How to Make a Replica of 1900-Year-Old Glass Fish: A Brilliant Video from the British Museum

in Art, History, Museums | December 26th, 2016

All due respect to the British Museum, but the title of its “How to Make a Glass Fish Replica” video, above is a tad misleading.

I’m sure no malice was intended, but “making” a DIY fish-shaped vessel reminiscent of some 22 found in the ancient Kushan storerooms at Begram, Afghanistan is no one’s definition of an easy craft project. (Unless you’re willing to fudge with some Elmer’s, some blue felt, and an empty peanut butter jar…)

Glass Specialist Bill Gudenrath of the Corning Museum of Glass is an historian of glassworking techniques from ancient Egypt through the Renaissance and clearly expert at his craft, but he doesn’t appear to be too keen on supplying explanatory blow-by-blows. Nor would I be, bustling around a red hot glass oven, without so much as a Johnny Tremain-style leather apron to protect me. I’m not even sure I’d want the distraction of a video camera in my face.

But if, as the title implies, the goal is to produce a duplicate of this whimsical 1900-year-old guppy, the process must be broken down.

From what this casual viewer was able to piece together, the steps would go something like:

1. Twirl a red hot metal pipe in the forge until you have a healthy glob of molten glass. Apparently it’s not so different from making cotton candy.

2. Roll the glass blob back and forth on a metal tray.

3. Blow into the pipe’s non-glowing end to form a bubble.

4. Repeat steps 1–3

5. Roll the pipe back and forth on a metal sawhorse while seated, applying pinchers to taper the blob into a recognizably fishy-shape.

(Don’t worry about its proximity to your bare forearms and khaki-covered thighs! What could possibly go wrong?)

6. Twirl it like a baton.

(Depending on the length of your arms, your nascent glass fish may come dangerously close to the cement floor. Try not to sweat it.)

7. Use scissors and pinchers to tease out a nipple-shaped appendage that will become the fish’s lips.

8. Use another poker to apply various bloops of molten glass. (Novices may want to practice with a hot glue gun to get the hang of this — it’s trickier than it looks!) Pinch, prod and drape these bloops into eye and fin shapes. A non-electric crimping iron will prove handy here.

9. Use blue glass, tweezers and crimping iron to personalize your fish-shaped vessel’s distinctive dorsal and anal fins.

10. Tap on the pipe to crack the fish loose. (Careful!)

11. Score the distal end with a glass cutting tool.

(This step should prove a cinch for anyone who ever used a craft kit to turn empty beer and soda bottles into drinking glasses!)

12. Smooth rough edges with another loop of molten glass and some sort of electric underwater grinding wheel.

Optional 13th step: Read this description of a furnace session, to better acquaint yourself with both best glassblowing practices and the proper names for the equipment. Or get the jump on Christmas 2017 with this true how-to guide to producing hand blown glass ornaments.

Not planning on blowing any glass, fish-shaped or otherwise, any time soon?

Explore the somewhat mysterious history of the 1900-year-old fish-shaped original here, compliments of the British Museum’s St John Simpson, senior curator for its pre-Islamic collections from Iran and Arabia.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Explore 5,300 Rare Manuscripts Digitized by the Vatican: From The Iliad & Aeneid, to Japanese & Aztec Illustrations

in Archives, Books, History, Literature, Museums | September 26th, 2016

Hundreds of years before vast public/private partnerships like Google Arts & Culture, the Vatican served as one of the foremost conservators of cultural artifacts from around the world. In the era of the Holy Roman Empire, few of those works were available to the masses (excepting, of course, the city’s considerable public architecture and sculpture). But with over 500 years of history, Vatican Museums and Libraries have amassed a trove of artifacts that rival the greatest world collections in their breadth and scope, and these have slowly become public over time. In 1839, for example, Pope Gregory XVI founded the Egyptian Museum, an extensive collection of Egyptian and Mesopotamian artifacts including the famous Book of the Dead. We also have The Collection of Modern Religious Art, which holds 19th and 20th century impressionists, surrealists, cubists, expressionists, etc. In-between are large public collections from antiquity to the Renaissance.

When it comes to manuscripts, the Vatican Library is no less an embarrassment of riches. But unlike the art collections, most of these have been completely inaccessible to the public due to their rarity and fragility. That’s all going to change, now that ancient and modern conservation has come together in partnerships like the one the Library now has with Japanese company NTT DATA.

Their combined project, the Digital Vatican Library, promises to digitize 15,000 manuscripts within the next four years and the full collection of over 80,000 manuscripts in the next decade or so, consisting of codices mostly from the “Middle Age and Humanistic Period.” They’ve made some excellent progress. Currently, you can view high-resolution scans of over 5,300 manuscripts, from all over the world. We previously brought you news of the Library’s digitization of Virgil’s Aeneid. They’ve also shared a finely illustrated, bilingual (Greek and Latin) edition of its predecessor, The Iliad (top).

