Archive for June, 2009
Joseph Pintz, Joined Drain Tile (detail), Earthenware, 2008
accessCeramics was awarded a $10,000 grant for “Access to Artistic Excellence” from the National Endowment for the Arts. accessCeramics, organized by the Visual Resources Collection of Watzek Library, Lewis & Clark College, is a collection of over 2,000 digital images by 128 contemporary artists. The site “merges a traditional academic digital image collection’s metadata capabilities with Flickr’s openness and flexibility.”
Tags: ceramics, digital library, Flickr, Lewis and Clark College, sculpture
Posted by Joan Winter on June 30, 2009 in art, images | No Comments »
Paolo Veronese’ “Wedding at Cana”
Peter Greenaway, video artist and director of such films as The Draftsman’s Contract and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, has produced a video installation for the 2009 Venice Biennial. The work, an art history lecture and visual spectacle, merges the High Renaissance with digital technology.
The fifty minute presentation parses and re-imagines Paolo Vernonese’ “Wedding at Cana.” Digital images of the painting are projected onto the walls of the refectory of Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. The soundtrack includes dialogue of the wedding guests imagined by Greenaway. Chatter culminates in their astonishment at the miracle of Christ transforming water into wine.
“Wedding at Cana” is the third in a series “Nine Classical Paintings Revisited.” Previous explorations include Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and da Vinci’s “Last Super.”
Read more about Greenaway’s installation in Roberta Smith’s New York Times article.
Tags: installations, Palladio, Peter Greenaway, Venice Biennial, Veronese
Posted by Joan Winter on June 30, 2009 in art, photography | No Comments »
Memphis Union Station, Courtesy of the Infrastructurist
Check out the post “Demolished! 11 Beautiful Train Stations That Fell To The Wrecking Ball (And The Crappy Stuff Built In Their Place)” in The Infrastructurist: America Under Construction. The contrast between the now demolished neo-classical buildings and the contemporary government offices, highways, and parking lots is incredibly striking.
Tags: abandoned architecture, train stations, transportation, urban planning
Posted by Joan Winter on June 29, 2009 in architecture | No Comments »
VADS: The Online Resource for Visual Arts contains over 100,000 free and copyright clear images for research and teaching. A unique aspect of their digital collection particularly relevant to architecture students is The City of the Future, a “project that sets out to explore contrasts between the familiarity of city fabrics, the strangeness of the past, and the newness of present-day experience.” It includes scholarly essays and a database of archival films documenting the urban environment.
Tags: digital libraries, VADs
Posted by Joan Winter on June 26, 2009 in art, images, photography | No Comments »
Nick Cobbing’s photographs of glacial ice in Greenland includes two narratives. Surface Tension, an “aerial study” of ice formations, captures the melting of polar ice caps , and Noorderlicht documents a treacherous journey on a 100-year old schooner through the Arctic Circle.
Tags: Greenland, ice, photography
Posted by Joan Winter on June 25, 2009 in art, images, landscape, photography | No Comments »
Photo courtesy of stevenkamenar on Flickr
Paul Simon’s lyrics from his 1973 song “Kodachrome” have come to fruition. Facing declining demand, Kodak has taken away the film that shot those “nice bright colors, those greens of summers.”
Usage of the film, primarily for 35mm slides, peaked in the 50s and 60s. Kodachrome was known for its archival stability and rich colors.
Kodachrome represented only 1% of Kodak’s sales and the remaining film will be donated to the George Eastman House Museum.
Photojournalist Steve McCurry – his Kodachrome photograph “Afghan Girl” is the most recognized image in the history of National Geographic – will shoot one of the last rolls of the historic color film.
Read more in the Democrat and Chronicle’s Article
View Kodak’s slide-show of great Kodacrhome Moments
Tags: analog, Kodachrome, Kodak, photographic processes, preservation
Posted by Joan Winter on June 23, 2009 in photography | No Comments »
An initial release of 2,700 images from Bryn Mawr’s collection of site plans documenting ancient and medieval buildings in the Ancient Near East and Europe is now available. Read more here.
ArtSTOR is also in the process of adding the Samuel H. Kress Collection from the National Gallery of Art, which includes over 600 images of European painting, sculpture and decorative arts. Read more here.
Tags: ARTstor, Bryn Mawr, National Gallery of Art
Posted by Joan Winter on June 22, 2009 in ARTstor, architectural history, art, copyright, maps | No Comments »
Eames House, courtesy of blanco teko on Flickr
Charles and Ray Eames’ home and studio in Pacific Palisades, California, turns 60 this weekend. Case Study House No. 8 is an icon of modernist design and a National Historic Landmark. Read more in the New York Times article A Prefab Home that Dazzles Still.
Tags: Charles and Ray Eames, modernism, preservation
Posted by Joan Winter on June 18, 2009 in architecture | No Comments »
Unidentified eye, circa 1900, watercolor on ivory, Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum provides some invaluable online reference tools, including Researching Your Art, a guide to appraising, identifying, and caring for family heirlooms and flea market finds.
Tags: appraising, art, collecting, musuems, Smithsonian
Posted by Joan Winter on June 17, 2009 in art | No Comments »
The New York Public Library has integrated a collection of photographs documenting the American landscape with Google Earth. Now you can view and browse Photographic Views of the United States spatially rather than alphabetically. Download the KML file here.
Tags: Google Earth, historic preservation, NYPL
Posted by Joan Winter on June 12, 2009 in architecture, images, landscape, maps, photography | No Comments »
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