Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 361,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces by Rembrandt Included!

in Art | April 7th, 2015

rembrandt-sp-as-apostle-paul

We all found it impres­sive when Ams­ter­dam’s Rijksmu­se­um put up 125,000 Dutch works of art online. “Users can explore the entire col­lec­tion, which is hand­i­ly sort­ed by artist, sub­ject, style and even by events in Dutch his­to­ry,” explained Kate Rix in our first post announc­ing it. ” “Not only can users cre­ate their own online gal­leries from select­ed works in the museum’s col­lec­tion, they can down­load Rijksmu­se­um art­work for free to dec­o­rate new prod­ucts.”

Het straatje

But we post­ed that almost two and a half years ago, and you can hard­ly call the Rijksmu­se­um an insti­tu­tion that sits idly by while time pass­es, or indeed does any­thing at all by half mea­sures: think of their cre­ation of Rem­brandt’s Face­book time­line, their com­mis­sion­ing of late Rem­brandt can­vas­es brought to life, or of their accom­mo­da­tion of ter­mi­nal­ly ill patients vis­it­ing one last time.

And so they’ve kept hard at work adding to their dig­i­tal archive, which, as of this writ­ing, offers near­ly 361,000 works of art. This brings them with­in shout­ing dis­tance of hav­ing dou­bled the col­lec­tion in size since we first wrote about it.

George_Hendrik_Breitner_-_Meisje_in_witte_kimono_(Geesje_Kwak)

You want the Dutch Mas­ters? You got ’em. You want Rem­brandt’s Self-por­trait as the Apos­tle Paul? It’s in the archive, right along­side Night Watch. You want Ver­meer’s View of Hous­es in Delft, bet­ter known as The Lit­tle Street? It’s in there too. But don’t stop now; the Rijksmu­se­um has put up a much greater breadth of Dutch art than that. You’ll also find impor­tant Dutch painters you may not have heard so much about before, such as the impres­sion­ist George Hen­drik Bre­it­ner, whose Girl in a White Kimono appears just above. And it even includes high-res­o­lu­tion images of works of art and design in oth­er media, such as Michel de Klerk’s 1918 suite of fur­ni­ture for ‘t Woon­huys, whose arm­chair you see below. Looks almost good enough to sit in, does­n’t it? You can enter the col­lec­tion here,  or search the col­lec­tion here.

skichair

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

A Final Wish: Ter­mi­nal­ly Ill Patients Vis­it Rembrandt’s Paint­ings in the Rijksmu­se­um One Last Time

Rembrandt’s Face­book Time­line

16th-Cen­tu­ry Ams­ter­dam Stun­ning­ly Visu­al­ized with 3D Ani­ma­tion

Flash­mob Recre­ates Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” in a Dutch Shop­ping Mall

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

What It’s Like to Be Color Blind and See Art in Color for the First Time

in Art, Biology, Museums, Science, Technology | April 7th, 2015

We all know that say­ing about walk­ing in anoth­er’s shoes, but what about see­ing through anoth­er’s eye­balls? I’m not talk­ing about per­spec­tive. I’m talk­ing about col­or. As in I see it, and my hus­band does­n’t. At least not the way I do.

His cop­ing mech­a­nism is to chal­lenge me when­ev­er I refer to some­thing as “blue.” To him, it’s grey, or brown, or some oth­er non-blue shade. He wants me to see it that way too. To admit that I am wrong. For my part, I feel it’s impor­tant that the per­son to whom I’m mar­ried acknowl­edge that there’s no way my favorite bowl can be the col­or of cement, no mat­ter what his cone cell recep­tors are telling him.

Per­haps he’d have bet­ter luck ask­ing patient strangers to describe col­or to him, as blind-from-birth film crit­ic Tom­my Edi­son does below. Hmm. Col­or may be more sub­jec­tive than my hus­band’s and my spec­tral stand-offs would sug­gest.

Accord­ing to EnChro­ma, the com­pa­ny that designed and sells the col­or-cor­rect­ing lens­es the onscreen guinea pigs are seen wear­ing in the video up top, an esti­mat­ed 300 mil­lion peo­ple suf­fer from some form of col­or blind­ness. Their glass­es offer some of those three mil­lion a chance at see­ing red in the lit­er­al sense. The video par­tic­i­pants are, not sur­pris­ing­ly, blown away by their first encounter with a Cray­ola-col­ored world.

