Experience Externships: Blanton Museum of Art

Students, don't miss out on this great opportunity from Southwestern's Career Services Office.

Friday March 6th, 1-6 PM (dinner included).

Anyone interested in museum or gallery work should benefit from this trip, which will include a tour of the Blanton and a roundtable discussion with:

Associate Curator of prints, drawings, and European paintings
Registrar
Manager of Docent and University Programs
University Programs Coordinator
Tour Coordinator
Manager of Visitor and Volunteer Services
Museum Gift Shop Manager
Museum Director (tentative)

Interested students should sign up in person at the McCook-Crain building.

Here's a video that lets you get a feel for the Blanton and its fantastic collection (could take a minute to load):

Austinville: The Blanton Collection
Director: Chris Telles
Music: Blur, 'The Universal'

Modern Architecture Website Up

Great news for students of Dr. Howe's Modern Architecture course this semester! His image-rich and lengthy powerpoint presentations are available for online review and study. This is made possible by the handy open-source Slideshare. In order to comply with copyright concerns, the site and its corresponding flash videos of the powerpoints are available by invitation only to students enrolled this semester.

Here is a screen shot of the resulting site:

For any students in the class needing help signing up for the google account that will grant you access to the site, check out this instructional video from Atomic Learning.

Hopefully I'll get some feedback on how this site works for students. If it gets a positive reception, we could see more course material available for a variety of art history classes online next semester?

Fun Image Search Toy

Check out Tag Galaxy!

It's a really neat way to search flickr tags, and it's graphically laid out like a solar system. Each tag search has little satellite planets with related terms. (Some are helpful, like 'Daibutsu' related to 'Todaiji'; others show how one tag can have alternate meanings- 'caesar' brought up 'salad' and 'Las Vegas' as well as 'Rome'.) If you click on a tag/planet, you see a sphere covered in images. You can rotate it and explore individual pictures. Tag Galaxy is a diploma project by Stephen Wood for the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences Nuremburg.

Not only is it a cool interface and fun to play with, it's potentially useful as well.

Library of Congress on Flickr

In honor of President's day (although a day late), check out Library of Congress' photostream on Flickr. They've posted a bunch of nice images from their collection- free of any copyright restrictions- on topics such as Abraham Lincoln, and the 1930s and 40s in color.

I particularly like this one:

Since they've got access to the original materials, the image quality is excellent. And because Flickr is part of the social web, you'll see all sorts of comments and tags that people have added. This communal, social aspect of describing images and making them available is really catching on and we'll no doubt see more and more institutions taking part in it.

Campus Event: Drive By Press

Drive By Press made an exciting visit to Southwestern's academic mall today. Out of the back of a van, this unique group travels around creating one of a kind t-shirts embellished with ink patterns off of original woodcuts. 

The combination of old (the technique dates to the 14th century) with the new (hip designs including boomboxes and Luchador masks for example) was pretty intriguing. Judging from the sizable crowd of  SU students, staff, and faculty members, the event was a hit.

Here is an interesting video showing DBP and its techniques:

Drive By Press's Myspace and Webpage.  If you wanted to purchase a shirt but missed your chance, they have online shopping. 

News Item du Jour: The Politics of Copyright

From the New York Times, Artist sues the AP Over Obama Image

     Shepard Fairey, the artist whose portraits of Obama have been widely seen during his campaign and recently on the cover of Time magazine, is preemptively taking legal action against the Associated Press. The AP has asserted that it owns the photo which serves as the foundation of Fairey's art, and that it is owed payment for its use. The artist meanwhile invokes the principal of Fair Use and intends to prove that his work has transformed into something wholly different from the original photo. Copyright is undoubtedly a hairy issue, and this story will likely get more heated and interesting as it progresses.

Accordingly, I've decided not to post either image here, so you'll just have to follow the link! Please don't sue me.

If Andy Warhol lived today, would any of his pop art images have made it?

Art History lunch

Today, with the help of a tasty pizza lunch, the department gathered together Southwestern students either majoring or minoring in art history and discussed future directions. The course lineup for fall was revealed, and early March was announced as the time for on-campus interviews for candidates for our new and very exciting full-time Latin American position. Students were advised to look for announcements of scheduled talks and lunches so that they can give their important opinions regarding the candidates.

The importance of study abroad and internship/work experience was underscored during the meeting. Two very important names:

Sue Mennicke, Director of Study Abroad International Programs Office at Southwestern

mennicks@southwestern.edu

Maria Kruger, Internship coordinator for the Great Lakes Colleges Association New York Arts Program

Some students expressed interest in combining their study of art history with other fields, such as business, accounting, or law, for a future career. There are undoubtedly many resources addressing this issue out there, but I've quickly compiled just a few starting points:

UT Austin's Career Guide for Art History

UC Santa Cruz' outline of Career Options in Art History

Notre Dame's Career Alternatives for Art Historians

Princeton Online's Careers In Art Links

University of Denver's What to Do With Your Art History Degree

(Caveat: I haven't had time to look these over, so they might not be the best resources! I hope to refine the list after I've gotten through the urgent slide scanning.)

No matter what a student chooses to do with his or her art history degree, Dr. Howe, Dr. Smith, and Dr. Tenckhoff expressed their willingness to look over applications and to write recommendation letters. They advised to consider taking a year off to get experience before applying to grad school, and assured students that their letters would be waiting for them!

Disheartening news from Brandeis University

A rather shocking news story from Brandeis University in Massachusetts: it seems that recently the university's board of trustees voted to fully scrap the campus' art museum.

An excerpt from Roberta Smith's New York Times article:

"Few things are more poignant than a gem of a museum whose days may be numbered. So it was at the Rose Art Museum at Bradeis University on a visit Friday, days after the university's trustees voted unanimously to trash the institution by closing it and auctioning off the 6,000 works in its collection. The action came without consulting either the museum's own board of governors or its director."

..............."the greater the art, the greater number of people "own" it. The greater its power, the more it expands our lives. In a just and moral society, art is crucial to our understanding of freedom, difference and individual agency. The message out of Brandeis University last week- to its own students and to the world- was that when the going gets tough, none of this matters. Art is dispensable."

Above: student protest signs in the doomed museum's entry. One reads "Integrity for sale. All must go! Accepting all offers."

Brown Symposium

This morning the Brown Symposium "Science and Religion: Conflict or Convergence" wrapped up downstairs. The event seemed very well attended, and KXAN ran a story on it.

Through March 7th, the department's art gallery is running an exhibition by artist Christian Lavigne. His interesting artwork, termed 'robosculpture', 'telesculpture', and 'cybersculpture' makes use of cutting-edge technology such as rapid-prototyping to meld aesthetics and mathematics.

            

Next year's symposium is sure to be a hit, when Dr. Thomas Howe presents his fascinating topic 'Imperium', comparing ancient Rome to modern America. Make no mistake though, there will be no Toga Parties held in conjunction with the 2010 event!

Blog Experiment

Inspired by colleague Heather Seneff's VRC blog at the University of Washington, I have decided to set one up myself. 

Here I will post any new or interesting developments having to do with the SU image collection, with services like ArtStor, and other newsworthy items having to do with art history, images, and emerging technology.