Public Art at the University of Chicago

The University of Chicago has recently released a new web resource called Public Art on Campus which seeks to catalog, document, and provide contextual and critical information about the works of art on campus. There is an accompanying video which provides an overview of the works on campus. The website allows users to browse works by location, artist, and title and for selected works users can read an artist bibliography and an essay about the work. These selected works also include archival images and documents relevant to the work.

The VRC supports this project by maintaining the UChicago Public Art Collection and Archive in collaboration with the Smart Museum of Art, UChicago Arts, and Christine Mehring of the Department of Art History. This dedicated, password-protected collection is accessible to all on-campus users and off-campus users who have a CNetID and password. If you’d like to explore more, the Luna collection contains archival photographs, audio, video, conservation information, and other ephemeral documentation pertaining to the public works on campus.

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.

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).

Digitized Manuscripts from the Vatican Apostolic Library

 

The Vatican Apolostic Library has been working on a project to digitize more than 80,000 documents in its collection. Currently there are nearly 4,500 manuscripts online and there is hope that they’ll have 15,000 manuscripts available by 2018.

The collection features a variety of important and early manuscripts and books, including Pre-Columbian manuscripts, early Greek and Latin texts, Islamic manuscripts, and even some Japanese paintings.

You can browse some of the materials at DigitaVaticana here as well as on the website of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Images can be downloaded from the digital library, but they come with a watermark and copyright statement.

Image: Sandro Botticelli, Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy performed by Lorenzi il Magnifico in the 15th century. Folio 101 recto with a section of the Inferno. Reg.lat.1896A.

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.

New Zealand Museum Releases 30,000 Images

The Te Papa Museum of New Zeland has released more than 30,000 high resolution images for download and re-use! To find images that can be reused, the search box is equipped with a radio button to allow users to select “with downloadable images.”

The Te Papa museum collection contains “artworks, objects, and specimens,” from “dinosaur teeth to contemporary art,” and as such presents two advanced search options for object and specimen to allow users to query different metadata fields.

For more information about the Creative Commons license governing the re-use of Te Papa’s images, check out their recent blog post about the initiative. Click here to explore the collection!

Met Releases 400,000 Digital Images for Use

On May 16, the Metropolitan Museum announced a new initiative called the Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) and released more than 400,000 images of public domain works on their website. Users can download the high-resolution files directly from the website for any non-commercial use, including scholarly publications. Users do not need to pay a fee and will not need to seek permission from the museum. Per the Met’s press release, “the number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis.”

The Met joins several other institutions in making high-resolution digital image files of collection objects free available on the web, including Rijksmuseum, LACMA, and the Getty. The Met was one of the first participants in ARTstor’s Images for Academic Publishing initiative, but in order to use those images, the user needed to be affiliated with an institution that had an ARTstor subscription or request a temporary password. The new OASC program makes the images available directly to the public from the museum’s collections website.

For more information, visit the Met’s FAQ about the OASC initiative or explore their collections website. Images included in the initiative will be indicated

Via the Metropolitan Museum Press Room.

e-Museum of Japan

Looking for images of works of art in the National Museums of Japan? This e-Museum collection of “National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties” contains hundreds of high quality reproductions, robust metadata, and descriptive content. Users can zoom and and pan through images, browse by categories including painting, calligraphy, sculpture, architecture, textiles, ceramics, and more. The site features a keyword and an advanced search.

In addition, iPhone and Android apps exist for the e-Museum collection.

For more information, explore the e-Museum of Japan!

Delaware Art Museum Launches Collections Website

The Delaware Art Museum recently launched a collections website via eMuseum which currently features more than 1,000 works of art. By 2018, the museum’s entire collection will be online, “including the largest collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art outside of the United Kingdom …”

Users can interact with the Collections tab by browsing curated collections, searching for individual object records and related artist biographies. Creating an account will allow users to select favorite records and save image groups and research notes.

For more information, visit the link to the Delaware Art Museum’s eMuseum collection or their Collections page.

Via ArtDaily.

35 Million Getty Images Free to Embed and Use Online

Yesterday, Getty Images released more than 35 million images that users can embed on websites and social media posts for free, so long as the images are for editorial and non-commercial purposes. With the embed feature, Getty Images includes a credit line and link to each image that users post. For a list of images available to embed, click here.

There’s been quite a lot of coverage about this monumental release of “free” images, including great articles from the Atlantic on “Why Getty Going Free Is Such a Big Deal, Explained in Getty Images,” and the Verge on “The world’s largest photo service just made its pictures free to use.” It’s important to note that not all Getty Images are free to use, and it’s very likely that contemporary photojournalism images, for example, will remain behind the paywall.

Also fun to think about on a Friday: How many photos have ever been taken?