Hav­ing refreshed myself on the struc­tures of the eye, I took the col­or blind­ness test on EnChro­ma’s web­site. I test­ed nor­mal, hav­ing iden­ti­fied the hid­den (or in my case not-so-hid­den) num­bers in a vari­ety of vir­tu­al mosaics.

My col­or blind friend, Bob, agreed to take it too, pro­vid­ed I muz­zle myself from offer­ing the sort of com­men­tary to which hus­bands are sub­ject­ed. (Whad­daya mean you can’t see it!? It’s bright fuch­sia!!!) He pulled a pret­ty heavy duty protan defi­cien­cy, oth­er­wise known as red-green col­or blind­ness.

Accord­ing to the man­u­fac­tur­er, EnChro­ma glass­es are unlike­ly to col­or his world. The best he could hope for is a slight improve­ment after weeks of wear­ing.

Bum­mer, except that he lives in Chica­go, where the Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art offers EnChro­ma Cx loan­ers at the recep­tion desk. Like many such insti­tu­tions, the MCA is active­ly seek­ing ways to improve acces­si­bil­i­ty. (The museum’s col­or blind direc­tor of com­mu­ni­ca­tions rec­om­mends hav­ing a look at Mar­tin Creed’s Work No. 1351, a col­or­ful lat­tice in the cafe. See right below.)

Creed_JulyInstall_03

Per­haps Bob will get a peek at some­thing he has­n’t seen before. Like red. Oth­ers will expe­ri­ence a rev­e­la­tion. Mean­while, an insuf­fer­able non-col­or­blind indi­vid­ual such as myself might get an effect akin to an Insta­gram fil­ter. My col­ors will pop.

“Unfair,” say Bob and my hus­band. I have to agree. Should the Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art offer col­or-leech­ing glass­es, I will wear them, even if the frames are real­ly ugly. Until then, the video below pro­vides some sense of what those of us who see the full range of col­or aren’t miss­ing.

via Vice

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pra­do Muse­um Cre­ates the First Art Exhi­bi­tion for the Visu­al­ly Impaired, Using 3D Print­ing

Jorge Luis Borges, After Going Blind, Draws a Self-Por­trait

Helen Keller Speaks About Her Great­est Regret — Nev­er Mas­ter­ing Speech

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Guernica: Alain Resnais’ Haunting Film on Picasso’s Painting & the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War

in Art, Film | April 1st, 2015

Note: You will hear sound 37 sec­onds into the film.

Human­i­ty has endured a great many wartime atroc­i­ties since 1937, but to this day, if you think of an art­work born of one such event, you’ll more than like­ly still think of Guer­ni­ca. Pablo Picas­so’s large black-and-white can­vas, which he began paint­ing less than a month after the aer­i­al bomb­ing dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War of the small Basque town which gave it its name, ren­ders the hor­ror of sud­den, thor­ough destruc­tion in a way nobody had ever seen before, or has seen again since.

“When I vis­it­ed the town the whole of it was a hor­ri­ble sight, flam­ing from end to end. The reflec­tion of the flames could be seen in the clouds of smoke above the moun­tains from 10 miles away,” wrote The Times’ war cor­re­spon­dent George Steer, in the report that moved Picas­so to take on the sub­ject of Guer­ni­ca for the mur­al the Span­ish Repub­li­can gov­ern­ment had com­mis­sioned for the 1937 World’s Fair. “Through­out the night hous­es were falling until the streets became long heaps of red impen­e­tra­ble debris.”

In 1950, both Guer­ni­ca and Guer­ni­ca inspired an equal­ly haunt­ing short film of the same name [part one, part two] by Alain Resnais and Robert Hes­sens. In black and white just like Picas­so’s paint­ing, the pic­ture uses night­mar­ish cut­ting to com­bine imagery from Guer­ni­ca and oth­er artis­tic sources, a score by Guy Bernard, and the poem “Vic­to­ry of Guer­ni­ca” by Paul Élu­ard. “You hold the flame between your fin­gers and paint like a fire,” said the poet to the painter dur­ing their close friend­ship in the years after the bomb­ing.

