Siemens & Halske A.G., Munich, (Manufacturer), Telephone, 1955. Image and data from: The Museum of Modern Art
The initial entry of our new Focus series presents a chronicle of the telephone using some of the numerous collections in the Artstor Digital Library that center on history.
Autumn has arrived in New York City and there are signs of it everywhere. The leaves are turning shades of red, orange, and gold, and when I stroll under the trees I look out for acorns falling. Outside of the city the changes are more striking. Before long the leaves will be piling up.
Vincent van Gogh, Large Plane Trees, 1889. This image and data was provided by The Cleveland Museum of Art.
When I think of fall, I picture vivid colors and dramatic light. Different artists come to mind, but one of my favorites is Vincent Van Gogh because of his use of color and his bold brushstrokes. Last year I got the opportunity to see some of his works in person at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and I keep a few postcards of his work posted up next to my computer.
This particular work by Van Gogh was painted on a cold day in November in Sainte-Rémy in southern France. He painted the golden leaves of the large plane trees and the laborers working beneath them on a piece of cheap linen fabric; zoom into the image in Artstor to see the pattern of red diamonds on the linen showing through where the paint is thinner. It is fantastic to see these types of details in a work by an artist I truly enjoy.
What other images make you think of fall?
– Lucy Sawyer, ITHAKA Marketing Enablement Manager
Bonnie Burnham, President of the World Monuments Fund (WMF), the leading independent organization dedicated to saving the world’s most treasured places, talks to Christine Kuan about the history and future projects of WMF. The Artstor Digital Library recently launched WMF’s images of architecture, sites, and monuments from around the world.
Jaisalmer Fort; Exterior, India. | Photographer: Mark Weber. | World Monuments Fund
CK: What is the mission of WMF?
BB: World Monuments Fund works globally to ensure that heritage sites of worldwide significance are preserved, protected, and play a meaningful role in the local and global community today.
CK: How many countries has WMF worked within since its founding in 1965?
BB: In our more than 45 years of serving the field of heritage conservation, WMF has conducted and supported field projects in more than 100 countries, at nearly 600 sites.
CK: What are the challenges of preserving world monuments in the 21st century?
BB: Heritage sites face a range of threats, which have to do with changing ways of life, values, and the impact of a changing environment. Everything from the past cannot be saved as the world continues to reshape itself. In spite of their best efforts, governments cannot protect every site that is confronted with potential loss. Communities rally around the monuments that are most meaningful for them to save, but often they do not have the vision, the resources or the momentum to achieve their goals. This is where an international organization, the voice of an international concerned citizenry can help. The biggest challenge for the preservation field today is to preserve not only buildings themselves, but a meaningful context that will allow them to continue to play vital roles within the community where they exist.
CK: What is the most complex project you’ve worked on during your tenure at WMF?
BB: Sometimes projects are complicated from a technical perspective and sometimes they involve bringing together a diverse political consensus. It is the latter situation that is more complex. After the end of the Soviet period, WMF began to work extensively in eastern and central Europe. Many great heritage sites had been neglected for ideological reasons, especially sacred places and estates associated with the aristocracy. There was no prioritization or sense of how and where to start. Local authorities had no experience with how to make a monument economically self-sufficient. In the communist system the state had owned and paid for everything. Powerful officials made all the decisions. Our process of forging consensus about what to do and how to make it happen was a new idea to our counterparts in the former soviet bloc. It was a very exciting but often frustrating and complicated process. We never knew where we stood, and whether at the end of the day someone could stand in the way of all we were trying to achieve, simply because they had the power to do so. Working in postwar Iraq there is a similar feeling of uncertainty about whether the good alliances we have formed with our local counterparts will stand the test of time, as the government is still rapidly changing and evolving. Until things settle down and normalize politically, it will be difficult for people in the cultural sector to achieve lasting results that the society can embrace.
CK: How has Internet impacted the work of WMF?
