New Online Image Sources

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Derek Churchill

Several interesting and potentially useful online image collections have launched recently, including:

War Art in the National Archives (UK): World War II-era art and propaganda from Britain, now available in Wikimedia Commons.
Farm Security Administration Photograph Collection: Rare FSA photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, recently rediscovered in the New York Public Library.
Machiel Kiel Photographic Archive: The Dutch scholar’s photos of Islamic and Christian architectural monuments in the former Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey and the Balkans).

New Collections in ARTstor

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Derek Churchill

ARTstor is releasing quite a number of new image collections as 2011 draws to a close. For the complete list of new releases, click here. A few of the most interesting of these recent collections are listed below (you can get additional information by clicking on each link):

Baltimore Museum of Art (one of this region’s major institutions, most famous for its Cone Collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century modern art)
QTVR Panoramas of World Architecture (more of those fun 3-D “QuickTime Virtual Reality” [QTVR] panoramas from Columbia University; this update includes mainly sites in Japan and Chicago)
Via Lucis (Medieval religious architecture in France and Spain)
Museum of the City of New York (a treasure trove of historical views of the city, including photographs by Jacob Riis and Berenice Abbott)

WPA Photos in Wikimedia Commons

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Derek Churchill

Poster for the WPA's Federal Art Project, 1936 (photo from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)

The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution has donated nearly 300 Works Progress Administration (WPA) photographs from the 1930s to Wikimedia Commons, the image collection affiliated with Wikipedia. These include portraits of artists like Charles Alston and Arshile Gorky, and photos showing artists at work on public murals and other Great Depression-era projects. You can view the complete collection here.

As works created explicitly for the Federal Government, most WPA works are not copyrightable and have therefore always been in the public domain. That means you can legally download and use these high-resolution images however you want, without having to seek permission.

Read more about this Smithsonian-Wikimedia collaboration here.

Frick Digital Image Archive

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Derek Churchill

The Frick Art Reference Library in New York has just announced the online launch of the Frick Digital Image Archive. Drawing from the Frick’s vast photoarchive, this inaugural release includes 15,000 images documenting many lesser-known works of art that were in American private collections or on the New York art market between 1922 and 1967.

The Frick is also making available the documentation (without images) for these works plus another 110,000 works recorded in its photoarchive through Arcade, the catalog of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC).

You can read more here in the Frick’s press release. As anyone who has ever used the Frick’s photoarchive can attest, this is a major new online resource for scholars.

New Collections in ARTstor

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Derek Churchill

Four new image collections drawn from university museums are now available in ARTstor. Click on the links below for ARTstor’s description of each collection:

Fowler Museum, UCLA (non-Western objects, with a particular strength in African art)
Colby College Museum of Art (strong in American art, including paintings by Alex Katz)
Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Richard F. Brush Art Gallery, St. Lawrence University

VRC@UD

The news blog of the Visual Resources Center at the University of Delaware

Tag Archives: photographs

New Online Image Sources

New Collections in ARTstor

WPA Photos in Wikimedia Commons

Frick Digital Image Archive

New Collections in ARTstor