Now available: Images from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA)

Unknown (Japanese) | Seki station, No. 48, Tokaido Road series | Indianapolis Museum of Art; imamuseum.org |Image © Indianapolis Museum of Art

ARTstor and the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) have collaborated to share more than 2,000 images from its encyclopedic permanent collection in the Digital Library. This is the second installment of a projected total of 10,000 images.

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New agreement: Images from the permanent collection of the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art

ARTstor is collaborating with the University of Florida to share more than 300 images from the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art.

The images consist of a selection of approximately 335 images of artworks representing the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art‘s five core collecting areas: African art, Asian art, modern art, contemporary art, and photography, as well as its holdings of Ancient American art, Oceanic art, and Prints and Drawings before 1850.

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New agreement: Images from the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

ARTstor is collaborating with the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum to share approximately 4,000 images from the permanent collection in the Digital Library.

The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. The Museum presents compelling perspectives on the impact of design on daily life through active educational and curatorial programming.

The Museum’s diverse collection spans twenty four centuries of historic and contemporary design, including seventeenth-century Japanese tsuba, Parisian parasol designs, postmodern glassware, modular toys, and fabric about the future.

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Now available: Images from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Harvard University)

Navajo | Pin, round silver base set with 52 turquoise stones in 3 rows around a center stone | Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

ARTstor Digital Library has collaborated with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University to share nearly 25,000 additional images of Pre-Columbian, African, Native North American, and Oceanic objects. This brings the current available total to more than 28,000 of a projected 154,000 images from the Museum’s collection.

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Teaching with ARTstor: The Great Mosque of Djenné and West African architecture

James Conlon | The Great Mosque of Djenne, South façade, exterior | image: 2008 | Djenne, Mali | for commercial use or publication, please contact: Caleb Smith, Director, Media Center for Art History, Columbia University. Email: cs2044@columbia.edu

Mrs. Michelle Apotsos
Stanford University
Doctoral candidate Art History/Architectural History

As a graduate student at Tufts University, I was once given the opportunity to give a lecture to a class of architectural history students on West African architectural form for the purpose of unsettling some common notions that inform Western conceptions of the built environment. I decided to present a case study of the Djenné mosque in Mali, West Africa as an example of an architectural tradition that utilizes distinctive structures, materials, and iconographies to resonate with its cultural context. The experience itself not only revealed to me the inherent challenges of teaching architectural studies in Africa, but also the necessity of having high-quality visual tools in order to recreate a convincing three-dimensional spatial narrative. Thus began my ongoing love affair with the ARTstor Digital Library.

James Conlon | The potige (façade) of the typical Djenne house | Djenne, Mali | For commercial use or publication, please contact: Caleb Smith, Director, Media Center for Art History, Columbia University. Email: cs2044@columbia.edu

As a field of study, African architectural history is handicapped by both a lack of documentation and the ephemerality of most primary structural source materials. This causes many students within architectural studies to view the idea of an “African architecture” with inherent skepticism. But the reality of architecture in Africa is that it is both a dynamic medium and a deeply cultural process that provides us with a largely underutilized tool for analyzing the cultural conditions of a particular African context. I attempted to underscore this reality in my lecture by taking the students step by step through a historical, cultural, and stylistic narrative of the mosque, using images from the ARTstor Digital Library to provide the visual evidence for the conceptual theories being presented. Beginning with a systematic analysis of mosque’s faces and then moving into a more formal investigation of its geometric brickwork patterns and threshold ornamentation, I proceeded to trace the mosque’s stylistic lineage back to North African sources, specifically the ksour and kasbah structures of Southern Morocco. I then compared these formal elements to other regional Djennenke productions including masks, pottery, and other architectural forms, and in doing so managed to convey the presence of a distinctly regional style that captured the area’s social, cultural, and spiritual character within a number of architectural representations ranging from the stick-like toron that erupt from the mosque’s surface to the studded pinnacles that mimic both traditional Islamic defensive architecture and pre-Islamic ancestral pillars. At each stage of my analysis, the ARTstor Digital Library provided the visual tools necessary to present this structure within an appropriate conceptual framework.