Maya Sites of the Yucatan Peninsula, Yucatán, Mexico, ca. 600-900. Photographer: Bonnie Burnham. World Monuments Fund.
BB: The Internet has had a wonderful impact on our work in making it more widely accessible in ways we could not have imagined or planned for. When our World Monuments Watch list is announced every two years, the information reaches millions of people around the world in a matter of minutes. We get extraordinary responses from people everywhere who are moved by the places we are trying to defend. We can get a feeling for the local events they are organizing – a vigil, a rally, or a hearing. The connections are immediate.
Another way the Internet helps us is as a virtual environment for presenting the places we are trying to preserve, giving many people an opportunity to experience a real sense of place. With the development of other forms of new technology, such as laser scanning, we are now able to recreate monuments that are far away, inaccessible, or even lost, for a worldwide audience. This is a powerful new form of education.
CK: Part of WMF’s mission is education and training, what are some of the most critical education programs sponsored by WMF?
BB: We support many hands-on training programs at sites where we work. It is wonderful to see our trainees become personally involved with and committed to saving places that they might have been indifferent to prior to this opportunity, simply because they had not been able to see what we valued in those places. It’s very inspiring when a young person with no educational preparation comes to share and embody the values that inspire your own work. But my favorite educational program is one that WMF helped to establish at the Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design in Brooklyn, NY. The curriculum at this school draws completely upon learning directly from experiences in the built environment surrounding the school and in the community. Every academic course curriculum at every grade is interwoven with experiential knowledge from local landmarks – whether it’s English, math, science or history. The students learn from the monuments around them. I believe it is a very good way to learn, and the academic success of the students in the school has borne that out. Sometimes their lives are transformed by this opportunity. I wish I had had a similar experience when I was growing up.
CK: Has digital photography been useful to the work of WMF?
BB: Digital photography has and will continue to transform our ability to understand places. So much can be done to work with these images, integrate them together, transmit them around the world, and keep them permanently as a record of a given place at a given time, that digital images have almost outdated traditional photographic means. Traditional photography has become as a consequence more of an art form, a way of recording a moment or a sensation or a sense of place. All that is wonderful and legitimate, but perhaps the two have different purposes and different uses today.
CK: You studied at the University of Florida and l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne and devoted your career to cultural heritage preservation. Are there notable different cultural approaches to the preservation of world monuments?
BB: Nothing in my academic training prepared me for my career in heritage conservation, unless it was the opportunity of international study, where I learned very quickly that there are completely different cultural perspectives and approaches to education itself. I continue to be educated by every new project, country, and cultural environment in which we work. There are indeed different ways of thinking about monuments, different aesthetic and ethical approaches to preservation, and different ways in which communities and authorities locally express their respect for these sites.
Preah Khan; Exterior, ca. 12th c. Siem Reap Province, Cambodia. Photographer: John Stubbs/World Monuments Fund
CK: Is there any site/monument that you’ve always wanted to work on but never had the chance?
BB: Yes. The Taj Mahal. We were able to do a little work there, but not enough to help transform the run-down area around the monument and improve the overall experience of visiting the Taj, which would have been our long-term goal.
CK: What is one of the most endangered sites/monuments now that everyone should be aware of?
BB: The most endangered monuments today may be those that are most appreciated by the public. It is very rare for a good system to be in place to help preserve and protect monuments in relation to their own public. That public, especially in the form of tourists, can completely change the nature of the place, without meaning or wanting to do so, just by their very presence. The most endangered monument that is being lost, probably irretrievably, today is Venice. This is because of a range of factors working together to produce a net loss, which is getting worse as the years go on. The environmental impact of rising water is ominous. The demographic changes of the city, with the Venetians leaving or being forced out because of rising property values, the unregulated numbers of tourists and the insensitive commercial decisions – from allowing oversized tour boats in the canals to selling huge space for advertising panels on key monuments – have degraded its sense of place, and it is steadily losing its appeal as a living community. The political powers of the city, and its citizenry, do not seem to have the will to save historic Venice as a vital city.
It’s been several years since the attacks on 9/11, but the events refuse to be confined to history. They continue to shape life and discourse in New York City, the United States, and the world, and the subject touches on disciplines as varied as social studies, journalism, political science, international relations, religious studies, economics, and civics. The Artstor Digital Library offers extraordinary images that provide many angles through which this complex episode can be considered.
A dazed man picks up a paper that was blown out of the towers after the attack of the World Trade Center, and begins to read it. ©Larry Towell / Magnum Photos. Image and original data provided by Magnum Photos
Dozens of images of the attack on the World Trade Center are available in the Magnum Photos collection, which also includes photographs of New York City in the following days and subsequent commemorations such as the Tribute of Light at Ground Zero on the second anniversary of the attacks. The collection also features magnificent views of the World Trade Center from the 1970s to the 1990s.
The event and its ensuing developments brought forth a wide range of reactions; these are represented in the Digital Library with works by contemporary artists, from the elegiac National Tribute Quilt in the American Folk Art Museum to searingly critical pieces by renowned political artist Hans Haacke in Contemporary Art (Larry Qualls Archive).
There are also glimmers of wonder among the many solemn images. A particularly touching piece is a Mexican retablo commissioned in gratitude for the survival of a loved one who was working in the Twin Towers during the attack.
Franklin Furnace was founded in 1976 by artist Martha Wilson to champion ephemeral art forms neglected by mainstream arts institutions. The organization provided a much-needed forum for artists’ books, temporary installation art, and performance art, and launched the careers of artists whose work has greatly influenced art and cultural discourse in this country. After 35 years, Franklin Furnace continues its mission to present, preserve, and advocate on behalf of ephemeral art. In 2008, Franklin Furnace partnered with ARTstor to digitize and publish on the web documentation of events it presented and produced.
To celebrate the most recent addition of images and documentation of Franklin Furnace events in the Digital Library, Artstor invited Founding Director Martha Wilson to share a history of the renowned venue.
If I had known 35 years ago how much work it was going to be to establish a not-for-profit organization in my living loft at 112 Franklin Street in TriBeCa, I probably would not have done it. Several times I was tempted to fold the tent. Yet the vacuum in the art world that need to be filled (with hot air!) was obvious, and kept me going: none of the major institutions in town were paying attention to what artists were doing. Artists were publishing cheap stuff, artworks masquerading as books. Around the same time, Printed Matter was being formed (as a for-profit corporation at first) by a collective of artists and activists, to publish artists’ books; soon we divided the pie such that Franklin Furnace took on the exhibition and preservation of artists’ books, Printed Matter, Inc. took on their publication and distribution.
In the early days, I asked artists to read from their published works; this immediately became the performance art program. To complement the cheap stuff we were archiving, Franklin Furnace began exhibiting artworks in book form; this soon turned into the temporary installation program. Franklin Furnace often premiered artists in New York who later emerged as art world stars: Ida Applebroog, Eric Bogosian, David Cale, Patty Chang, Willie Cole, Sue de Beer, Nicole Eisenmann, Karen Finley, Kate Gilmore, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Ann Hamilton, Murray Hill, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Liza Lou, Taylor Mac, Robbie McCauley, Rashaad Newsome, William Pope.L, Emily Roysdon, Dread Scott, James Sienna, Theodora Skipitares, Michael Smith, Annie Sprinkle, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Paul Zaloom, among hundreds of others. Franklin Furnace has had an indelible impact upon art by launching the careers of artists whose work has influenced art and cultural discourse in this country.
Franklin Furnace occupied the ground floor and then the basement of 112 Franklin Street for 20 years. In the wake of the Culture Wars, we decided to “go virtual” to give artists the freedom of expression they had enjoyed in the loft during the 1970s. We moved to the Financial District until 9/11 made it depressing and archivally challenging, then responded to an RFP to move to 80 Arts in the BAM Cultural District, where we live today with collegial organizations like Bang on a Can, Bomb Magazine, Sound Portraits, and Witness.
Franklin Furnace collaborated with the Abrons Art Center of Henry Street Settlement to present “The History of the Future: A Franklin Furnace View of Performance Art” during the Performa 07 biennial. We presented live performance artists interspersed with historical video footage of performance art works from the last three decades. At the end of the evening, audience members were invited up on stage to enjoy drinks, and have their pictures taken with Marina Abramović. A couple approached me to say, “Hi, we’re Julie and Glenn Gribble and we live in your old loft at 112 Franklin Street.” We made a deal to throw a party someday. As our 35th birthday party appeared on the horizon, the plans took shape: We held our celebration not only in our original loft, but on our actual 35th birthday. Ame Gilbert and Deena Lubow of Communal Table prepared spectacular food, and got spinach pie from the nearby Square Diner, where many a lunch was eaten back in the day. Marja Samsom, who had performed as “Miss Behave” at Franklin Furnace in 1980, returned as the “Dumpling Diva” to make her signature mushroom dumplings. And Vince Bruns, proprietor of Westfield Seafood (and my partner of 18 years) provided shrimp and crab cakes.
As part and parcel of the entertainment at the party, we showed slides of artists’ installation and performance artworks which also showed the loft in all its gritty glory. These slides were harvested from a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Booth Ferris Foundation to digitize Franklin Furnace’s first decade of event records, to publish them on our website, and to contribute them to ARTstor’s database so they might be used in art and art history classrooms.
During the last 35 years, Franklin Furnace’s mission has remained constant—to make the world safe for avant-garde art—but the implementation of our purpose has evolved from presenting space to research resource. Instead of 75 people sitting on hard folding chairs, now our online audience is a worldwide mix of artists, students, scholars and regular folk from 65 countries. If I had had unlimited resources, I probably wouldn’t have taken Franklin Furnace into the virtual realm; and I occasionally feel nostalgic for the loft space at 112 Franklin Street. Yet I’m not sorry history turned out like it did!
–Martha Wilson, April 2011
Conrat Meit, Judith with the Head of Holofernes (detail ), 1512-1514 Alabaster with gilding 30 cm high Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich
In the Old Testament’s Book of Judith, the beautiful widow saved the besieged city of Bethulia by charming her way into the tent of Assyrian general Holofernes and beheading him, enabling the Israelites to defeat the invading army.
The Artstor Digital Library features more than 600 images depicting the story of Judith and Holofernes, attesting to the powerful appeal the Judith narrative has over artists. The Jessica E. Smith and Kevin R. Brine Charitable Trust sponsored 330 new images to be added to the Digital Library’s existing 300 images based on the story. Images on the theme range from an 11th century illuminated manuscript to an unnerving tableau by Judith Greifinger Klausner from 2008 that features insects playing the parts of the two characters.
Hans Baldung, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, early 16th century. Oil on panel , 92 x 77 cm. Schloss Friedenstein Museum, Gotha.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath, 1609-1610.Oil on canvas, 125 x 101 cm. Galleria Borghese, Source Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
We’ve gathered six examples that illustrate how the images in Artstor can be used to enhance the teaching and learning of architecture and architectural history, along with two case studies, one by a then-doctoral candidate and another by a fine art faculty member.
A rallying economy led the United Arab Emirates cities of Abu Dhabi and Dubai through a six-year building boom that transformed sand dunes into futuristic cityscapes boasting the world’s tallest building, biggest shopping mall, and The World, a man-made archipelago in the shape of the seven continents. While the building frenzy has largely been tamed by the international economic crisis, the projects it engendered have significantly expanded the vocabulary of contemporary architecture.
Sheik Zayed Road (view of the traffic and metro station exterior), Dubai. Image and original data provided by Art on File.