Resnais, who would go on to direct such clas­sics of French cin­e­ma as Hiroshi­ma mon amour (anoth­er study of an after­math) and Last Year at Marien­bad, only just end­ed his long and dis­tin­guished film­mak­ing career when he died last year. But in 1950, his career had only just begun, his first for­ays into film hav­ing come in the form of short doc­u­men­taries on work­ing artists in the mid-1940s. Those led to a com­mis­sion to do one on the paint­ings of Van Gogh for a Paris exhi­bi­tion, which led to one on Gau­guin, which led to Guer­ni­ca. Clear­ly, Resnais had the ten­den­cy to unite the arts in his work from the very begin­ning, and many of his fans would say it served him well to the end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 3D Tour of Picas­so’s Guer­ni­ca

Watch Alain Resnais’ Short, Evoca­tive Film Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)

Pho­tos of Hiroshi­ma by Hiroshi­ma mon amour Star Emmanuelle Riva (1958)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Download Images From Rad American Women A‑Z: A New Picture Book on the History of Feminism

in Art, History, K-12, Life | March 30th, 2015

patti smith letter

The next time sto­ry hour rolls around, you can give a mouse a cook­ie or you can awak­en pre-read­ers (and your­self) to some key fig­ures in wom­en’s his­to­ry. 26 of them, to be pre­cise. It’s no acci­dent that that num­ber cor­re­sponds to the exact num­ber of let­ters in the alpha­bet.

Author Kate Schatz and illus­tra­tor Miri­am Klein Stahl active­ly sought to include women of col­or and a vari­ety of sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tions when choos­ing whom to fea­ture in Rad Amer­i­can Women A To Z, a pro­gres­sive fem­i­nist text cum ABC primer. (Illus­tra­tions from the book, like the ones fea­tured on this page, can be down­loaded here for free.)

odetta letter

Hope­ful­ly Glo­ria Steinem was not too upset to learn that G is for the Grimke sis­ters. Actu­al­ly, I sus­pect that the sec­ond wave’s most rec­og­niz­able super­star would be pleased if read­ers are moved to edu­cate them­selves as to some of the book’s more obscure ref­er­ences.

ursula letter

B is for Bil­lie Jean King who whooped male chau­vin­ist pig Bob­by Rig­gs on the court in 1973’s Bat­tle of the Sex­es. I remem­ber her! A Bil­lie and Bob­by-themed pump­kin took top hon­ors in my school’s Hal­loween carv­ing con­test that year.

It’s fun­ny how when a woman does some­thing they always think we only affect half of the pop­u­la­tion, and peo­ple will come up to me and say thanks for what you did for wom­en’s ten­nis all the time, and I know they’d nev­er say that to a guy.

E is for civ­il rights activist Ella Bak­er, a sec­re­tary who rose through the ranks of the NAACP to become direc­tor of branch­es. She rec­og­nized the press often over­looked her role, as did his­to­ry.

You did­n’t see me on tele­vi­sion, you did­n’t see news sto­ries about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put togeth­er pieces out of which I hoped orga­ni­za­tion might come. My the­o­ry is, strong peo­ple don’t need strong lead­ers.

J is for Jovi­ta Idar, edu­ca­tor and cofounder of the Mex­i­can Fem­i­nist League.

Mex­i­can chil­dren in Texas need an edu­ca­tion…. There is no oth­er means to do it but our­selves, so that we are not deval­ued and humil­i­at­ed by the strangers who sur­round us. 

God­moth­er of Punk Pat­ti Smith, author Ursu­la K. La Guin, and Odet­ta, leg­endary blues singer and “Voice of the Civ­il Rights Move­ment,” are among the mar­quee names to be can­on­ized. See their illus­tra­tions above.

To get all 26 illus­tra­tions in a down­load­able for­mat, click here. To order your own copy of the book, go here.

via Good

Relat­ed Con­tent:

74 Essen­tial Books for Your Per­son­al Library: A List Curat­ed by Female Cre­atives

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Chrissie Hynde’s 10 Pieces of Advice for “Chick Rock­ers” (1994)

Simone de Beau­voir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intel­lec­tu­al and Fem­i­nist (1960)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Download 576 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

in Art, Books | March 28th, 2015

Met 1

You could pay $118 on Ama­zon for the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s cat­a­log The Art of Illu­mi­na­tion: The Lim­bourg Broth­ers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to down­load it at Met­Pub­li­ca­tions, the site offer­ing “five decades of Met Muse­um pub­li­ca­tions on art his­to­ry avail­able to read, down­load, and/or search for free.”