Further up, from a similar time but very different place, we see a Pre-Columbian Aztec manuscript, equally finely-wrought in its hand-rendered intricacies. You’ll also find illustrations like the circa 17th-century Japanese watercolor painting above, and the rendering of Dante’s hell, below, from a wonderful, if incomplete, series by Renaissance great Sandro Botticelli (which you can see more of here). Begun in 2010, the huge-scale digitization project has decided on some fairly rigorous criteria for establishing priority, including “importance and preciousness,” “danger of loss,” and “scholar’s requests.” The design of the site itself clearly has scholars in mind, and requires some deftness to navigate. But with simple and advanced search functions and galleries of Selected and Latest Digitized Manuscripts on its homepage, the Digital Vatican Library has several entry points through which you can discover many a textual treasure. As the site remarks, “the world’s culture, thanks to the web, can truly become a common heritage, freely accessible to all.” You can enter the collection here.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How to Look at Art: A Short Visual Guide by Cartoonist Lynda Barry

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Life, Museums, Philosophy | June 6th, 2016

Despite the small, narrative doodle posted to her Tumblr a couple of weeks back, inspirational teacher and cartoonist Lynda Barry clearly has no shortage of strategies for viewing art in a meaningful way.

She takes a Socratic approach with students and readers eager to forge a deeper personal connection to images.

She traces this tendency back forty years, to when she studied with Marilyn Frasca at Evergreen State College. Could Frasca have anticipated what she wrought when she asked the young Barry, “What is an image?”

For Barry, who claims to have spent over forty years trying to answer the above question, there will almost always be an emotional component. In a 2010 interview with The Paris Review, she addressed the ways in which art, visual and otherwise, can fill certain crucial holes:

In the course of human life we have a million phantom-limb pains—losing a parent when you’re little, being in a war, even something as dumb as having a mean teacher—and seeing it somehow reflected, whether it’s in our own work or listening to a song, is a way to deal with it.

The Greeks knew about it. They called it catharsis, right? And without it we’re fucked. I think this is the thing that keeps our mental health or emotional health in balance, and we’re born with an impulse toward it.

No wonder the snaggle-toothed dog woman on Barry’s Tumblr looks so anxious. She craves that elusive something that never much troubled Helen Hockinson’s museum-going comic matrons.

(Had revelation been on the menu, those ladies would have dutifully paged through the most highly recommended guidebook of the day, confident they’d find it within those pages.)

These days, the internet abounds with pointers on how to get the most from art.

Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts lobbies for a four-point method, well suited to classroom discussion.

The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott prescribes time and silence.

Another critic, New York magazine’s firebrand, Jerry Saltz, recommends an aggressively tactile approach for those who would look at art like an artist. Get up close. Cop a feel. Try to see how any given piece is made. (He himself is given to contemplating art with his hips thrust forward and head tilted back as far as it will go, in duplication of Jasper Johns’ stance.)

Looking for something more graphic? Abstract Expressionist Ad Reinhardt helped the post-War public get a handle on modern art in his iconic How to Look series.

Former museum educator, Cindy Ingram, the Art Curator for Kids, echoes the spirit of Barry’s sentiment when she states that a child’s interpretation of a work’s meaning is no less valid than Wikipedia’s, the museum’s, or even the artist’s. Adults, don’t squelch a child viewer’s joy of art by telling him or her what to think!

Of course, some of us don’t mind a hint or two to help us feel we’re on the right track. Those in that camp might enjoy the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 82nd and 5th series, in which expert curators wax rhapsodic about their love of particular works in the collection.

You understand that this is just the tip of the proverbial ‘berg…

Readers, if you have any tips for achieving revelation through art, please share them by leaving a comment below.

And don’t forget to lift your shorter companion up so he can see better.

Barry’s short series of images originally appeared on her Tumblr.

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

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Discover Harvard’s Collection of 2,500 Pigments: Preserving the World’s Rare, Wonderful Colors

in Art, Harvard, Museums, Science | April 29th, 2016

If modern paint companies’ pretentiously-named color palettes gall you to the point of an exclusively black-and-white existence, the Harvard Art Museums’ Forbes pigment collection will prove a welcome balm.

The hand and typewritten labels identifying the collection’s 2500+ pigments boast none of the flashy “creativity” that J. Crew employs to peddle its cashmere Boyfriend Cardigans.

Images by Harvard News

The benign, and wholly unexciting-sounding “emerald green” is —unsurprisingly—the exact shade legions of Oz fans have come to expect. The thrills here are chemical, not conferred. A mix of crystalline powder copper acetoarsenite, this emerald’s fumes sickened penniless artists as adroitly as they repelled insects.

