John Hendrix English Gothic Collection

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Are you a Goth? Then you’re surely going to love our collection of images of English Gothic buildings, which we have recently added to RDID. The collection was photographed by RISD professor John Hendrix during the summer of 2009, and the images were optimized and cataloged by Visual Resources Center staff and our brilliant student workers. Eventually, the collection will consist of 629 images of Gothic buildings from all over England. At the moment, we have uploaded 114, but you can watch the collection grow during the next few weeks.

To access the John Hendrix English Gothic Collection, login to RDID with your RISD username and password. You can either see a slideshow with selected images of Gothic buildings, or do a search for the keyword Gothic – that will give you access to the entire collection.

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Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol on RDID

The RISD Digital Image Database is proud to host a new collection called “Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol”, created by the Archives department in the Library in collaboration with the RISD Museum. The collection consists of twenty-eight images documenting the “Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol” exhibition held at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1970 April 23 – June 30. There are eleven installation images and seventeen images of objects in the Museum’s storage area.

In 1969, the RISD Museum invited Andy Warhol to curate an exhibition featuring works he selected from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition was eventually named Raid the Icebox. According to Judith Tannenbaum, curator of contemporary art at the RISD Museum, “Warhol was drawn to an eclectic mix of objects. He liked the cabinets of shoes in storage and displayed all of them exactly as they were stored. He also chose baskets, Navajo blankets, paintings, ceramics and costume accessories. He created an alternative museum. Raid the Icebox I has become a landmark exhibition, the precursor of “artist ’s interventions ” of the 1990s that rethink the nature of traditional collecting museums.”

We want to thank Denise Bastien from the RISD Museum and Andrew Martinez and Douglas Doe from the RISD Archives for digitizing and cataloging these images.

To view “Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol”, you will need to login to the RISD Digital Image Database with your RISD username and password.

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China and North America in RDID

Our recent additions to RDID include the following:

• A collection of 62 images depicting the portrayal of Native Americans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

• 39 images of art works in the collections of Chinese Emperor Huizong, from the Sung dynasty.

To see these slideshows, remember to login to RDID with your RISD username and password, and then click on the links above.

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Remote Collections in RDID

The RISD Digital Image Database runs on a piece of open source software called MDID, developed at James Madison University, which is used by many other institutions throughout the country to catalog and deliver digital images. Some of these institutions have made part of their digital collections freely available to other MDID users, by incorporating them ‘remotely’ into local image databases. The Visual Resources Center is proud to announce the incorporation into the RDID database of the following image collections:

• Art Images for College Teaching: Art Images for College Teaching (AICT) is a personal, non-profit project of its author, art historian and visual resources curator Allan T. Kohl, consisting of 2,900 records. AICT is intended primarily to disseminate images of art and architectural works in the public domain on a free-access, free-use basis to all levels of the educational community, as well as to the public at large.
• Battles and Leaders of the Civil War: A collection of 106 digital images taken from “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” issued serially in 1887-1888 by Century Magazine. The massive four-volume set consisted of articles, memoirs, and reminiscences, which quickly became accepted as the comprehensive (and surprisingly unbiased) account of the War. According to the digital set’s author, Allan Kohl, “the nearly 3000 pages of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War featured more than a thousand maps, engraved portraits, spot designs, and other original artwork created by some of America’s top illustrators. These included familiar names such as A. R. Waud and Winslow Homer, men who had been highly regarded as field correspondent sketch artists during the actual conflict. But Century also commissioned new illustrations from the outstanding military subject specialists of its own day, artists such as J. O. Davidson, H. A. Ogden, and Isaac Walton Taber. This project contains a selection of over one hundred of the best examples from among these illustrations, including both battle scenes and camp life, along with details of weapons and uniforms.”
• English Architecture: The James Collection of English Architecture (c.1100-1800 CE) was photographed by Sara Nair James, professor of Renaissance Art at Mary Baldwin College, Virginia, and consists of 648 digital images and their accompanying records. The archive includes cathedrals and parish churches from the Norman Romanesque period; ecclesiastical buildings in the Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular styles; Medieval secular architecture including castles, marketplaces and town halls; Perpendicular Gothic collegiate buildings; Tudor, Elizabethan, Baroque and Neoclassical country houses and churches.
• Historic Illustrations of Art & Architecture: The 297 historic illustrations included in this project by Allan Kohl were originally published during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many appeared in publications that predated the widespread use of photography for art documentation. “These engravings, line drawings, and plans reflect both the technological and aesthetic standards of their time. By their very nature, they often represent subjective interpretations of the monuments and works depicted, and as such they offer fascinating insights into the cultural values of art and architectural history during the formative years of these disciplines…. Anyone wishing to use these images for teaching and research purposes should bear this in mind. Moreover, some of these illustrations may no longer reflect current scholarship due to ongoing research and critical reassessment of individual sites and works since their original publication. Therefore, the use of these images for pedagogical purposes should be complemented as necessary by comparison with updated plans, drawings, and photographs of the subject works and sites.” [ Allan Kohl]
• Historic Posters (1880 – 1918): This collection, also created by Allan Kohl, consists of 162 digital images of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century European posters. In the words of the collection’s author, “In the late nineteenth century, lithographers began to use mass-produced zinc plates rather than stones in their printing process. This innovation allowed them to prepare multiple plates, each with a different color ink, and to print these with close registration on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of colors and variety of sizes could now be produced quickly, at modest cost. Skilled illustrators and graphic designers – such as Alphonse Mucha, Jules Cheret, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — quickly began to exploit this new technology; the “Golden Age of the Poster” (1880s through the First World War) was the spectacular result. This collection of over one hundred and sixty digital images of historic posters from this period was originally compiled to support the teaching of Design History and Graphic Design courses at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design…. All of these works are in the public domain under United States Copyright Law.”
• John Tenniel and the American Civil War: Political Cartoons from Punch, 1860-1865: “John Tenniel is best known as the original illustrator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Before teaming up with Lewis Carroll, he was the chief cartoonist for the British periodical Punch, a weekly journal of political and social satire, and is regarded as one of the pioneers in developing the genre of the political cartoon as we know it today. Each issue of Punch featured a “principal cartoon,” printed full page on a single side of the paper for highest quality reproduction under the standards of the time. Between 1860-1865 Tenniel produced some 56 cartoons commenting on the conflict in America from a sometimes very biased British perspective. These would be of potential interest to anyone dealing with topics such as the history of diplomacy and international relations during the Civil War, the development of the political cartoon as a genre, or the relationship of popular illustration to high art. Because Tenniel maintained high standards of draftsmanship, and as Punch appealed to an erudite upper class readership, these cartoons offer fascinating insights into the social life of Victorian England, and also provide useful resources for costume and design history.” [ Allan Kohl]
• Madison Art Collection: James Madison University’s collection of 1035 art images is quite varied, ranging from the late Neolithic Period (3,000 BCE) to contemporary art. Areas where it has strengths include the ancient Near East, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, West Africa, and Russian religious art. It also contains a large number of paintings by the 19th and 20th century American landscape artists, Walter and Eliot Clark. Further the Madison Art Collection is an official repository of arts and crafts objects created in the 1930s under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), including quilts, prints, and paintings.

To download images from these remote collections, login to RDID, go to the Search page, and check the box next to the collection’s name. Users can then do keyword searches within each specific collection, and download the images by clicking on the floppy disk icon below the thumbnails. For cross-collection searching, check as many boxes as needed, and use keyword searches.

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French Posters, Chinese art, and much more now in RDID

The RISD Digital Image Database, RDID, continues to grow apace, thanks to requests from our very committed faculty. These are some of the image groups we have uploaded in the past month:

Posters from German-occupied France during WWII

20th Century Chinese Art

New Yorker Magazine Cartoons

Marginalia in Medieval Manuscripts

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World Jewelry in RDID

This week we have added a number of digital  images of world jewelry to RDID. They include African work such as Dogon rings, Senufo ankle bracelets and Tuareg necklaces; Indonesian nose rings; Polynesian whale teeth necklaces and many other types of ornament. Click here to see a slideshow of these images. To login to RDID, simply use your RISD username and password.

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Art:21 images in RDID

We are very happy to announce that we have recently uploaded into RDID 143 digital images of artwork featured in the television series Art:21, Seasons 1 to 4. To find these images, login to RDID, click on Browse and select the Subject field in the drop-down box. Under subject, click on Art:21 (Television program), and that will allow you to download all the images of artwork from the program. To see individual slideshows, click on the following links:

Art:21 Season 1

Art:21 Season 2

Art:21 Season 3

Art:21 Season 4

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RDID Guide Online

The Visual Resources Center has created two step-by-step guides on how to use RDID, the RISD Digital Image Database: a faculty guide and a student guide. Both have in-depth instructions on how to browse and search our digital collections, how to download images for RISD projects, and how to view the RDID slideshows. Be sure to let us know what you think of the guides, and help us improve them.

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World Textiles in RDID

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!

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RISD Posters Added to RDID

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.

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