If that strikes you as an obvi­ous choice, pre­pare to spend some seri­ous time brows­ing Met­Pub­li­ca­tions’ col­lec­tion of free art books and cat­a­logs.

You may remem­ber that we fea­tured the site a few years ago, back when it offered 397 whole books free for the read­ing, includ­ing Amer­i­can Impres­sion­ism and Real­ism: The Paint­ing of Mod­ern Life, 1885–1915; Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Anatom­i­cal Draw­ings from the Roy­al Library; and Wis­dom Embod­ied: Chi­nese Bud­dhist and Daoist Sculp­ture in The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art. But the Met has kept adding to their dig­i­tal trove since then, and, as a result, you can now find there no few­er than 576 art cat­a­logs and oth­er books besides. Those sit along­side the 400,000 free art images the muse­um put online last year.

met museum free art books

So have a look at Met­Pub­li­ca­tions’ cur­rent col­lec­tion and you’ll find you now have unlim­it­ed access to such lush as well as artis­ti­cal­ly, cul­tur­al­ly, and his­tor­i­cal­ly var­ied vol­umes as African Ivories, Chess: East and West, Past and Present; Mod­ern Design in The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, 1890–1990; Vin­cent Van Gogh: The Draw­ings; French Art Deco; or even a guide to the muse­um itself (vin­tage 1972).

chess east and est

Since I haven’t yet turned to art col­lec­tion — I sup­pose you need mon­ey for that — these books don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly make me cov­et the vast sweep of art­works they depict and con­tex­tu­al­ize. But they do make me wish for some­thing even less prob­a­ble: a time machine so I could go back and see all these exhibits first­hand.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Over 250 Free Art Books From the Get­ty Muse­um

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

The Guggen­heim Puts 109 Free Mod­ern Art Books Online

Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Muse­ums, and Free Books from Uni­ver­si­ty Press­es

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 86 ) |

Download 100,000 Free Art Images in High-Resolution from The Getty

in Art | March 27th, 2015

getty free

When I want to get a good look at the city of Los Ange­les, I go up to the Get­ty Cen­ter in the San­ta Mon­i­ca Moun­tains. I can also, of course, get a pret­ty good look at some art at the muse­um there. But if I don’t feel like mak­ing that trek up the hill — and if you don’t feel like mak­ing the trek from wher­ev­er you live — The Get­ty can give you, in some ways, an even bet­ter way to look at art online. Just vis­it the Get­ty’s Open Con­tent Pro­gram.

Japanese Ladies

See­ing as this sort of free cul­tur­al resource fits right into our wheel­house here at Open Cul­ture, we’ve tried to keep you post­ed on the archive’s devel­op­ment over the past few years. Last time we passed the word along, the Get­ty’s dig­i­tal pub­lic-domain archive of high-res­o­lu­tion images had grown to 87,000, and now it has near­ly hit the 100,000 mark (99,989, to be exact)— which sounds to us like just the time to keep you post­ed on what you can find there­in.

Rue Mosnier

In its cur­rent state (which promis­es fur­ther expan­sion still), the Get­ty’s Open Con­tent Pro­gram offers images like Aban­doned Dust Bowl Home (top image), Dorothea Lange’s vivid­ly stark evo­ca­tion of Depres­sion-era Amer­i­can des­o­la­tion, as well as oth­er pho­to­graph­ic time (and place) cap­sules, such as Kusak­abe Kim­bei’s hand-col­ored prints of life in late 19th- and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Japan (Japan­ese Ladies pic­tured here); impres­sion­ist can­vas­es like Édouard Manet’s 1878 The Rue Mosnier with Flags; and even views of Los Ange­les itself, like Car­leton Watkins’ shot of the city’s plaza cir­ca 1880.