In their most recent Artstor-sponsored campaign, Art on File photographers Colleen Chartier and Rob Wilkinson documented state-of-the-art projects in Dubai such as Burj Khalifa (Skidmore, Owings and Merrell), the world’s tallest building; the Meydan Racecourse (TAK architects), the longest building in the world; the Burj al-Arab (Tom Wright of Atkins), a hotel constructed on an artificial island; the Dubai Marina (Emaar Properties), a man-made marina district; and the Rose Tower (Khatib & Alami Group), the world’s tallest building used exclusively as a hotel.
Capital Gate (RMJM Architects), Abu Dhabi. Image and original data provided by Art on File.
In Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Chartier and Wilkinson photographed the new Sheikh Zayed Mosque (Yousef Abdelki, architect, and Halcrow Group, engineers), an enormous project that can accommodate up to 44,000 people for prayer sessions, and the Yas Hotel (Asymptote Architects), which features a Formula One racetrack that passes through the hotel, and a net-like roof consisting of thousands of light panels that change colors.
Dubai Creek Golf and Yacht Club (Godwin Austen Johnson, architects). Image and original data provided by Art on File.
Other buildings in the new campaign include Capital Gate (RMJM Architects), the largest leaning tower in the world, Al Jazira Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium, and the new Ferrari World (Benoy Architects), a low undulating design with a roof surface of 200,000 sq. meters still under construction.
Dubai Metro (Aedas, architects). Image provided by Art on File.
Explore Artstor’s Art on File collection in JSTOR.
Yas Hotel & Marina (Asymptote Architecture), Yas Island, Abu Dhabi. Image and original data provided by Art on File.
Christine Kuan interviews Maria Ann Conelli, Executive Director of the American Folk Art Museum
CK: What’s special about the American Folk Art Museum?
MAC: The American Folk Art Museum is the only museum in the United States dedicated to traditional folk art as well as creative expressions of contemporary self-taught artists; it is home to one of the world’s premier collections dating from the eighteenth century to the present.
CK: Many more people are interested in folk art today, why do you think that is?
MAC: I think that folk art and the art of the self-taught have an inherent accessibility people can relate to. What is amazing is that the art is made by individuals with no formal artistic or academic training who nevertheless have the need to articulate their passion to create. The result is these astounding works that speak to a broad and varied audience.
CK: What’s your favorite work in the collection?
MAC: That’s like asking a parent which child is her favorite.
CK: Why did the Museum decide to make digital images of the collection available in the Artstor Digital Library?
MAC: A large part of the museum’s focus is on education. We take great pride in our educational website, www.folkartrevealed.org, through which teachers have access to museum-generated lesson plans for grades K through 12. One of the exciting aspects about our collaboration with Artstor is that it allows us to reach a collegiate audience in ways that were not available to us before. It also allows us to share very high-resolution image files of thousands of objects in the museum’s collection that offer important details, such as stitching in textiles and signatures on paintings—details that are crucial to the study and preservation of folk art for generations to come. Providing high-resolution images to teachers, scholars, and students is extremely important to us—we want the works in our collection to be shared with as large an audience as possible.
CK: How is your museum taking advantage of digital technologies?
MAC: We are using the Internet more and more to reach a larger audience and stay in touch with those who may not be able to actually visit the museum. Digital photography, because of its ease of use, makes it possible for us to share the collection with people around the globe, and social media outlets allow us to offer behind-the-scenes looks at the museum. Through the museum’s main and educational websites, as well as Facebook and Twitter, we are able to engage audiences around the world by sharing archival and installation information that we were not able to provide in the past.
CK: What’s the biggest challenge facing American museums [or your museum] today?
MAC: I think all museums are grappling with how to attract and engage a younger audience. We have a teen docent program that we’re all really proud of—our museum educators teach high school students how to serve as gallery guides to their peers. It’s a huge time commitment for the students and our educators, but I think it’s valuable for the participants to develop not just visual literacy but also writing, speaking, and critical thinking skills. The museum’s online presence can be a great introduction to the art, especially for younger audiences—but I think they know that the “real thing” is so much more interesting.
The Artstor staff wishes you happy holidays with some extraordinary images of our hometown of New York City during the holiday season stemming back to the 19th century. For example, the crowds of shoppers in D. Rellam’s print from 1874, “Holiday Greens–A Scene in Washington Market, New York” 1 are recognizable today. While the market was razed in the early 1970s, the image echoes the crowds in the popular Union Square Holiday Market, where many of us will be shopping this month.
The eternal hustle and bustle of the holidays in our metropolis is captured in abstract form in New Yorkers Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s “Christmas Card for Ray and Charles Eames” (1946) 2.
Another timeless image that many of us in New York recognize is the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Angel Tree” (18th-19th century) 3, which was first exhibited in 1957 and has since become an annual tradition.
The audience in Inge Morath’s three photographs of “Ice skaters at Christmas Show on Madison Avenue” (1958) 4 radiates an innocence that unexpectedly reappears decades later in Erich Hartmann’s “World Financial Center; Christmas lights” (1990)4. Meanwhile, Susan Meisela’s series of Santa Claus photos (1976-1977) 4 portray the grit that we all know and—most of the time—love in the city, as does Nan Goldin’s “Sharon with the Christmas Tree, New York City” (1990) 5.
Season’s Greetings, wherever you are! We invite you to search the Artstor Digital Library for more holiday images from around the world, including places as far-flung as Cuba, Lebanon, Hungary, and Cambodia.
Judy Chicago is an artist, author, and educator whose work has significantly transformed the traditional art historical canon. She and her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, have collaborated throughout their marriage of twenty-five years in art projects and team teaching at such institutions as Western Kentucky University, Cal Poly Pomona, and Vanderbilt University. Through the Flower, a nonprofit Feminist art organization founded by Chicago in 1978 and based in New Mexico, serves the general public and especially K-12 schools by creating educational programs dedicated to communicating the importance of art and its power in countering the erasure of women’s achievements.
CK: From the seminal work The Dinner Party (1979) to the present, do you think the art world has changed?
JC: Since the time I created The Dinner Party there have been many changes in the art world, which has become globalized. Women and artists of color are free to openly address issues of gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation in their work, which was not true when I was young. Moreover, there is no dominant style but rather a plethora of approaches to art-making, along with a wide range of media, all of which is to be celebrated. At the same time, in terms of the major museums, permanent collections continue to be only 3-5% women and only 2.5% of commercial solo art publications are devoted to women. This institutional resistance is what I set out change many decades ago.
CK: Many well-known artists today are women. How has your work as artist, photographer, and educator impacted the recognition and preservation of women’s achievements?
JC: Obviously, The Dinner Party, which traveled to sixteen venues in six countries and three continents to a viewing audience of over one million people, helped to educate many viewers about women’s achievements. Its permanent housing in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum is extending its reach, as people are coming to see it from all over the world. In addition to The Dinner Party, my other collaborative projects (the Birth Project, 1980-85; the Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, 1985-1993, created with Donald Woodman; and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time,1994-2000) helped to bring women’s experiences and perspectives into the art discourse. And over the course of its three decades of existence, Through the Flower has done exhibitions and programming aimed at highlighting women’s achievements in the arts.
CK: Are there challenges today that women artists face today that were not issues in the past?
JC: This is a difficult question for me to answer, given where I am in my career. However, from my perspective, the greatest challenge is that, as stated by the pioneering women’s historian Gerda Lerner, “women don’t know what women before them thought or taught” (and I would add created). Consequently, instead of being able to build upon the achievements of their predecessors, women artists are caught in the same cycle of repetition that The Dinner Party recounts.
CK: In recent years, “feminism” has taken on a wide spectrum of meanings both positive and negative. What does “feminism” mean to you?
