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Friday Links: art on a deserted island, on social media, and on a freight elevator

Photographer: Robert Howlett | Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the Great Eastern | ca. 1857-1858 | George Eastman House, eastmanhouse.org

Some stories we’ve been reading this week:

• A new artist residency offers a month in a deserted island accessible only by boat or seaplane. Only joint applications from artist couples or two artists “willing to tolerate each other for the duration” will be accepted.
• In previous Friday Links we told you about the world’s ugliest color and the world’s darkest black. This week we bring you the world’s newest blue.
• Social media is shaping the way art is produced and shown, “perhaps even motivating artists and art institutions to feature work that looks attractive on digital platforms, even if it feels flimsy in real life.”
• What does the Sleeping Hermaphrodite motif in Greco-Roman art tell us about art, sex, and good taste?

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Now available: Photographs of graffiti in New York and art and architecture in Ladakh, India by Barbara Anello

Dal Lake, vegetable merchants on boats Image and original data provided by Barbara Anello; Photographs © Barbara J. Anello

Lower East Side: Dancing Ninja, Near 105 & 104; Graffiti Lower East Side Manhattan 1991. Photograph © Barbara J. Anello

Artstor is sharing two new collections of photographs by Barbara J. Anello: graffiti in Lower Manhattan in the 1980s and 90s, and Tibetan Buddhist art and architecture in Ladakh, India.

The photographs from Ladakh were exhibited at the Overseas Press Club in New York City and Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio in 1982.

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Parsing the wisdom of crowds: Artstor’s Arcades results

Artstor Arcades

A zealous group of Artstor users have pitched in to collaboratively catalogue images from the D. James Dee Archive of contemporary art on our crowdsourcing site, arcades.artstor.org. Thanks to a combination of their expertise and a lot of internet sleuthing, 555 works are now a welcome addition to the D. James Dee Archive of Contemporary Art collection in the Artstor Digital Library. You can read more about Arcades on this blog, and about the Dee Archive in the New York Times.

At Arcades, participants are presented with images in a game environment where they are able to enter basic data, such as creator, title, date, medium, and exhibition history in order to accumulate points. In doing so, they “level-up” and progressively acquire titles ranging from “flâneur” and “connoisseur” to “apprentice” and “master” (all references to Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project—more about that to come). At the time of our October 2015 launch we wondered what kind of results we would get. General crowdsourcing theory assumes that the more entries, the smarter the results. Would we secure enough participants? Would they feel compelled to return again and again?

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Barbara Anello on New York graffiti in the ’80s and ’90s

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.

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Portraits of artistic self: Parsing creative influence through prompted Artstor searches

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.

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Friday Links: Leonardo’s Bedazzler, a robot librarian, and naughty graffiti

Photographer: Robert Howlett | Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the Great Eastern | ca. 1857-1858 | George Eastman House, eastmanhouse.org

Some stories we’ve been reading this week:

• Did Leonardo da Vinci invent the original Bedazzler?
• 2,500-year-old homoerotic graffiti was found on a wild, windswept, rocky, and remote Aegean island.
• Which segues nicely with this appreciation of the sexually charged art of Aubrey Beardsley.
• We also enjoyed this account of the effect a Francis Bacon painting had on a 17-year-old novelist-to-be.
• Play games, get college credits! Well, almost. A Game-Based Learning company is releasing a collection of games supporting college-level Art History survey courses. Their first release teaches the interconnectedness of local and international economies in Renaissance Italy, and how those economies influenced art and art patronage.

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Case study: Medieval Portland

Anne McClanan, Professor of Medieval Art History at Portland State University and one of the winners of the Artstor Digital Humanities Awards, introduces us to Medieval Portland and describes the impact Shared Shelf [now JSTOR Forum] has had on the project.

Medieval Portland? We hope our project’s silly name is just perplexing enough to make people want to learn more—who wouldn’t assume there is no medieval Portland?

When I moved to Oregon after years of medieval art history graduate training at more resource-intensive places, Harvard and Johns Hopkins, I worried whether I’d be able to continue the teaching grounded in first-hand observation and investigation of works of art that I think is central to the practice of art history. I plunged into the task of trying to figure out what medieval material was here, and gradually discovered several hundred items in collections across the Portland area (the number varies depending on how generously we want to define “medieval,” and we often reach into the early modern period).

Running since 2005, our site has gone through several iterations, but by far the biggest change has been our recent transition to Shared Shelf. Our Shared Shelf collection’s defining feature is that Medieval Portland presents original research pursued by students alongside that by advanced scholars. The students doing the research are from across my university, for I teach the course as a community based learning senior capstone within Portland State University’s nationally-recognized University Studies program. The Medieval Portland capstone provides students opportunities to critically engage with the past as well as to then produce resources that allow these objects to become better known and understood to the wider community. The capstone students soon realize that history isn’t an edifice to be committed to memory, but instead is an act of inquiry into the meaning of the past.

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Artstor tip: Customize our image groups for your needs

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 (pictured above). 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!

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Friday Links: the world’s ugliest color, a terrible flood, and a cheeky conservator

Photographer: Robert Howlett | Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the Great Eastern | ca. 1857-1858 | George Eastman House, eastmanhouse.org

Some stories we’ve been reading this week:

• In case you were wondering, here’s a list of the ten worst ways to die in a Hieronymus Bosch.
• Is this the world’s ugliest color? (We’re inclined to say yes.)
• The Blue Mountain Project has scanned nearly 350 issues of Der Sturm (“the storm”), a Weimar-era arts journal that promoted German Expressionism and modern art. Even if you don’t read German you’ll want to take a look for the stunning illustrations by giants such as Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Marc, and Macke. Tremendous.
• It’s just terrible to see how the recent floods in France damaged the art in the Musée Girodet.
• A dying breed: meet one of the world’s last professional carousel carvers.
• And finally, we’ll let this awesome tweet speak for itself:

Just completed the conservation of a 2000 y/o Roman statue, removing an interesting stain to the marble surface! 💋🍑 pic.twitter.com/ItIYrLwELW

— Jade Maloney (@Jade_Maloney) May 19, 2016

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Exploring Rembrandt with JSTOR

We recently told you about our alliance with ITHAKA. The Exploring Rembrandt project with JSTOR should give you a hint of why we are so excited to be working together! It’s just a proof of concept, but it points to a world of possibilities.

In a nutshell:

1. Pick a Rembrandt painting.
2. View the high-quality Artstor image.
3. Find JSTOR articles about it!

You can learn how the project came about in the JSTOR Labs blog.

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