Plaza Los Angeles

To down­load an image for which you’ve searched, you first need to click on that image’s title. That link takes you to the image’s own page (like those we linked to in the para­graph just above), where you’ll find a down­load link. Look for the word “down­load” beneath the image, and then click that link. It’s just that sim­ple — far sim­pler, in any case, than visu­al access to such a range of art­work has ever been before. Though if you do make it to Los Ange­les, don’t hes­i­tate to make the effort to vis­it the Get­ty Cen­ter; the tram that takes you up to it makes for a pret­ty fas­ci­nat­ing cul­tur­al expe­ri­ence and view of the city in and of itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Get­ty Adds Anoth­er 77,000 Images to its Open Con­tent Archive

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Down­load Over 250 Free Art Books From the Get­ty Muse­um

40,000 Art­works from 250 Muse­ums, Now View­able for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project

LA Coun­ty Muse­um Makes 20,000 Artis­tic Images Avail­able for Free Down­load

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

What Happens When a Cheap Ikea Print Gets Presented as Fine Art in a Museum

in Art, Comedy, Design, Life | March 23rd, 2015

The enti­ty to whom Dutch group, Life­hunters, attrib­ut­es the muse­um qual­i­ty art­work in the video prank above doesn’t exist. The “famous” Swedish artist’s han­dle –IKE Andrews –is but a puck­ish ref­er­ence to IKEA, the pur­vey­or of the 10€ print (oh snap, it’s not even an orig­i­nal!) var­i­ous unnamed “art experts” are asked to eval­u­ate, hav­ing been led to believe it’s some­thing rare and won­der­ful. IKE Andrews’ fel­low fic­tion­al enti­ty, Borat, would be grat­i­fied by how read­i­ly these experts accept pre­sen­ter Boris Lange’s sug­ges­tions as to the val­ue of this work.

So how bad is this “paint­ing”? Wal­ter Keane bad? Mar­garet Keane bad? Is it a Velvis? A sad clown? The sort of crum­my land­scape artist Wayne White might snap up in a thrift store?

Only if you think IKEA achieved glob­al dom­i­nance by choos­ing designs, pat­terns, and images in order for snot­ty hip­sters to buy them iron­i­cal­ly…

As sev­er­al YouTube, Twit­ter, and blog com­menters have men­tioned, the print itself is pret­ty cool.

It’s a media fren­zy, but inter­est­ing­ly, the artist is not com­ing for­ward to her­ald his or her role in the hoax.

Make that artists. Turns out IKE Andrews is a pair of Swiss street artists, Chris­t­ian Rebec­chi and Pablo Tog­ni, who col­lab­o­rate as NEVERCREW.

They have a fas­ci­na­tion with cross sec­tions. As their web­site some­what murk­i­ly explains [all sic]:

These mod­els, as such, from time to time actu­al­ly con­tain more or less exten­sive real­i­ties, rep­re­sent­ed as autonomous sys­tems of which the real­i­ty of the view­er becomes a part. This then the rap­port becomes the very sub­ject, main­ly high­light­ed as the rela­tion­ship between man and nature (between human being and its nature), but auto­mat­i­cal­ly extend­ed to a vision of total and inevitable rela­tion­ship between every­thing, between every part, where it is only the point of view, the posi­tion with­in a sys­tem, to define a selec­tion.

IKEA stream­lines the artists’ phi­los­o­phy for the mass­es thus­ly:

We call the theme “liv­ing struc­tures” and we like to see them as mod­els of liv­ing sys­tems. We would like our art to gen­er­ate inter­est and curios­i­ty, and the view­er to become a part of the mech­a­nism with his or her thoughts, per­spec­tive and emo­tions.

never-crew-message-in-a-bottle

 

Philosophy’s all well and good, but what’s it actu­al­ly look like, this “Mes­sage in a Bot­tle”?

Well, it seems to me to be a bot­tle, implau­si­bly halved length­wise to reveal a bunch of steam­punk stuff bal­anced atop robot spi­der legs, form­ing a cage around an ancient-look­ing whale. Also, a cloud rain­ing yel­low liq­uid, or pos­si­bly light. (Hope­ful­ly the lat­ter). Oh! And it appears to have been paint­ed on a brown paper bag.

I can think of plen­ty of peo­ple who’d not only like it, but find mean­ing in it, as the experts do. The only dif­fer­ence is the experts do so on cam­era, a fact not all of them are will­ing to laugh at, when host Lange informs them they’ve been punked.

