New service: Artstor Analog

Amidst the boom in our increasingly digital lives, people are returning to analog objects. For the first time ever, sales of vinyl records have outstripped digital sales, with more than 3 million LP sales reported in 2016, and in what Publishers Weekly calls “digital fatigue,” ebook sales have plateaued. Although fatigue might not be the correct term here; according to a recent study, children–who presumably haven’t been using digital products for very long–prefer paper books to screens.

With this in mind, Artstor is proud to introduce a new service: Artstor Analog. Now your library or institution can get the same 2 million high-quality images in the Digital Library that you trust and depend on as photo slides. As a bonus, the Artstor Digital Library’s 2,000 QTVR files will be made available as fully rotatable dioramas. Among its many benefits, Artstor Analog offers the perfect solution for locations that have spotty or unreliable access to wifi.

Artstor Analog is delivered in approximately 15,000 carousel trays of 140 slides each. Because of shipping restrictions, this offer is only available in the continental United States and Canada. Please note that Artstor Analog is currently not compatible with the Offline Image Viewer.

Now available: additional images from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Edward Weston, Cabbage Leaf, 1931-1951. Image and data from SFMOMA; © 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Artstor and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) are making nearly 500 additional images of works from the Museum’s permanent collection available in the Artstor Digital Library. This collaboration brings the total number of images from the Museum within the Digital Library to approximately 1,800. Featuring photographic works by Sibyl Anikeef and Sonya Noskowiak, among others, this launch offers increased coverage of notable female photographers. Photographs by Edward Weston, drawings by Diego Rivera, Gunter Gunschel, and Wayne Thiebaud–as well as paintings by Clyfford Still, Frank Stella, and Josef Albers–round out the contribution.

The women who shaped America, in photographs

Unknown; Young women holding a sign which reads, ‘Self Supporting Women.’ Several other women grouped near the banner are holding balls; 1914. This image has been made available by the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

March is Women’s History Month, and we’re celebrating women who shaped the political and social landscape of America with a tour of an expansive photographic archive documenting their experiences.

The Schlesinger History of Women in America collection contains 36,000 images from the archives of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. The Schlesinger Library’s collections encompass women’s rights and feminism, health and sexuality, work and family life, education and the professions, and culinary history and etiquette. It documents women’s experiences in America between the 1840s and 1990s and is sourced from donations made to the library, including the papers of many prominent female activists, politicians, and leaders. In making the stories of women’s lives available to all, the library combats assumptions that women’s roles have been tangential in the course of American history.

Around the web: caveman pointillism, museum jumping jacks, and a vacant-lot colossus

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Some stories we’ve been reading this month:

• Georges Seurat placed dots on a canvas to depict park-goers lounging along the Seine in 1884. The technique was known as pointillism, and it seemed new at the time. We now come to find out it was really 38,000 years old.
• African American activist and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois directed the creation of more than 60 hand-drawn charts, graphs, and maps that visualized data on the state of black life in America in 1900. They look amazing.

“Warhol’s legacy belongs to the world”–an interview with the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Michael Hermann

Andy Warhol; Cow, 1966. Images © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. and Andy Warhol artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Andy Warhol; Self-Portrait; 1964. Images © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. and Andy Warhol artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Artstor has recently made available images of commercial art, canonical works, and thousands of personal Polaroids from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Artstor’s Damian Shand speaks to Michael Hermann, the Foundation’s director of licensing, about the collection.

Damian Shand: 35,000 images from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts have just been made available in the Artstor Digital Library. What were the origins of the collection and how difficult was it to bring all the material together for digitization?

Michael Hermann: When Warhol passed away in 1987, he left his extensive inventory of artwork to the Foundation. In order to get such a large, complicated collection cataloged, archived, photographed and digitized, the Foundation embarked on what turned out to be an ongoing 30-year project. The endeavor has been time-consuming and expensive, but as stewards of Warhol’s legacy, we feel it was necessary. Traditional means were used to document the collection while adapting to technological advancements where necessary. In the case of the 28,000 photographs now available on the Artstor Digital Library, we used a crowd-sourcing model. The original 28,000 Warhol photographs were donated to over 180 college and university museums and galleries who in turn documented the artworks and sent the high-resolution digital images back to us.

Addressing the unaddressed: Tuskegee University’s Hidden Audio Collections, 1957-1971

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks at the TCA meeting, 1957. Courtesy of the Tuskegee University Archives, P.H. Polk Collection, 2017.

Tuskegee University Archives recently released new recordings from the Tuskegee Civic Association records that feature prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. These speeches, addressing the Tuskegee community, fill in historical gaps to illuminate the relationships between leaders and their constituents.

The collection was digitized from reel-to-reel tape under the care of university archivist Dana Chandler and made available through funding by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Council of Independent Colleges. The recordings are freely available to listen to on Shared Shelf Commons.

Artstor staff members Evan Towle and Karyn Anonia spoke with Chandler about his work.

ET: First, can you speak a little about your history with the Archives at Tuskegee?

DC: I’m in my eleventh year. I’d first visited in 1972—my parents brought us down here to see Carver’s laboratory, and I fell in love with the place then. I did not ever expect to work here. The opportunity kind of fell into my lap, and I have been able to, I think, develop the Archives into a viable place for researchers to come from the US and all around the world to work on the materials to fill in some blanks that have been evident for a long time about the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the history of Tuskegee as a whole, as well as the work of African Americans, how successful they really were during the time of Jim Crow Laws and laws of segregation.

When you think about Tuskegee, you think about George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington. You think about the Tuskegee Airmen, and maybe something called the Syphilis Study, which did not happen here on the campus. But it is much more than those things. The first Extension Agent to the US Federal Government came from Tuskegee—not just the first black agent, but the first Extension Agent came from Tuskegee University—the first African American Hospital in Alabama; the first school to offer a four-year degree in nursing in Alabama; the first African American woman to win a gold medal at the Olympics, Alice Coachman Davis, went to Tuskegee. And believe me, I could go on and on ad nauseam about the stuff that’s here.

New ways of seeing Warhol – new collections in the Artstor Digital Library

Andy Warhol; Dollar sign; c. 1981. Images © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. and Andy Warhol artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Andy Warhol; Red Jackie; 1964. Images © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. and Andy Warhol artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Michael Hermann, Director of Licensing at The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, explains how the Foundation’s collections in the Artstor Digital Library provide a comprehensive view of Warhol’s cultural impact–as well as insight into his personal life.

Thirty years after his death, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Warhol’s life and work continue to inspire creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. His impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than soup cans and his prescient observation that “everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture. The extensive Andy Warhol Foundation collections available on Artstor provide a thorough presentation of the prolific artist’s works in one place for the first time through more than 35,000* images inclusive of paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, and photography spanning four decades.

The turbulent 1960s ignited an impressive and wildly prolific time in Warhol’s life which saw the production of many of Warhol’s most iconic works, including Campbell Soup Cans, Marilyn Monroes, Dollar Signs, Disasters, Brillo Boxes and Coca Cola Bottles. These familiar works are supplemented by a wide-ranging presentation of the provocative and ground-breaking works Warhol continued to create until his untimely death in 1987.