Art & Architecture Library

The Smithsonian Institution has just launched a search interface it calls the Collections Search Center, which provides a single point of entry to most of the Smithsonian's publicly accessible collections data. The collections include: the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection, the National Portrait Gallery Collection, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Archives of American Art, the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum Photo Archives, and the Smithsonian Libraries' Art and Artists Files. It appears that the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Collection will be added in the near future. More information: http://collections.si.edu/search/about.jsp

A page with a host of useful links:
http://www.collegeart.org/ip/

Lynda Benglis	Mumble	ARTDVD 257
Ant Farm	Media Burn	ARTDVD 230
Dara Birnbaum	PM Magazine/Acid Rock	ARTDVD 258
Chris Burden	Documentation of Selected Works 1971-74	ARTDVD 229
Sophie Calle and Gregory Shephard	Double-Blind	ARTDVD 228
Rhys Chatham	A Four Year Retrospective	ARTDVD 259
Jane Crawford and Robert Fiore	Rundown	ARTDVD 219
Jane Crawford and Robert Fiore	Sheds	ARTDVD 218
Valie Export	Space Seeing - Space Hearing	ARTDVD 227
Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn	Resolution of the Eye	ARTDVD 266
Nancy Holt	Sun Tunnels	ARTDVD 225
Nancy Holt	Points of View: Clocktower	ARTDVD 224
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson	Mono Lake	ARTDVD 223
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson	Swamp	ARTDVD 221
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson	East Coast, West Coast	ARTDVD 220
Ken Jacobs	The Surging Sea of Humanity	ARTDVD 262
Ken Jacobs	Tom Tom the Piper's Son	ARTVC 32
Joan Jonas	Left Side Right Side	ARTDVD 226
Peter Kirby	Binary Lives	ARTDVD 263
Chris Marker	Bestiaire	ARTDVD 264
Gordon Matta-Clark	Programs 1-8	ARTDVD 268-274
Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley	Heidi	ARTDVD 261
Bruce Nauman	Manipulating a Fluorescent Tube	ARTDVD 232
Dennis Oppenheim	Program 4	ARTDVD 254
Tony Oursler	Spheres of Influence: "Diamond"	ARTDVD 265
Tony Oursler	Tony Oursler: Selected Works	ARTDVD 255
Carolee Schneemann	Plumb Line	ARTDVD 233
Carolee Schneemann	Snows	ARTDVD 234
Robert Smithson	Spiral Jetty	ARTDVD 231
Robert Smithson	Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island	ARTDVD 260
Michael Snow	*Corpus Callosum	ARTDVD 256
Stan VanDerBeek	Visibles	ARTVC 31

The University of Wisconsin has created a terrific material culture resource that includes over 1,500 images and dozens of fully-scanned books. For example, have a look at Gustave Stickley's book Craftsman Homes.

      

Here are a few sites with some incredible medical images--some new, some very old:

From UC Davis:
Brain Maps

From the National Library of Medicine:
Historical Anatomies on the Web

From Stanford:
Bassett Collection of Stereoscopic Images of Human Anatomy

Today's New York Times contains reviews for two Medieval manuscript-related shows, both of which seem truly compelling. "Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages," at the Met, explores the relatively unknown pen-and-ink work of Medieval artists through drawings both accidental--i.e., unfinished manuscript illuminations--and entirely intentional--e.g., architectural renderings. Read Roberta Smith's review here. The Morgan Library's exhibition "Pages of Gold," on the other hand, presents single manuscript leaves that bear extraordinarily colored and gilded--highly finished--images. The pages are beautiful yet complicated intellectually by their separation from their original volumes. Reviewer Karen Rosenberg discusses the nineteenth-century practice of separating illuminations for individual sale. She poses the following question: "Most people would agree that tearing up an illuminated manuscript to sell it by the page is vandalism. But might it also liberate the art on those pages?"

The Stencil Archive is an incredible resource for documentation relating to an art form growing rapidly in popularity and critical treatment. Photographs have been, of necessity, taken in situ and therefore vary somewhat in quality. Organization is geographic, but a "Search the Gallery" features allows for thematic/keyword searches (e.g., "skull:" 34 results; "San Francisco:" 207 results). The Book Cover Archive is a rather remarkable collection of contemporary book covers. Searches can be limited by publisher, designer, title, photographer, typeface, etc.

Looking for a really quiet space to study?

Want to reserve a room for planning group projects?

Need a space where you can quiz each other prior to finals?

The room on the basement floor of the Art Stacks (formerly known as the Rare Book Room) is now available as a reservable study/discussion/seminar space. When not reserved, the Study Room may be used as an open study area. Enjoy!

http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/

This is one of my favorite clip art pages. The images were digitized by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, College of Education, University of South Florida. Large tiff files are available for download. And though the cataloging information is fairly brief, the original source is always referenced. For example:

File Name: 44790_oyster
Description: "A salt-water mollusk, highly esteemed as an article of food." -Foster, 1921.
Source: Ellsworth D. Foster The American Educator (Chicago: Ralph Durham Company, 1921) 2696
Keywords: oyster anatomy, label mollusk

Katie and I just returned from Indianapolis, where we attended the ARLIS/NA 37th Annual Conference.
Lots of good ideas and impressive projects; here are just a few notes (more to come).

• BHA to become IBA:
  The Bibliography of the History of Art, published by the Getty Research Institute, has parted ways with its French partner the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. The result: among other things, a name change, to the International Bibliography of Art. More importantly, updates to the database that had not occurred for a year will soon be made (and will include the year's backlog).

• What is "Visual Literacy," and how can an art library/visual resources center help contribute to its development in students of all disciplines?
  This was the general inquiry that inspired the conference session "Visual Literacy: What, Why, How?" Here is a reasonable-sounding definition.: http://www.ivla.org/org_what_vis_lit.htm Ian McDermott, Assistant Librarian at the Yale Center for British Art and one of the session's speakers, breaks the goals of Visual Literacy down into three components: discovery, interpretation, and use.

  Discovery: through use of tools such as the ones he presents in his research guide: http://guides.library.yale.edu/findimages

  Interpretation: Here is a great example of interpretation that isn't limited to the realm of art history: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-shaw/reading-the-pictures-embo_b_1....

  Use: Ian's research guide includes a good section on this topic. At the conference he also presented this terrific voicethread presentation (see description of "voicethread" below): http://clc.yale.edu/tools/visual-literacy-tools/.

• Some interesting Web 2.0 tools:

  http://www.cooliris.com/
  Image management is as important as image discovery. This is a fairly compelling tool (at least visually).

  http://voicethread.com/about/
  I'm especially excited about how this program could assist in bibliographic instruction.

  http://tineye.com/faq
  I'm not sure yet if and when I would use this reverse image search engine in my daily work, but it does reveal really interesting trails of image use across cyberspace.

  http://www.blist.com/
  A blist is, apparently, a Web list. This set of widgets allows users to create online lists and forms and tables and tallies, and then to post them online wherever they wish.

  http://www.eurekster.com/
  A swicki is, according to the Eurekster Web site, a "customized search portal for your website or blog." Perhaps worth exploring.

Artforum News
http://artforum.com/news/

The Art History Newsletter
http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/

ArtsBeat (New York Times)
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/

The Comics Reporter
http://www.comicsreporter.com/

Cooper-Hewitt Design Blog
http://blog.cooperhewitt.org/

Yale Arts Library Blog
http://artslibrary.wordpress.com/

The following two series, published by MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery and the J. Paul Getty Museum, respectively, are remarkable for their creative comprehensiveness, their utility, and their visual appeal. The Art & Architecture Library owns all published volumes in both series; the Getty titles are housed in our reference collection.

NX650 .H67 G68 2007	Documents of Contemporary Art Series London : Whitechapel ; Cambridge, MA : MIT Press
N7740 .B2913 2005 REF.	The Guide to Imagery Series Los Angeles : J. Paul Getty Museum

Monday, Feburary 23, 5 pm:
Caroline Walker Bynum
"Weeping Statues and Bleeding Bread: Miracles in the Later Middle Ages"
Stanford Humanities Center

Wednesday, February 25, 5 pm:
Caroline Walker Bynum
"Holy Pieces: Attitudes toward Parts and Wholes in Late Medieval Devotion"
Stanford Humanities Center

Thursday, March 5, 4 pm:
Julian Bell
"Verbal Bubblewrap; or, The Contradictions of Art Writing"
Stanford Humanities Center

See the event description at:
http://events.stanford.edu/events/172/17279/