

Image: Oriental Institute, Exhibit Area 10, 1931. Archival Photographic Files, University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center, apf2-05453.