Displaying items by tag: digitized

Maxwell Anderson, the Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, announced today the launch of an exciting redesigned digital database for the Museum’s collection of encyclopedic art through its website, DMA.org. This marks the first phase of an initiative to dramatically improve online access and representation of the Museum’s global collection of more than 22,000 works of art.

By digitizing its entire collection, the DMA is creating one of the world’s most sophisticated online art collections, providing open access to its entire collection, and leading the field in the quality and depth of content available to visitors, students, teachers, and scholars. In addition, whenever permitted by existing agreements, the DMA will release all images, data, and software it creates to the public under Open Access licenses for free personal and educational use.

Looking to visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum without actually going to the Smithsonian? You might soon be able to do so from the comfort of your own smartphone.

On Friday, the White House announced in a blog post that the Smithsonian American Art Museum would soon open up its digitized collection to developers so they can build it into educational apps. According to the White House, “even museum curators do not have easily accessible information about their art collections. This information will soon be available to everyone.”

New York’s American Folk Art Museum has launched a public, digital archive of 117 issues of magazines published by the institution between 1971 and 2008. ‘The Clarion,’ which was later renamed ‘Folk Art’ was published three times a year and served as a leading forum for original research and new scholarship in the realm of American folk art. The archive, which is organized chronologically, includes original articles, photographs, illustrations, advertisements and calendars.

The digitization and archive creation was made possible thanks to a grant from Museum Trustee Karin Fielding and her husband, Dr. Jonathan Fielding as well as donations from the Friends of Heritage Preservation and the American Folk Art Society.

The archive can be found on the American Folk Art Museum’s website.

165 years ago, the Knoedler Gallery opened its doors in New York and went on to help create some of the country’s most celebrated collections including those of Paul Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and Robert Sterling Clark. Throughout the years, top-notch works by artists such as van Gogh, Manet, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Louise Bourgeois, and Willem de Kooning passed through the gallery. When the Soviet government sold hundreds of paintings from the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in the 1930s, they chose to work with Knoedler to sell paintings by masters like Rembrandt, Raphael, and Velazquez.

Knoedler’s exemplary past is often forgotten as the gallery’s present has been mired in lawsuits and accusations that the company’s former president, Ann Freedman, was in the business of selling fakes. Last year, Knoedler Gallery closed its doors for good.

This week, Los Angeles’ Getty Research Institute announced that it had bought the Knoedler Gallery archive. Spanning from around 1850 to 1971, the archive includes stock books, sales books, a photo archive and files of correspondence, including letters from artists and collectors, some with illustrations. The Getty was interested in Knoedler’s archive because it offers an expansive glimpse into the history of collecting and the art market in the United States and Europe from the mid-19^th century to modern times.

The archive was purchased from Knoedler’s owner, Michael Hammer, for an undisclosed amount. Meticulously preserved, the archive will be available to scholars and digitized for online research after the Getty catalogues and conserves it all.

After two years in beta, Art.sy’s public version went live this past Monday. Using intuitive sites such as Pandora and Netflix as guides, Art.sy gets to know its users and presents them with suggestions and recommendations based on their individual likes and dislikes. Art.sy offers a free repository of 20,000 and counting digitized fine art images as well as an art appreciation guide. Art.sy can already count 275 galleries, private collectors, and 50 museums such as the Dallas Museum of Art, SFMoMA, and Fondation Beyeler as partners.

A start-up backed by millions of dollars in venture capital from art world giants such as Larry Gagosian and Dasha Zhukova, Art.sy already has 600,000 registered users. The site is moving past mere image sharing and has begun partnering with major art fairs, serving as the exclusive online platform for Design Miami/ in December and the Armory Show in March.

Art.sy offers a unique experience to collectors, allowing them to speak with a specialist, connect directly to a gallery, or submit offers on works remotely. A different feature on the site will allow collectors to buy outright as long as the dealer chooses to utilize the e-commerce option. Art.sy plans to bring in most of its revenue from sales commissions on works sold through the site.