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Blog Category: Organization

April 15, 2015

Taking our time: Artstor’s first Slow Art Day

Slow_art2

We recently wrote about Slow Art Day, and were quite happy to finally try it ourselves this past weekend.

To recap, a recent study estimated that museumgoers spend an average of just 17 seconds looking at an individual artwork. To combat this habit, Phil Terry, CEO of Collaborative Gain, started a movement in which a volunteer host selects art at a gallery or museum, participants meet at the venue to examine several works for five to ten minutes each, and then discuss their impressions over lunch or coffee.

FRICK1

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March 12, 2015

At-risk collections to receive preservation and distribution support from Artstor

artstor_logo_rgb2Artstor announces the first four recipients of a new initiative to preserve and increase the availability of at-risk collections. The selected projects are:

  • The James Cahill Archive of Chinese art (University of California, Berkeley)
  • Excavations and finds in Oaxaca by Judith Zeitlin, 1973 and 1990 (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
  • Ronald M. Bernier Archive, Buddhist initiation rituals in Nepal in the ’70s and ’80s and key historical sites from Myanmar (University of Colorado Boulder)
  • The Mohamed Makiya Archive, Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT’s archive of Iraqi architect and urban planner Mohamed Saleh Makiya (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

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February 18, 2015

Roy Lichtenstein Foundation awards $75,000 to Artstor

Photographer D. James Dee and his archive

Photographer D. James Dee and his archive

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has awarded $75,000 to Artstor in support of the James Dee Archives project. The Archives are composed of approximately 250,000 slides, transparencies, negatives, and photographs documenting contemporary art in New York City over the last four decades, and Artstor is digitizing and maintaining the archive for use in research and education. The gift will support the processing of the collection, developing crowdsourcing software for collaborative cataloging, and the outreach to galleries and individuals who would be helpful in interpreting the images.

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February 2, 2015

The art of looking slowly

Workshop of Raphael, probably Giovanni da Udine, Cupid on a Wagon Drawn by Snails, 1516. Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. ; artres.com; scalarchives.com, (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Workshop of Raphael, probably Giovanni da Udine, Cupid on a Wagon Drawn by Snails, 1516. Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. ; artres.com; scalarchives.com, (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence / ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

“I didn’t know how to look at art,” Phil Terry, founder and CEO of Collaborative Gain, confessed to ARTnews a few years ago. “Like most people, I would walk by quickly.” As the article points out, a study in Empirical Studies of the Arts estimates that museumgoers spend an average of just 17 seconds looking at an individual painting. But with Slow Art Day, Terry might just be changing those statistics.

It all started in 2008, when Terry decided to try an experiment at an exhibit at the Jewish Museum. Instead of rushing through the show glancing at everything, he looked at just a few works, slowly. He found that he loved it.

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August 22, 2014

Call for at-risk collection-building proposals

From James Shulman
President, Artstor

I’m writing to announce a call for collection-building proposals focused on at-risk archives of individual scholars. The Artstor Digital Library includes many image collections from individual scholars who have built important archives in support of their work.  Now, we are launching a project to preserve and increase the availability of these at-risk collections by inviting the Visual Resources community, which supports many such scholars, to identify and submit proposals for Artstor to provide some modest financial support to digitize and catalog some of these collections.  Artstor would then maintain the collections and make them available through the Artstor Digital Library as well as through open access initiatives (especially the Digital Public Library of America, with whom we have worked as a content hub since their April 2013 launch).

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May 8, 2014

Letter from the Chairman & the President

artstor_logo_rgb2July 1, 2014 will mark ten years since the Artstor Digital Library became available for educational use. Today, nearly half a million registered users at more than 1,500 educational institutions around the world use the Library for their research and teaching. We are always fascinated by the work being done using Artstor – from Lois Kuyper-Rushing, the music librarian at Louisiana State who curated dozens of image groups related to musicology, to Lera Boroditsky, professor of psychology at Stanford, who tracked the gender representations of ideas (such as Liberty) across cultures and times.

As the Artstor Digital Library continues to expand its multidisciplinary content (including cartoons from The New Yorker and anthropological objects from The American Museum of Natural History), we continue to develop on other fronts. Last year, we worked with six museums to support the launch of the open Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Soon after, institutions such as the University of Delaware, Bryn Mawr College, and Cornell University contributed special collections of images and video to the DPLA via our Shared Shelf service.

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January 31, 2014

Artstor to release performance videos from Franklin Furnace

Guy de Cointet | Two Drawings | 5/9/1978 | This image was provided by the Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.

Guy de Cointet | Two Drawings | 5/9/1978 | This image was provided by the Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.

We are delighted to announce that Artstor is collaborating with the Franklin Furnace Archive to introduce videos in the Digital Library in the coming months. Franklin Furnace has been championing performance and other ephemeral arts for more than three decades. Martha Wilson, Franklin Furnace’s founding director, elaborates on the significance of this collaboration:

While there is undeniable value to gathering objects from performances such as costumes, props, and ephemera, video offers an irreplaceable key to understanding temporal works. Moving images are the best window we have into the past—no amount of caption text or notes from scripts can convey the look and feel of this pivotal time! Franklin Furnace is pleased to be working in collaboration with Artstor to bring video documentation of our performance art events to a broad scholarly audience.

