A collection of 54 images of contemporary textiles from around the world has been uploaded into the RDID database. They include images of work from Australia, Africa, Japan, Korea, Britain and the U.S. To see it, login to RDID, and click on this link to the World Textiles Slideshow. Enjoy!

We are very happy to announce that a collection of 360 posters created at RISD for various events has been added to the RISD Digital Image Database. The original collection is held in the Archives department at the RISD Library, and is described by our archivists as follows:

“The posters document events and activities of the students, faculty, and administration of Rhode Island School of Design, 1908 and 1960s-2007. These posters advertise Rhode Island School of Design events, educational programs, exhibitions, lectures, and conferences. A small number of posters, primarily for faculty, document events held outside of RISD. The bulk of the posters are dated from the late 1970s through 2007, and many items are undated. There is one Jewelry Department poster dated 1908. This series contains professionally printed and hand printed posters, many designed or created by students. A variety of materials were used including various types of paper, vinyl wallpaper, fabric, and plastic. Some items are fragile and others have glued on material such as glitter and faux fur.”

Digital images of these posters are now available for study and download by logging onto RDID with your RISD username and password. The following link will take you to a slideshow of highlights of the RISD Poster Collection.

It’s easy to see why Martin Scorsese heaps praise (as well as his name, as presenter) on this film.  Besides the obvious subject matter, Gomorrah has the same type of motions and scope of a Scorsese film: long panning shots that go from vistas to walls to vistas, documentary-style camerawork and quick bursts of violence that feel surprisingly real.  The film focuses on five individuals involved with the Camorra (Naples’s mafia underworld), intertwining their stories with the larger bleak reality of a mafia-controlled existence.  Be sure to check out the features on the second disc, particularly the interview with the director, Matteo Garrone. He discusses how to film a mafia movie in a mafia controlled location (it involves wearing laminates).  Gomorrah is a beautifully rendered vision of a depressing reality.  Though the gangster genre has been updated successfully in the last ten years (think Sopranos….), it’s never felt quite as real as this.

“In the Land of the War Canoes” was originally called “In the Land of the Head-Hunters” and this was truer.  It was like watching “Nanook of the North,” a rare anthropological spy treat into ways of a people as extinct as the dodo.  Oh the precious scenes of what people wore and their dances and costumes and how they courted and warred.  The special secret treat of watching a man hoping for visions. I became lost in time.

Giacometti, Henry Moore, George Segal, Duane Hanson, Red Grooms, Native American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, Christo, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer… These are some of the artists whose work we have recently added to the RISD Digital Image Database. Login to RDID with your RISD username and password, and then click on the links below to see slide shows of these artists’ work:

• 20th century sculpture and 3D work

• Art of the Americas: The Pacific Northwest

• Environmental Art

The RISD library has recently acquired “The Rape of Europa,” a documentary film tracing the Nazi theft of art during World War Two, and the allied armies’ efforts to recover the stolen artworks. The film has been praised both for its rare archive footage, and for its narrative structure, which keeps viewers completely absorbed in the story, despite the fact that the film is over two hours long. The documentary starts with an explanation of the Nazi concept of ‘Degenerate Art’, and it continues with an in-depth examination of the systematic looting policies of the German armies, as they invaded one European country after another. The Rape of Europa is also a meditation on the historical value of cultural artifacts, which has particular significance today, as the real scale of destruction of cultural artifacts in Iraq starts to become better known. Check this link for an interesting review of the film.

As we continue adding websites to our del.ici.ous collection of bookmarks, we want to keep you informed of our favorite recent additions, organized by subject:

Fine Arts

Bruce Nauman Leave the Land Alone: Documentation of Bruce Nauman’s performance of Untitled (Leave the Land Alone), 1969/2009.

The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated: A Library of Congress exhibition documenting the work of photographer to the Tsar Sergei Mikhailovich Prokrudin-Gorskii.

French National Library’s Image Bank: A searchable collection of digital materials from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture: Website for the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Vézelay: Benedictine Abbey of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine: A searchable collection of digital images of the Abbey of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine at Vézelay, photographed by Alison Stones, and cataloged by the Digital Research Library at the University of Pittsburgh.