The talk itself was so successful and the material so rich that it eventually formed the basis for my Master’s thesis, my doctoral dissertation, and the creation of an undergraduate seminar on West African Islamic architecture scheduled for 2013. In addition, the ARTstor Digital Library has inspired me in the course of my research to document not only as many buildings as possible, but also their various contexts in order to provide a comprehensive image base that can support a rigorous degree of academic analysis.

Barbara Anello | Ait Ben Haddou, image 2007 | Ain Ben Haddou, Morocco | Image and original data provided by Barbara Anello | Photographs © Barbara J. Anello

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New agreement: The Princeton University Art Museum

The Princeton University Art Museum is partnering with ARTstor to share images from its encyclopedic collections in the Digital Library. Included are several hundred selections from the Museum’s vast holdings, of which approximately 10,000 images eventually will be available through ARTstor. The Museum’s renowned collections of art of the ancient Americas and photography are well represented, as are ancient, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The art of Europe is documented with polychrome wooden sculptures from the Middle Ages, old master paintings by fifteenth-century Italian artists Fra Angelico and Guido da Siena, Enlightenment-era paintings by Jacques-Louis David and Angelica Kauffmann, and nineteenth-century works by Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. The arts and cultures of Africa, and Asia also form key parts of the collections. For the latter, images in the Digital Library will include Chinese and Japanese Neolithic pottery and jade, ancient ritual bronze vessels, ceramics, metalware, woodblock prints, painting, and calligraphy. The collections also include examples of international modern and contemporary art.

The Princeton University Art Museum is one of the nation’s leading art museums, with over 72,000 works of art in its collections. The Museum was founded in 1882 on the belief that the study of great original works of art was essential to higher education and the enlightenment of the general public. In addition to displaying its collections, the Museum hosts many special exhibitions each year, accompanied by lectures, artists’ talks, scholarly symposia, concerts, film screenings, and family programs. Along with the University’s Department of Art and Archaeology and the Marquand Library, the Museum forms a dynamic center for the study of the fine arts. A selection of rights-cleared images in this collection that fall in the public domain will be included in ARTstor’s Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) program.

Related collections:

• Italian and other European Art (Scala Archives)
• Art, Archaeology and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives)
• Classical Sculptures (Berlin State Museums)
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• National Gallery of Art

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ARTstor Is… Black History

Black History Month is observed every February in the United States and Canada. What better time to remind our readers of the many excellent resources on the topic available in the ARTstor Digital Library?

Jacob Lawrence, American, 1917-2000 | In the North the Negro had better educational facilities | The Museum of Modern Art | © 2008 Estate of Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Black history:

Image of the Black in Western Art A systematic investigation of how people of African descent have been perceived and represented in Western art spanning nearly 5,000 years.

Magnum Photos: Contemporary Photojournalism Some of the most celebrated and recognizable photographs of the 20^th century and contemporary life, documenting an astounding range of subjects, including hundreds of major figures and events in contemporary black history.

Eugene James Martin Vibrant abstract works by African American artist Eugene James Martin, including paintings on canvas, mixed media collages, and pencil and pen and ink drawings.

The Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection Professional and amateur photographs documenting  the full spectrum of activities and experiences of American women in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, including a significant amount of portraits of African American women.

Smithsonian American Art Museum Works of art spanning over 300 years of American art history, including selections from a collection of more than 2,000 works by African American artists.

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African art and culture:

Richard F. Brush Art Gallery (St. Lawrence University) West African textiles from Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, and Cape Verde.

Herbert Cole: African Art, Architecture, and Culture (University of California, Santa Barbara) Field photography of African art, architecture, sites, and culture from Nigeria, Ghana, the Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Kenya, as well as photographs of African objects in private collections around the world.

James Conlon: Mali and Yemen Sites and Architecture Images of sites and architecture in Djenné, Mopti, Bamako, Segou, and the Dogon Region in Mali.

Fowler Museum (University of California, Los Angeles) The arts of many African nations, including Angola, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mail, Nigeria, Republic of Benin, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. The museum also has significant holdings of African diaspora arts from Brazil, Haiti, and Suriname.

Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University Images of African art, such as textiles, costumes, basket and bead work, weapons, tools, and ritual objects.