JC: The definition of feminism is not a personal choice; it is a philosophy that dates back two hundred years or more, specifically to Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous tract “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” published in 1792. Since that time, there have been many feminist theories, all of which advocate the political, social and economic equality of the sexes. Successive waves of feminist movements have attempted to achieve such equality in the face of fierce resistance because sexual equality would upend the structure of power on the planet.
CK: What do you think has been the greatest accomplishment to date of Through the Flower?
JC: Through the Flower has survived over the course of more than thirty years with little support from traditional funding sources and very few grants. Instead, it has been sustained by individuals who believed in my work and the goals of Through the Flower, thereby demonstrating the power of the individual to contribute to social change. I believe that this is an important model for alternative arts organizations, particularly those aimed at enlarging the art dialogue. Over this time, Through the Flower has provided a framework for my collaborative art-making which—in addition to producing works of art—empowered many of the participants. Moreover, given its modest staff and funding base, Through the Flower has managed to accomplish many significant goals. For more information, go to throughtheflower.org.
CK: Judy, you and Frances Borzello just published the book Frida Kahlo: Face to Face. Many conversations are focused on the so-called “death” of scholarly art publishing. What do you think is the future of print art publications?
JC: I hope that print art publications never end, because there is no digital version that is even close to providing the pleasure of the printed page in terms of images and text. That said, I believe that text-based print books will be replaced by digital forms. But fine art printing will survive because I cannot imagine a reader getting the same satisfaction viewing Frida Kahlo: Face to Face online as they will by holding this large format, sumptuously illustrated book in their hands and turning the pages to discover the many beautiful images and reading the texts.
CK: You continue to exhibit and your works continue to attract large audiences. What do you hope viewers come away with from your current show, Surveying Judy Chicago: 1970-2010?
JC: Surveying Judy Chicago: 1970-2010 at ACA Gallery, New York, from October 14 through December 4, 2010 is intended to provide a glimpse into my overall body of art. Although I am gratified by the attention The Dinner Party brought me, it is my abiding hope that one day it will be seen as only one work in a large and varied oeuvre. Hopefully the ACA show will be a step towards the achievement of this goal.
CK: You’ve contributed 367 images of your works to the ARTstor Digital Library and they’ve just gone live. Why did you decide to make your images available to educational and scholarly users via ARTstor?
JC: I wanted to make my images available via ARTstor because I recognize its crucial role in providing images to teachers and professors. My study of history taught me that many women artists have been erased from history and one of my goals has been to overcome that erasure—for myself, for the 1038 women represented in The Dinner Party, along with the countless women artists Through the Flower has exhibited and honored. I am deeply appreciative that ARTstor has accepted this gift and hope that it will prove useful.
CK: Has the digital medium impacted your work?
JC: The digital medium has definitely impacted both my work and my career. For example, several of my recent lithographs (from Retrospective in a Box, seven prints surveying my career) combine digital imagery with traditional lithography. The Internet has provided a means of sharing my work with a worldwide audience through my website, judychicago.com. And Through the Flower’s K-12 Dinner Party Curriculum is available online as a series of free, downloadable pdf files. These are just a few examples of the many ways in which the digital medium is transforming our lives.
CK: What inspires you to continue working and collaborating with other artists?
JC: I have always worked both individually and collaboratively. Some projects are best realized by one’s own hand while others require the participation of people with different skills. As to what inspires me? An ongoing passion for art, something that I’ve had since I was a child.
Judy Chicago’s current exhibition, Surveying Judy Chicago: 1970-2010, is on view from October 14, 2010 to December 4, 2010 at ACA Gallery, 529 20th Street, 5th Floor in New York City.
Judy Chicago and Frances Borzello’s new book, Face to Face: Frida Kahlo is published by Prestel and launched with a lecture and book signing at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Chicago will be doing book events around the country with an English book tour to follow in June, 2011.
Learn more about the Judy Chicago Collection in the ARTstor Digital Library.
View the Judy Chicago Collection in the ARTstor Digital Library.
To learn more about Judy Chicago, go to www.judychicago.com.