Look how nicely it goes with Van Gogh’s ruddy hair…

“Mummy” is perhaps the closest the Forbes collection comes to 21st- century pigment naming. As Harvard’s Director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Narayan Khandekar, notes in the video above, its mushroom shade is no great shakes. The source—the resin used to seal mummies’ bandages—is what distinguishes it.

The collection’s crown jewel is a rich ball of mustard‑y Indian Yellow. This pigment comes not from maize, nor earth, but from the dehydrated urine of a cow subsisting exclusively on mango leaves. I’m drawn to it like a moth to the living room walls. I’m sure Benjamin Moore had his reasons for dubbing its urine-free facsimile “Sunny Days.”

The images above, save the Van Gogh painting, comes courtesy of by Harvard News. The video above was created by Great Big Story.

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

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330 Years of Female Printmakers (1570–1900) : Download Free Prints, Visit the Exhibit

in Art, Museums, Politics | April 4th, 2016

Henrietta Louisa Koenen was born a century before the Guerrilla Girls, but her collecting habits are a strong argument for honorary, posthumous membership in the activist group.

The wife of the Rijksmuseum’s Print Room’s first director, Koenen spent over three decades acquiring prints by female artists, though discouragingly few of the 827 women in her collection achieved much in the way of recognition for their work.

Renaissance aristocratic painter, Sofonisba Anguissola, and portraitist (and founding member of London’s Royal Academy of Arts) Angelica Kauffman, have the distinction of being namechecked in the Guerrilla Girl’s 1989 provocation, below.

Neither can be said to enjoy the museum tote bag celebrity of a Kahlo or O’Keeffe.

Self portait, Angelica Kauffman

Their work can be expected to attract some new fans, now that 80 some pieces from Koenen’s collection are on display as part of the New York Public Library’s exhibit, Printing Women: Three Centuries of Female Printmakers, 1570–1900.

(And it would be unseemly not to credit American art dealer Samuel Putnam Avery, for donating Koenen’s collection to the library at the turn of the last century, twenty years after her death.)

Printmaking is a frequently collaborative art. The droll Young Girl Laughing at the Old Woman, above, was drawn by Anguissola and engraved by Jacob Bos.

And Maria Cosway’s Music Has Charms, at the top of this post, was a family affair, with Cosway printing husband Richard’s celestial rendering of daughter Louisa Paolina Angelica. (Mrs. Cosway was also an accomplished composer and painter of miniatures and mythological scenes, though history has decreed her most enduring claim to fame should be her hold over a besotted Thomas Jefferson.)

The library highlights the continuum with an online gallery showcasing the work of contemporary female printmakers, some of whom are contributing guest posts to curator Madeleine Viljoen’s Printing Women blog.

Sara Sanders, whose 2010 Lithograph, Untitled Chair #5, above, is part of a larger series, writes:

I believe that the domestic objects with which we spend our lives retain traces of our histories and tell stories about our pasts. These prints are part of an ongoing series of portraits of chairs drawn in the way we imagine them to be. Two of the chairs in this series were drawn from existing objects with a rich history, while the rest are imagined character studies.

Her thoughts seem particularly germane, when the “lesser genres” of ornament, still-life, and landscape were by default frequent subjects for the female artists in Koenen’s collection. Propriety deemed the fairer sex should not be party to the nude figure studies that significant religious and historical scenes so often demanded.

(Channel your inner Guerrilla Girl by performing an image search on Rape of the Sabine Women, and imagining the models as aspirant artists themselves, confined to such subject matter as violets and laundry day.)

That’s not to say domestic subjects can’t prove divine.

Witness 1751’s A Child Seated, Blowing Bubbles by Madame de Pompadour, an amateur artist and frequently painted beauty, who, the National Gallery’s website informs us, was “groomed from childhood to become a plaything for the King.”

View the online brochure for New York Public Library’s Printing Women: Three Centuries of Female Printmakers, 1570–1900 exhibition here. The exhibition at The New York Public Library ends May 27th, 2016.

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

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Free: Download 500+ Rare Music Manuscripts by Mozart, Bach, Chopin & Other Composers from the Morgan Library

in Creativity, Museums, Music, Opera | March 14th, 2016

When my son first started playing the piano, I lost several evenings chasing the holy grail of free online sheet music. Sadly, most of what we were interested in downloading wasn’t really free… just the first page.

It’s hard to rationalize dropping five bucks on one song, when the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is a short subway ride away. The problem is, I’m not much of a musician, and while there are scores and scores of scores upon their shelves, I rarely understood what it was I was checking out. Often I’d come home with the sought after piece, only to realize that I’d inadvertently checked out a vocal selection, or the chord-rich equivalent of a cocktail pianist’s fake book.

With the Morgan Library’s Music Manuscripts Online project, there’s no guarantee my son or I will be able to play it, but I do know exactly what I’m getting.