We hope these fifty videos featuring Franklin Furnace alumni such as Alice Aycock, Ericka Beckman, Lee Breuer, John Cage, Guy De Cointet, Constance De Jong, Richard Foreman, the Kipper Kids, Jill Kroesen, Matt Mullican, Michael Smith, and William Wegman will provide insight into the intentions of avant-garde artists from 1976 forward, and will help to embed the value of ephemeral art practice in art and cultural history.

– Martha Wilson, January 2014

You may also be interested in 35 Years of Ephemeral Art: Martha Wilson on Franklin Furnace

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November 8, 2013

Artstor named “best overall” database by Library Journal

We are thrilled to have been named as one of the two “best overall” databases of 2013 along with JSTOR by Library Journal. Lura Sanborn, reference librarian at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH is quoted as saying that “Both databases are ‘classics worth owning,’” and adding “My library simply could not get by without JSTOR and Artstor.” Read all the reviews here.

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June 10, 2013

Announcing the winners of the ARTstor Travel Award 2013!

Ordered by Shapur I | Dam and Bridge at Shushtar; c. 260 | Shushtar, Iran | Islamic Art and Architecture Collection (Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom, Walter Denny)

Ordered by Shapur I | Dam and Bridge at Shushtar; c. 260 | Shushtar, Iran | Islamic Art and Architecture Collection (Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom, Walter Denny)

Congratulations to the five winners of this year’s ARTstor Travel Awards! They will each receive $1,500 to be used for their teaching and research travel needs over the course of the next year. The winning essays and accompanying images will be posted in the blog in the near future.

Our thanks to everyone who submitted an essay. Our committee was very impressed by the creative ways that our users integrate the images in the ARTstor Digital Library into their teaching and research. We hope to feature notable submissions from runners up in the blog throughout the year.

The ARTstor Travel Awards 2013 winning essays are:

Peyvand Firouzeh, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge
Shushtar: A Town to Tame Water

The aridity of the Middle East stands in contrast to the landscape architecture of Islamic gardens, where water is used generously and luxuriously. The contrast hints at creative methods of dealing with water scarcity: from man-made canals and reservoirs to cisterns and qanats (subterranean tunnel-wells). Firouzeh focuses on Shushtar, a town in southwest Iran, by looking at the ways its inhabitants applied to tame water, making the nearby river not only a resource for the essentials, but also an amenity for leisure.

Lisa Hartley, Student Services Associate, Columbus College of Art Design
Wrapped Up in Lace: Chantilly

Coco Chanel called lace “one of the prettiest imitations ever made of the fantasy of nature,” and Hartley introduces us to Chantilly, the tiny town in France where the craft originated. The traditions and skills used there date back as early as the 16th century, when European nobility commissioned workers to create dresses, parasols, shawls, and gloves in beautiful openwork fabric.

Anne C. Leader, Art History Professor, Savannah College of Art and Design-Atlanta
Florence: City of the Living, City of the Dead

While the primary motivation for patrons of religious architecture and decoration was to gain or retain God’s grace, Florentine tomb monuments manifest a conflicting mix of piety and social calculation, reflecting tension between Christian humility and social recognition. Leader’s essay reconstructs the rich mosaic of tomb markers that once covered the floors, walls, and yards of the Florentine cityscape to bring us closer to how Florentines experienced the deaths and memories of their kin, friends, and competitors in the early modern city.

Marlene Nakagawa, Undergraduate student at the University of Oregon
Alexandria: The City

From Pakistan to Turkey, Alexander the Great founded or renamed nearly twenty cities after himself as a representation of his omnipresence in the ancient world. Over the centuries, most of these Alexandrian cities have been destroyed, renamed, or absorbed into other territories. Nakagawa introduces to the major exception: Alexandria, Egypt’s largest seaport, which continues to be a dynamic force in the country’s ancient and modern economy.

Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture, Tulane University
Washington’s Secret City: Cultural Capital

African Americans made up from a quarter to a third of Washington, D.C.’s population throughout the nineteenth century, and historian Constance Green characterized the capital in the early 1900s as the “undisputed center of American Negro civilization.” This population peaked between 1960 and 1990. Wiley’s submission tells the story of African Americans in Washington and their significant contribution to the nation’s capital since its founding in 1790.

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April 17, 2013

Artstor Travel Awards 2013: Cities

Antoni Gaudí | La Pedrera (Mila House) | 1906-1910 | Image and original data provided by Shmuel Magal, Sites and Photos; sites-and-photos.com

Antoni Gaudí | La Pedrera (Mila House) | 1906-1910 | Image and original data provided by Shmuel Magal, Sites and Photos; sites-and-photos.com

The Artstor Travel Awards are back and they are now open to undergraduate students! This year the theme is cities: their histories and development, their depictions in art and documentation, their architecture, their ruins, their governments, their peoples, their myths.

Create an Artstor image group or groups and a single essay of 500 words or less that creatively introduces us to a city or cities we did not know or reveals an intriguing aspect of the cities we do know. Five winners— college and graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field—will receive $1,500 each to help support travel-related educational and scholarly activities. Winning essays and other selected submissions will be published on the Artstor Blog, Artstor website, and via our social media channels. Deadline extended to Tuesday, May 28.

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