Christopher Roy: African Art and Field Photography Images of West African art and culture, including ceremonial objects and documentation of their social context, use, and manufacture from the rural villages and towns of the Bobo, Bwa, Fulani, Lobi, Mossi, and Nuna peoples in West Africa—primarily in Burkina Faso, but also in Ghana, Nigeria, and Niger.

Thomas K. Seligman: Photographs of Liberia, New Guinea, Melanesia, and the Tuareg people Images of the Tuareg people, a nomadic people of the Sahara who live in countries such as Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso, as well as photographs of sites and people in Liberia, New Guinea, and Melanesia.

 

Case studies:

Africa: People, Culture, and Art by  Julie Nanavati, Librarian, Loyola Notre Dame Library

 

James Conlon, Photographer | Dogon Dance of the masks (2008) | Sangha (Dogon Region), Mali

Upcoming collections:

Irving Rouse Archive of Caribbean Archaeology in the Peabody Museum of Natural History (Yale University) 4,000 images documenting excavations undertaken on sites in Antigua, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and other Caribbean islands.

For more teaching ideas, visit the Digital Library and click on “Featured Groups,” where you will find Image Groups that include Art History Topic: African Art and Interdisciplinary Topics: African and African-American Studies, as well as a Travel Awards 2010-winning essay, “Sweet Fortunes: Sugar, Race, Art and Patronage in the Americas” by Katherine E. Manthorne, The City University of New York. Also, visit ARTstor’s Subject Guides page to download the African and African-American Studies Subject Guide.

New: Black History Month 2013, featuring additional resources!

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Newsletter 2011: Focus on teaching

Africa: People, Culture, and Art

- Julie Nanavati, Librarian, Loyola Notre Dame Library

Women of the Konate family making jars using the concave mold and coiling techniques; Mrs. Konate, Burkina Faso. | Photographer: Christopher D. Roy. | Image and original data provided by Christopher D. Roy.

For the past three years at Loyola-Notre Dame Library I have been involved in teaching library research sessions for several African History courses such as Women & Social Change in Modern Africa, Apartheid and its Demise in South Africa, and Africa: Past and Present. Students in these classes select from a wide range of social and historical research topics in which they incorporate a blend of primary and secondary resource materials.

One of the most important concepts in the students’ research is the ability to recognize and understand that Africa is not just one country, one culture, but many countries made up of hundreds of unique peoples and societies. The images illustrating Africa: People, Culture, and Art include photographs from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa and provide a window into the lives, culture, and art—from daily life to religious practices and celebrations—of a few of the varied peoples in these regions.

Among the examples I use, I have explored handcrafts and clothing choices, buildings, and rituals. One such ritual is funeral rites. Looking through the funerary images, a strong cultural contrast is visible in both clothing and formality: in Ghana, at a traditional Akan funeral (the funeral of the Omanhene of Techiman (Takyiman)), mourning clothing of red and black is worn by all; at a friend’s funeral in the Nuba Mountains in Sudan a man is shown with painted white body art and minimal clothing (Natu at the funeral of his friend Napi, East Africa); while a mix of western and more traditional clothing is worn by a group at a simple funeral for a child in a remote village in Ethiopia.

The funeral of the Omanhene of Techiman (Takyiman), Joe Frimpong. Women lined up to enter the courtyard funeral of Osabarima Dotobibi Takyia Ameyaw II | Image and original data provided by Christopher D. Roy

Through these images students also explore the lives of women in African communities, an area in which many of my students focus their research. In the group are photos of women working, with their families, and creating items for daily use, as well as images of body ornamentation. A selection of images by Christopher D. Roy looks at the cooperative process through which a group of co-wives from Burkina Faso work at the daily task of creating pottery. Other images offer a detailed view of body scarification from two vastly separated groups—one in the Sudan, and one in Nigeria—showing both the process and the intricate finished patterns being displayed by the women.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the ARTstor image collection is its ability to transport students into new cultures in ways that years before would have been limited to a few photo journals or spreads in National Geographic. The more our students today can explore these societies, the greater understanding the next generation will have of the world.

