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Paleontology staff posing with Fossil Shark Jaws. Image and original data provided by Library, American Museum of Natural History, Anthropology Department, American Museum of Natural History

These photographs of six members of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Paleontology staff sitting inside the massive jaws of a Carcharocles megalodon are the stuff of nightmares—and, of course, just the thing for Shark Week.

Yet, as Brian Switek writes on ScienceBlogs, they’re the result of a miscalculation. “[T]he famous jaws were reconstructed by assuming that the teeth of the extinct shark would have had the same proportions to the jaw as in the living great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), yielding a maw that would have fit a shark 100 feet long or more.”

Missed our #ColorMyArtstor postcards at the ALA conference? Not to worry, you can print your own! Visit the Promoting Artstor section on our Support site and download the full set of five! There you will also find downloadable posters, bookmarks, brochures, and logos to let everyone know that your institution subscribes to Artstor.

We invited Barbara Anello to tell us about her photographs of graffiti in Lower Manhattan, newly released in the Artstor Digital Library.

Robin Michaels and Kristen Reed; Mural, 353 East 4th St between Aves C & D; 1991; Graffiti Lower East Side Manhattan. Photograph © Barbara J. Anello

I photographed graffiti, stencil art, wall paintings, and murals on New York City streets during the 1980s and early ’90s in Lower Manhattan from about 14^th Street south to Battery Park, and from the Hudson to the East Rivers, but generally in Soho, Noho, the Lower East Side, and “Alphabet City.”

At the time, Soho, where I lived, was still the neighborhood of artists and galleries, but rapidly gentrifying, forcing younger artists east and out. While much of the public art and graffiti was anonymous, the neighborhoods where I photographed embodied the “art world” of the time; these were the streets where artists worked and played, dealers bought and sold. So my photographs included works and writing by artists who became “art world” figures, such as Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring, by artists who built reputations in their neighborhoods as “writers” and social activists, as well as by dedicated, working artists who made statements independently on the walls of abandoned buildings or squats, intended for the people, for the neighborhood, outside the confines of commercial galleries.

Rogier van der Weyden, Saint George and the Dragon, 1432.Image: Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Self Portrait with Towel. Posted with permission of the artist.

Justin B. Makemson, PhD, assistant professor of art and the art education program coordinator at Belmont University in Nashville, TN, contributed this essay, part of a study of selective artistic self-identification.

Creative action is defined largely by the artist’s relationship to significant artistic others. Even the youngest of emerging artists are acutely aware of images and objects that surround their own creative explorations. To help address the social negotiations of artistic self-identification and specifically to parse the creative influence of significant artistic others, I developed a comparative visual research method for my dissertation work at Indiana University that combined the analysis of prompted Artstor Digital Library searches with an examination of student portfolios, narrative self-histories, and more traditional portraiture research methods. The purpose of my research was twofold: To better understand the events and circumstances associated with the development of students’ artistic identity and awareness/ownership of that identity; and to draw insight from the examination of a group of seven students that might be expanded to benefit the field of art education.

Did you know that you can easily customize any one of our image groups by adding or removing images to make it exactly what you need?

Begin by opening an image group, such as Cities and Urban Planning from our Teaching Resources. From the Organize menu, choose Save image group as. Once you’ve named and saved your image group, you can then remove any images from the group, add your own content from your personal collection or from the Digital Library, and voilà–you’ve customized the image group!

You have questions and Artstor’s Support site has answers! Want to know how to log in from home? Or how to access the Digital Library on your smartphone? Start with our Quick Start Guide. Prefer to watch your instructions? We have you covered. We also have advice on approved image uses, troubleshooting, and much more.

There’s no need to bookmark the site; you can always find the Help link in the top navigation bar of both artstor.org and the Artstor Digital Library.

Heading off for summer break? Did you know you can still access all the features and tools of the Digital Library remotely with a registered user account – it’s Artstor on the go! Create your user account and access our more than 2 millions images and your own image folders and groups. You can even do this from your mobile device. Just remember, you will need to log in through your institution once every 120 days. Can you make it around the world in that time?

Our User Services team is available all summer long if you need help with any of these tools.

On May 5th, Merete Sanderhoff, curator and senior advisor at the National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst), presented “Sharing is Caring” (you can see her slides here) at the Artstor offices for a group of professionals in the arts and cultural heritage fields, as well as members of the American Friends of SMK. We took the opportunity to do a brief interview.

Artstor: The SMK is working towards releasing its digitized collections into the Public Domain. How does that fit in with the museum’s mission?

MS: The museum is a public institution, and we see ourselves not as the owners but as stewards of our collections. We believe these collections are for everyone, so making them freely available very naturally aligned with our mission.

It’s also a way to show the breadth and depth of our collection, instead of just the canon. The Rijksmuseum provided a great example: they have gone the farthest in making their public domain materials free and providing the tools to work with them, and today everything they have online is being seen and used. It’s the Long Tail in action—the more obscure works get much fewer views than the peak, but together the views of the lesser-known works add up to much more than for the canon.

Editor’s note: this post was updated to reflect Artstor’s platform changes.

John Reps, Monpazier, 1951 (founded 1284)

In the 13th century, southwestern France gave birth to several hundred new planned towns, partly to replace villages destroyed in the Albigensian Crusades and partly to revivify a stagnating economy and tame areas of wilderness¹. Some were designed as fortress communities, while others were laid out as simple agricultural villages. The great majority, however, had a different function. Known as bastides, they were created as market towns with the aim of concentrating the population in secure places for ease of administration while returning a profit to their sponsors. Their founders were the great feudal lords of the region: kings, dukes, counts, and viscounts.

John Reps, Monpazier: Southeast Arcade Entrance, 1966 (founded 1284)

John Reps, Mirepoix: Consul House Double Brackets Detail, 2009 (founded 1279)

John Reps, Fleurance: Market Building Ceiling Framing, 2009 (founded 1274)

Reliquary of Sainte-Foy, from Conques, ca. 1000, with gothic additions. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y., artres.com

Tlatilco, Female figure, 1200-900 B.C. Image and data from: Princeton University Art Museum, Image © Princeton University Art Museum, photo: Bruce M. White.

Jean Antoine Houdon, George Washington Statue; overview, 1785-1788, Richmond, VA. Image and original data provided by Art on File; artonfile.com.

Made for Prince al-Mughira, Pyxis of al-Mughira; the prince seated with his lutist and fan-bearer, 968. Image and original data provided by Walter B. Denny.

Each May, around the world, almost twenty five thousand students sit for the AP® Art History exam. This year’s test falls on the third of May (a date not lost on many seasoned Art History teachers). It is also quite different from the AP® exam you or your children may have taken. This time, students will be taking a test that covers a newly designed AP® Art History curriculum. This is the first year that the exam is truly global in nature.

This curriculum includes works from the European tradition that we all learned in our survey course, such as the Acropolis, but also goes beyond that to include artists from Native American tribal traditions, the rest of the Americas, and works from the Pacific, Africa, and Asia. There are now 250 key works of art or architecture that a student must know quite well in addition to those the teachers and students explore to round out the experience. For the first time, the AP® Art History exam covers something of the cultural heritage of each student in the room while providing them the chance to learn about our global artistic production.