1930′s Illustration

A summer project of sorting out our Magazine Covers folders led to my discovery of these wonderful 1930′s covers.  These illustrators may not be as well known as some, but are deserving of a place in the summer sun.

Top left: Collier’s, March 7, 1931, John Gannam

Top right: Ladies Home Journal, June 1935, Charles Edward Chambers

Middle left: Ladies Home Journal, Sept. 1934, Eugene Iverd

Middle right: New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 30, 1938, Karl Godwin

Bottom left: Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 29, 1938, Francis Lee Jaques

Bottom right: Saturday Evening Post, June 27, 1936, R. C. Kauffmann

Flashback to the Seventies

The Picture Collection has an extensive section of 20th century costume, with separate sections for men, women and children, and most of it broken down by decade.  Sources for this material are fashion magazines, Sunday newspaper supplements, and catalogs.  I have to confess that some of my favorite Picture Collection files are the 1970′s costume.   Whether they make you cringe or smile, these images just might make your day.

Iron Age Picture Stones

Some new additions to the mounted prints in the Picture Collection include these Iron Age Picture Stones from the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea.  These beautiful stones date from the 5th – 7th centuries, A.D.

Revolutionary Theatre

This outdoor theatre in Tampere, Finland actually rotates the audience around to the next scene.  Circa 1959.  This image can be found in the Picture Collection in the folder titled “Theaters – Open-Air”

Shepherds with Character

This is just one of the gems you can find in the Picture Collection Costume files.  These shepherds of the Carpathian foothills will be filed under Costume – Czechoslovakia.

Treasures in the mounted print collection

The collection of mounted art file prints in the Picture Collection is as old as the library itself.  And the collection is still in heavy use today.  While filing away stacks of mounted prints from the architecture section at the end of the semester, I stumbled across a few gems.  These are just a few of the many wonderful old black and white photographic prints that can be found in this collection.

Can you identify this building?

This image was found in the “Rhode Island-Providence-Historic” folder in the Picture Collection.  It had separated from a bundle of pages of historic Providence street scenes, and the only caption is HIGH SCHOOL.

I would like to identify the building.  Which high school, and where was it?  If you have any ideas, please let us know.

New Video and Film available soon at RISD Library

Sadie Benning is a lesbian videomaker who began making videos when she was 15 years old, using a Fisher Price Pixelvision toy camera. Benning’s early works were made in the privacy of her childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries to record thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity… Her more recent work moves beyond the Pixelvision camera and into animation and film.   We have just purchased her Retrospective from The Werner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, February 2004.  Volumes 1-3 (work from 1989-2204)

Los Cartoneros, Michael McLean, short documentary, 2006 Juanchi, a 21-year-old from a small town outside Buenos Aires, supports himself and his family by digging through trash. Six days a week, he roams the street of the Argentine capital in search of cardboard and other recyclables, hoping to sell his findings to a recycling depository. Like thousands of Argentines, he is “un cartonero”, a cardboard collection. “Cartoneros” comprise part of the country’s booming informal economy, which swelled drastically following the 2001 economic collapse of the country.

New mounted prints in the Picture Collection

It is not often that we add new mounted prints to the art file in the Picture Collection.  However, sometimes we find items that are just too good to simply laminate.  A recent new batch of mounted prints includes some glossy black and white photographs of the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, by Frank Lloyd Wright.  There are also some old architectural images of college and university architecture from early 20th century publications.  We have also mounted some beautiful calendar images of Hokusai woodblock prints, as well as a collection of paintings by Odd Nerdrum, a contemporary Norwegian painter.

Johnson Wax Building, Racine, Wisconsin

Johnson Wax Building, Racine, Wisconsin

College of the City of New York, Sub-Freshman Building

Hokusai, Mishima Pass in Kai Province, woodblock print, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji

 

Princeton University, Alexander Hall

Contemporary Illustration and Classic Furniture Design on RDID

Continuing with our mission to serve the RISD curriculum, this week we have uploaded into RDID a large number of  digital images which are particularly relevant to two departments at RISD: illustration and furniture. This is a sample of what we have uploaded:

• A collection of 45 images of work by contemporary illustrators, including Daniel Adel, Marcos Chin, Craig Frazier, Peter de Séve, and David Wiesner.

• Classic furniture from the 1950s to the present, by designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, Eileen Gray, Vico Magistretti, Verner Panton, Jean Prouvé, and many more.

To view these slideshows, login to RDID with your RISD username and password, and click on the above links. If you have any suggestions for more related images you would like us to add to our collection, feel free to comment on this post.