The handwritten manuscript of Mozart’s comic singspiel, Der Schauspieldirektor, above, for instance, autographed by the composer himself. 84 pages worth, not counting covers and endpapers, all free for the downloading!

Put that on your iPad, Mr. Salieri!

The collection currently offers digitized versions of upwards of 500 musical manuscripts, with more to come as the reviewing process continues.

It’s searchable by composer, and big names abound.

Perhaps you’d like to warm up the Wurltizer with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue for Organ, BWV 538, in D minor…

Or let all your opera singing, ballet dancing friends know you’re available to accompany them with Puccini’s autographed manuscript for Le Villi…

Or circumnavigate the scribbled out boo boos, while attempting Chopin’s Polonaises, Piano, Op. 26. Chopin’s John Hancock is the reward.

The hits just keep coming: Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Fauré, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Massenet, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann…

Not surprisingly, female composers are grossly underrepresented, but there are a few gems, such as Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel’s autographed manuscript of the song Selmar und Selma, decorated with a pretty pencil and wash drawing by her husband

The Morgan has plans to add essays about the manuscripts by leading scholars. In the meantime, pick a piece and start practicing.

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

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Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Launches Free Course on Looking at Photographs as Art

in Art, MOOCs, Museums, Photography | February 15th, 2016

Not content with banning selfie sticks, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is bringing visual literacy to the masses via its first foray into the world of MOOCs (aka “massive open online courses”).

Curator Sarah Meister will be drawing on MoMA’s expansive photography collection for the free 6‑session, self-paced Seeing Through Photographs class on Coursera.

You won’t learn how to make duck lips in a mirror, but by the course’s end, you should be able to cast a critical eye, with a new appreciation for the “diverse ideas, approaches, and technologies” that inform a photograph’s making.

The first week’s assignments include a video interview with Marvin Heiferman, author of Photography Changes Everything, below. Yes, there will be a quiz.

Expect assigned readings from John Szarkowski’s Introduction to The Photographer’s Eye, and MoMA’s Chief Curator of Photography, Quentin Bajac.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, obviously. Meister has lined up quite a hit parade: Ansel Adams, NASA’s moon photography, Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” Susan Meiselas’ “Carnival Strippers” project, Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills,” and Nicholas Nixon’s 40-year documentation of the Brown sisters.

Prove your knowledge at the end of the six weeks with a final 30-minute project in which you’ll select an image that would be a good addition to one of the course’s themes, below:

Seeing Through Photographs

One Subject, Many Perspectives

Documentary Photography

Pictures of People

Constructing Narratives and Challenging Histories

Ocean of Images: Photography and Contemporary Culture

Enroll in this fascinating free course here.

via Petapixel

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

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The Artist as Artist’s Model: Au Naturel Portraits of Frida Kahlo Taken by Art Patron Julien Levy (1938)

in Art, Museums, Photography | October 30th, 2015

Frida Kahlo’s legacy is definitely informed by her careful husbandry of own image. She understood its currency, and how to leverage it. Even when caught out of uniform or having a seemingly unaware laugh, she stayed true to what in modern parlance would be called her brand.

So it is with gallery owner Julien Levy’s 1938 (technically not-safe-for-work) photographs of the artist, taken the year before he hosted her first solo show, an event that caused Time magazine to rhapsodize that “the flutter of the week in Manhattan was caused by the first exhibition of paintings by famed muralist Diego Rivera’s…wife, Frida Kahlo.”

Rivera’s wife was also Levy’s lover, as these artfully posed, semi-clad photos suggest. They show a less public side of Kahlo, to be sure, but one that’s in keeping with the face she presented to the world.

Frankly, the revelation of her partially loosed hair seems more intimate than her dishabille.

Click here to see the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection of Levy’s Kahlo portraits, both with and without rebozo.

To learn a little more about Julien Levy (“a gallery owner who committed his charisma, connections, and personal resources to establishing photography’s importance in the field of modern art”) and the collection bequeathed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, click here.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is now playing in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How to Make a Replica of 1900-Year-Old Glass Fish: A Brilliant Video from the British Museum

Explore 5,300 Rare Manuscripts Digitized by the Vatican: From The Iliad & Aeneid, to Japanese & Aztec Illustrations

How to Look at Art: A Short Visual Guide by Cartoonist Lynda Barry

Discover Harvard’s Collection of 2,500 Pigments: Preserving the World’s Rare, Wonderful Colors

330 Years of Female Printmakers (1570–1900) : Download Free Prints, Visit the Exhibit

Free: Download 500+ Rare Music Manuscripts by Mozart, Bach, Chopin & Other Composers from the Morgan Library

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Launches Free Course on Looking at Photographs as Art

The Artist as Artist’s Model: Au Naturel Portraits of Frida Kahlo Taken by Art Patron Julien Levy (1938)

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