The artists aren’t the only ones play­ing it cool. The inter­net may be explod­ing, but so far, nei­ther IKEA, nor the Nether­lands’ Arn­hem Muse­um, where the prank was staged, have made men­tion of this busi­ness.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trail­er That Was Nev­er Released in Amer­i­ca

The Great Dr. Fox Lec­ture: A Vin­tage Aca­d­e­m­ic Hoax (1970)

How the “Paul McCart­ney is Dead” Hoax Start­ed at an Amer­i­can Col­lege News­pa­per and Went Viral (1969)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and moth­er of a teen film­mak­er whose best known work was shot guer­ril­la style in a Red Hook, Brook­lyn Ikea. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe

in Art, Google, Museums, Travel | March 22nd, 2015

circling

Cir­cling Birdies by Cheko, Grana­da Spain

Since last we wrote, Google Street Art has dou­bled its online archive by adding some 5,000 images, bring­ing the tal­ly to 10,000, with coor­di­nates pin­point­ing exact loca­tions on all five con­ti­nents (though as of this writ­ing, things are a bit thin on the ground in Africa). Giv­en the tem­po­ral real­i­ties of out­door, guer­ril­la art, pil­grims may arrive to find a blank can­vas where graf­fi­ti once flour­ished. (RIP New York City’s 5 Pointz, the “Insti­tute of High­er Burn­ing.”)

A major aim of the project is vir­tu­al preser­va­tion. As with per­for­mance art, doc­u­men­ta­tion is key. Not all of the work can be attrib­uted, but click on an image to see what is known. Guid­ed tours to neigh­bor­hoods rich with street art allow arm­chair trav­el­ers to expe­ri­ence the work, and inter­views with the artists dis­pel any num­ber of stereo­types.

Cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions like Turkey’s Pera Muse­um and Hong Kong’s Art Research Insti­tute, and street art projects based in such hubs as Rome, Paris, Syd­ney, and Bangkok, have pulled togeth­er offi­cial col­lec­tions of pho­tos and videos, but you can play cura­tor too.

It’s easy to add images to a col­lec­tion of your own mak­ing that can be shared with the pub­lic at large or saved for pri­vate inspi­ra­tion. Care­ful, you could lose hours…it’s like Pin­ter­est for peo­ple who grav­i­tate toward spray paint and rub­bish strewn vacant lots over ging­ham wrapped Mason jars.

It’s been a long and bru­tal win­ter here on the east coast, so for my first for­ay, I prowled for Signs of Spring. One of my first hits was “Cir­cling Birdies” by Cheko, above. Locat­ed in Grana­da, Spain, it’s one of the exist­ing works Google has turned into a GIF with some light, log­i­cal ani­ma­tion.

Behold a bit of what typ­ing “flower,” “baby ani­mals,” “plants,” and “trees” into a search box can yield! You can enter Google Street Art here.

Child With Windmill

Artist: Wal­ter Ker­shaw
Lon­don UK

Thrashbird

Artists: Thrash­bird and Renee Gagnon
Los Ange­les, Cal­i­for­nia.

Baby Chick

Artist: unknown
Rochester, NY

Screen Shot 2015-03-19 at 11.07.58 PM

Icy and Sot
Rochester NY

Freedom Fighter

Artist: Kristy San­doval
Los Ange­les, CA

Natureza Viva

Artists: Regg and Violant
Alfragide Por­tu­gal

Beetle

Artist: Klit
Alfragide, Por­tu­gal
A giant col­or­ful bee­tle tries to fly between the ceil­ing and the floor of this park­ing lot. His wings seem filled with flower petals. So, the “Liv­ing Nature” project brought a set of huge insects that car­ry a note of liv­ing spir­it to the space.

Deep Blue

Artist: Rai Cruz
Mani­la, Philip­pines

Nagel
Artist: Chris­ti­aan Nagel
Lon­don, Eng­land

Untitled Rome
Artist: Lady Aiko
Rome, Italy

Parsa

Artist: Andrew Ken­tish
Nepal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art

Obey the Giant: Short Film Presents the True Sto­ry of Shep­ard Fairey’s First Act of Street Art

Big Bang Big Boom: Graf­fi­ti Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion Cre­ative­ly Depicts the Evo­lu­tion of Life

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast