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To celebrate Artstor’s collaboration with the RISD Museum, our friends at the museum graciously created a lightning-tour of their encyclopedic collection in the Digital Library through twenty notable objects. Part one focuses on decorative and utilitarian artifacts, and part two on artworks.

Egyptian; Paint box, 1302-1070 BCE. Image © Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence

Paint Box

Only a handful of paint boxes survive from ancient Egypt, and this one is particularly unique in being made of ceramic and bearing a sliding lid with a grip whimsically decorated with a genet, an animal related to the mongoose.

The stylized papyrus thickets represent the genet’s habitat of tall grasses and shrubs. Featuring a hollow well for water and brush storage, the box contains seven pigment cakes of yellow ochre, Egyptian blue (a synthetic pigment composed of silica, copper, and calcium), calcium carbonate (white), hematite (dark red), hematite mixed with calcium carbonate (lighter red), and two charcoal blacks. Painters used these same pigments to decorate statuary and the walls of temples and tombs.

A new version of Artstor Mobile is now available, which resolves an issue with the zoom feature for the mobile site and the Android app.

Please note that the functionality of the zoom feature on Artstor mobile has changed slightly with this release: The zoom button now opens a slightly larger image in a new window (an app window for Android users or a browser window on Apple products). Pinch and spread for further zoom detail (may not be available on some mobile devices). Navigate to the previous window to access search, browse, and home menu buttons.

More information on installing the Android app is available on our support site.

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:

• Oh-oh. Computer paints “new Rembrandt” after detailed analysis of the artist’s oeuvre.
• Call us old fashioned, but we’re more comfortable with this recently discovered Judith Beheading Holofernes, which may be a “new” Caravaggio original.
• Introducing Judith Leyster and the overlooked women painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
• “[W]hile drawing I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen.” Legendary Op-Art painter Bridget Riley on drawing.
• A man creates rock art in his backyard to attract aliens. In California, of course.

Artstor and the RISD Museum are now sharing more than 3,600 images from the Museum’s permanent collection in the Digital Library.

The RISD Museum is an internationally renowned art museum distinguished by its relationship to one of the world’s leading colleges of art and design. Founded alongside the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1877, the Museum houses seven curatorial departments and approximately 100,000 objects dating from 3700 BCE to the present day, and featuring major figures in the history of visual art and culture. Highlights include one of the nation’s finest collections of costume and textiles, with more than 26,000 objects created since 1500 BCE; the world’s largest collection of Gorham silver, housed in the first museum wing devoted to American decorative arts; a 12th-century seated Buddha, one of the largest Japanese statues in the United States; and significant collections of ancient Egyptian objects, Impressionist paintings, contemporary British art, 20th- and 21st-century design, and more.

For more details, visit the RISD Museum page in Artstor.

You may also be interested in A tour of the RISD Museum in 20 objects

How are you discovering and using images and data in Artstor? We’d like to hear from you! Your feedback will help us shape the future of our tools and services.

Take our brief survey by May 4th and you could win an Artstor tote bag!

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Join us to discover how community colleges around the country are using image-based learning with the Artstor Digital Library to support and enliven a wide variety of classes, develop important Visual Literacy skills, and to build projects that encourage deeper engagement from students.This webinar will also feature an overview of the interdisciplinary teaching resources that Artstor has created to make lesson planning and assignments easier.

The session will run for 30 minutes and questions are welcomed during and after the presentation.

Sessions:

• April 5, 1:00 PM
• April 21, 12:30 PM

April 1, 2016, New York, NY – Following January’s announcement of the strategic alliance between Artstor and ITHAKA, Artstor and JSTOR will now become a single resource to be known as STOR-STOR.

Commenting on the merger of the resources, STOR-STOR’s director of nomenclature Jay Starr said, “We considered naming the organization JART, but we wanted a name that didn’t imply that we only offered art-related content. Another approach was to focus on our shared qualities and become just STOR, but that failed to sufficiently address the inclusivity of our mission. After several weeks of work, we came up with STOR-STOR, and are currently negotiating with an existing storage company for the domain name storstor.org.”

“Among the most exciting opportunities open by the new STOR-STOR merger is the possibility of a future partnership with Storify,” added STOR-STOR president Arthur Stohr.

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:

• “The San Jose Public Library wants its books back. And its CDs and DVDs. Taken altogether, library patrons are holding onto or have damaged 97,000 items and owe the city $6.8 million in fines and fees. The situation is so out of control that about 40 percent of the city’s library cardholders can no longer borrow anything until they return their library holdings and pay what they owe.”
• And speaking of the maltreatment of books, holes in the pages of manuscripts are the result of many causes. But, unlike damaged library books, these holes sometimes add to the books’ beauty: check out the images.
• One would think an artist famous for sending giant rubber ducks around the world would have a great sense of humor, but he was not laughing when he accused Brazilian protesters of plagiarism after they used a similarly enormous rubber bird as a statement against their president.

ITHAKA, the not-for-profit leader in advancing and preserving knowledge worldwide, announced that Piotr Adamczyk will join the organization as Director of Image Content and Museum Partnerships.

Adamczyk will lead ITHAKA’s efforts to partner with cultural organizations around the world to grow the Artstor Digital Library, an online resource for teaching and research that includes more than 2 million high-quality images from museums, artists’ estates, and archives. He will also head up a new team of designers and developers that will collaborate with these image contributors and users to identify and pursue new ideas for engaging and improving their work.

Wangechi Mutu, A Little Thought for All Ya’ll Who’re Thinking of Beating Around the Bush, 2004. Contact: Alexandra Giniger, Studio Manager, Wangechi Mutu Studio ali@wangechimutu.com

Next week we will offer Teaching Global Contemporary Art in AP® Art History, the second in our series of occasional webinars on works of art and architecture in the AP® Art History curriculum. To help us navigate this topic, we have enlisted art historian Dr. Virginia Spivey as our guest presenter. Dr. Spivey specializes in the art of the late-20th and 21st centuries and the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (you can read about her many achievements below).

Global Contemporary Art is represented in the curriculum framework by 27 works of art; after polling a group of AP® Art History teachers, Dr. Spivey has settled on the work of five artists: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Mariko Mori, Wangechi Mutu, Xu Bing, and Bill Viola.

Please join us Monday, April 4th at 7PM EST for a lively discussion on these contemporary artists and the art and ideas that influence them. Register here.

— Dana Howard, Senior K-12 Relationship Manager

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For more than 19 years, Dr. Virginia Spivey has taught in museum and academic settings, where she has received two university teaching awards and multiple nominations. Since 2009, she has worked independently, providing expert content and developing curricular resources for clients including Pearson-Prentice Hall and Smarthistory at the Khan Academy while teaching part time at Georgetown, the George Washington University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Dr. Spivey recently revised the chapter on “Art since 1950” as a contributing author to Stokstad’s Art History (forthcoming 2016) and is currently working with the National Gallery of Art to redesign their docent training curriculum in art history. Since 2014, she has been a contributing editor at AHTR, a peer-populated open educational resource and online community for art history instructors, where she served as project leader to create Art History Pedagogy and Practice, an academic e-journal slated to launch in fall 2016.

AP® and Advanced Placement® is a trademark registered and/or owned by the College Board, which was not involved in the production of, and does not endorse, this website.