Architecture/ Design

Arch Daily: An the online source of continuous information for a growing community of thousands of architects searching for the latest architectural news: projects, products, events, interviews and competitions among others.

E. A. Seguy’s Butterflies: A digital collection of Seguy’s collotypes from the New York Public Library.

Environmental Design Archives: Gertrude Jekyll: Archival material from the University of California at Berkeley. The Jekyll collection includes presentation drawings, planting plans, plant lists, surveys, photographs, and correspondence relating to residential gardens throughout the United Kingdom.

Plastics Network: Website of an international collaborative project to promote an understanding of the study of plastics and design.

Tom Eckersley Poster Archive: A collection of digital images of Eckersley’s posters hosted by the Visual Arts Data Service, VADS, created from the artist’s archive at the University of the Arts in London.

Liberal Arts

American Treasures of the Library of Congress: Online exhibition displaying some 250 items from the Library of Congress collections, including some not currently on permanent display. The organizing principles of this exhibition are Memory, Reason and Imagination.

Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database: “The Literature, Arts, & Medicine Database is an annotated multimedia listing of prose, poetry, film, video and art that was developed to be a resource for teaching and research in MEDICAL HUMANITIES, and for use in health/pre-health, graduate and undergraduate liberal arts and social science settings.”

Transatlantic Slave Trade Database Images: A collection of images of places and vessels involved in the Transatlantic Slave trade, as well as slave portraits. This collection is part of the Voyages database project, which has collected archival data from all over the world to create an invaluable resource for scholars of the slave trade.

Van Gogh: The Letters: A project of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, offering all 902 letters to and from Van Gogh in digital format, with scans of the originals, transcripts and annotations.

Voice of the Shuttle – Cultural Studies: Voice of the Shuttle (VoS) is a subject gateway for humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet.

Museums

Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity: MoMA exhibition displaying “over 400 works by some 100 Bauhaus teachers and students that reflect the extraordinarily broad range of the school’s output.”

New Ceramics Galleries, Victoria and Albert Museum, London: “Purpose built in 1909 for the display of the Ceramics collection the newly refurbished galleries tell the story of world ceramics, with 3000 objects on display from the earliest Chinese pottery to contemporary ceramic art.”

RISD Museum: The Brilliant Line: An exhibition of engravings from the Early Modern period.

Reunion des Musees Nationaux: A digital collection of art images from French museums.

The Virtual Museum of Iraq: Online exhibition of objects from Iraqi museums created by the Italian National Research Council.

Here are some vintage Thanksgiving illustrations and postcards from the Picture Collection.  The first image is a Collier’s Weekly cover by F.X. Leyendecker, 1919.  The next one is an Edward Penfield illustration, ca. 1920.  The rest are from the vintage postcard collection.

Interested in Renaissance portraits, contemporary sculpture, or even Cold War design? Login to RDID using your RISD username and password, and check out the latest additions to the RISD Digital Image Database:

• Renaissance Faces: Images from an exhibition of portraits by artists such as Titian and Van Eyck, which took place at the National Gallery in London, between November 2008 and January 2009.
• Cold War design: Images of cold-war related objects, including Socialist posters, sheets from artist Bela Kolarova’s diary, spacesuits, spy cameras, a Mao jacket, and even a design for the Brainwashing Chamber in the spy film “The Ipcress File”!
• White Cube Gallery Exhibitions: Works from exhibitions that took place in 2008 and 2009 at the White Cube Gallery in London, by artists such as Josiah McElhenny, Robert Irwin, and Sam Taylor-Wood.
• Wood sculpture: Works by Louise Bourgeois, Andy Goldsworthy, Tyrone Mitchell, Mel Kendrick, David Nash and other artists working in wood.

We hope you enjoy these slideshows! RISD faculty, students and staff can download the images by going to the Search section, doing a simple keyword search, and clicking on the floppy disk icons under the thumbnails in the results pages.

Art at RISD:

Recent retired RISD Professor of Photography, Joel Deal has a new exhibition, Joe Deal: New Work up at the RISD Museum till January 3, 2010.

Art at Brown:

Zugunruhe is a large scale installation show by RISD Professor of Glass, Rachel Berwick up at the David Winton Bell Gallery at the List Art Center on Brown University. The show will be up until February 11,2010.