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Now available: Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University

Tapir, Amazon River, Brazil, 1972. Photographer: Stanley N. Botwinik, Peabody Museum of Natural History

ARTstor has released nearly 7,200 images from the Peabody Museum of Natural History’s permanent collection and photographic archives in the Digital Library. The images include approximately 420 images of African art, such as textiles, costumes, basket and bead work, weapons, tools, and ritual objects. The Museum is also contributing approximately 10,000 images from its archival collections, a majority of which consist of archaeological and ethnographic objects from throughout the Caribbean, including Antigua, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Trinidad, the Dominican Republic and other islands, as well as northern South America. The collection will also include documentation of specimens of dinosaurs and mammals, as well as depictions of the same in the famous murals that adorn the Museum’s Great Hall—Age of Reptiles and Age of Mammals by Rudolph Franz Zallinger (1919-1995). In addition, ARTstor is sponsoring a pilot project to produce three-dimensional imagery for African objects housed at the Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery. Through an ongoing collaboration, both museums seek to provide greater access to their unique permanent collections and develop an integrated digital collection in ARTstor that brings together materials currently housed at separate Yale institutions.

The Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University was founded in 1866, through a gift from philanthropist George Peabody. By 1925, the Museum moved to its current location, which boasts a two-story Great Hall large enough to display Marsh’s massive dinosaur skeletons. Today, the Museum’s permanent collection includes over 11 million specimens in anthropology, botany, entomology, geology, mineralogy, ornithology, paleobotany, paleontology, zoology, planetary science, and historical scientific instruments.

View the collection in the Digital Library: http://library.artstor.org/library/collection/yale_peabody.

For more detailed information about this collection, visit the Peabody Museum of Natural History (Yale University) page.

Other collections from Yale University:

Yale University Art Gallery and Dura-Europos and Gerasa Archives.

Related collections:

• Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Collection (Harvard University)
• Hill Ornithology Collection (Cornell University Library)
• Herbert Cole: African Art, Architecture, and Culture (University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Christopher Roy: African Art and Field Photography
• Giza Archaeological Expedition Archive (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
• Cook’s Voyages to the South Seas (Natural History Museum, London)
• Richard F. Brush Art Gallery (St. Lawrence University)
• First Fleet Collection (Natural History Museum, London)

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Now available: French museum collections from the Réunion des Musées Nationaux

Edgar Degas, Seated dancer, turned to the right, 1873. Musée du Louvre. Photographer: Gérard Blot. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.

Through a collaboration with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN) and Art Resource, ARTstor has launched the first installment of nearly 4,000 of a projected total 12,000 images of works from the premier national and regional museums of France in the Digital Library. The collection in the ARTstor Digital Library presents high-resolution images of important works of art from antiquity to the 20^th century. The majority of images focus on works by key artists from major European schools, as well as decorative arts and furnishings from castles and royal residences throughout France. French museums with significant holdings in the arts of Asia, Africa, and Oceania are also included. The images have been selected from the archives of the Agence photographique de la RMN, which include the collections of 28 museums, including the Musée du Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou. The partnership, RMN, Art Resource, and ARTstor are making this important scholarly resource more broadly available for non-commercial, scholarly, and educational purposes

The Réunion des Musées Nationaux is a French public industrial and commercial establishment (EPIC), under the trusteeship of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. RMN works with 32 museums and 2 exhibition venues to acquire works of art, organize exhibitions, publish catalogs and monographs, distribute editorial and commercial products, and promote the museums’ collections. The Agence photographique de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux produces the inventory of the French museums’ permanent collections and conducts annual photographic campaigns on behalf of museums and other institutions. It is the leading photo agency in France and one of the top ten in the world in the field of visual arts and museums.

Art Resource is the exclusive representative for RMN in North America. Art Resource is the world’s largest stock photo archive of fine art, serving as the principal source of fine art images for commercial and scholarly publications in the United States.

For more detailed information about this collection, visit the Réunion des Musées Nationaux page.

Related collections:

• Italian and other European Art (Scala Archives)
• Art, Archaeology and Architecture (Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives)
• Classical Sculptures (Berlin State Museums)
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• National Gallery of Art

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