Trick or Treat

These vintage Halloween postcards from the Picture Collection are a treat!

Recent Additions to RDID

RDID keeps growing at a steady pace, and in the past 6 weeks we have added a great selection of images that we hope you will enjoy, including:

• 54 images of Rococo artworks, some of which were featured in the 2008 exhibition Rococo: The Continuing Curve, at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum.
• 41 images of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, photographed by RISD professor Nicole Merola.
• 57 images of Chinese objects from the Neolithic Period
• 55 images of artworks during restoration
• 31 images of J. M. W. Turner’s watercolors and drawings
• 21 images of glass objects from the treasury at the Museo San Marco in Venice

Odd Nerdrum in the Picture Collection

Sometimes the Library’s loss is the Picture Collection’s gain.  A withdrawn/damaged book of work by Odd Nerdrum came to the Picture Collection to be clipped, and we were able to add many new samples of this Norwegian figurative painter’s work to our files.

Also added recently is a large collection of postcards of London Transport posters.  See Advertising – Posters – London Transport.

RDID Off-Campus

We are very pleased to announce that the RISD Digital Image Database, RDID, is now available to RISD faculty and students outside the RISD network. To access RDID, login with your RISD username and password from wherever you are, be it in the classroom or at home. You will be able to search for images, view them in the Slide Viewer, or download them for your RISD projects. If you want to suggest particular artworks, artists, design pieces or topics for inclusion into our database, send us your ideas here:

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Welcome RISD Students and Faculty

We want to extend a warm welcome to all our new and returning RISD students and faculty members. This coming academic year promises to be full of exciting courses and projects at RISD, and we at the Visual Resources Center will be keeping you informed of everything related to digital images and visual culture.

For information about how to find the images and resources you need for your projects at RISD, take a few minutes to navigate through our blog. Here you will find Our Links, a section devoted to links from the RISD Library and the world of Visual Resources. You will also see interesting, and constantly updated, image groups from Flickr, and links to our Vodpod videos that could be of interest to you. We also have a section showing the last three sites added to our RISD VR Delicious bookmarks page. If you click on our Delicious link, you will be directed to a veritable treasure trove of links to art-related websites. We also hope to keep you informed of trends and developments in the world of digital images and art, through our RSS feeds from the ARTstor blog, the Art Newspaper, the Visual Arts Data Service, and others we will be adding. We hope you find us useful, and if you have suggestions to improve our blog, please send us your comments.

Visual Resources Center Closed

The Visual Resources Center will be closed from August 10th to August 23rd for staff vacation. We will be back offering our digital imaging services from August 24th.

Archdaily: Satisfying Your Architecture Fix

For those addicted to pictures of buildings, or just pictures in general, Archdaily is the place to go. Updated constantly with new architectural projects, this site offers a bold look into new and upcoming design projects and proposals, as well as a chance to see into the minds of some of these designers. Each project page provides a written summary of the work, specific details of the project, and a collection of images that range from professional photos to sketches on napkins, CAD drawings and models. A spread of visual links (cool colorful photos) is also provided that makes jumping from project to project easy and enjoyable. Know what you want to look for? Then you can quickly search Archdaily for that specific project with all the images you could want. However, do not be afraid to get lost just clicking on interesting pictures and seeing where you will end up, that is what this site was designed for, and it is a ton of fun.

Tate Classified

Chapman Family Collection (Detail)

As part of their exhibition Classified: Contemporary Art at Tate Britain, the Tate Gallery has created the ‘Classified’ Flickr group, where group members can contribute up to 5 images of the objects they collect. The results are quite fascinating, from swing tags to old doll’s heads, coins, photographs found in antique shops, Vimobots, found handwritten notes, lottery tickets, and many more. To see them, have a look at our Flickr photostream on the sidebar.

“Classified” exhibits works from the Tate’s contemporary art collection, and explores the role of the gallery in collecting, classifying and displaying objects. It includes works such as Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig, Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy and Jake and Dinos Chapman’s The Chapman Family Collection, and it is an interesting exploration of the act of collecting. You can see the exhibition at Tate Britain in London until August 23. MB

Day Trip: New York City

A Few Shows to See on a Summer Day in the City

1. Black Acid Co-op: Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman: at Deitch Projects (18 Wooster Street) in Soho. See art gallery rooms with holes in the walls leading to meth labs and melted mobile homes.

2. Sexy and the City at Yossi Milo Gallery: (525 West 25th Street) Part of the city wide NEW YOKR PHOTOGRAPHS, and includes photographers Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Mitch Epstein,  Nan Goldin, André Kertész,  Joel Meyerowitz, Duane Michals, Tod Papageorge, Weegee, and Garry Winogrand- to name a few.

3. Dirk Skreber at Friedrich Petzel Gallery: (537 West 22nd Street) See smashed cars and a few paintings.

4. Colby Katz: Beauty Pageants & Sarah Wilson: Blind Prom: At Foley Gallery (547 W 27th Street, 5th floor). Photographs of a school for the blind’s prom and also photographs of very young beauty queens.

5. Heartbreak Hotel at Freight and Volume: (542 West 24th Street) Featuring paintings by Kim Dorland, Fanny Allie, Jim Lee, Eric White, and more.

6. Shane Hope-Your Mom Is Open Source: At Winkleman Gallery (637 West 27th Street). Kid handwriting and collage-like paintings.

-AA

June Online Resources for Art and Design

This is a summary of the most recent websites we have added to our del.ici.ous collection of bookmarks, organized by subject.

Fine Arts

ArtBabble

The Auteurs

Barlow Collection of Chinese Ceramics, Bronze and Jade

Center for Contemporary Canadian Art Database

Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource

Architecture/ Design

Access Ceramics

Architecture of the Getty Center

Fold School: Cardboard Furniture

Restoration of the Maya Cities of Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil and Labná

Stewardess Uniform Collection

Liberal Arts

Alaska’s Digital Archives

Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs

New York Public Library Digital Collections

Smarthistory

Ubuweb

Museums

Benaki Museum, Athens

The Model as Muse: Metropolitan Museum

National Media Museum, U.K.

New Britain Museum of American Art, CT

Synthescape: New Media for Museums