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Blog Topic: Highlights

September 20, 2013

Upside down world: Rubén Durán on his photographs of Carnaval

Rubén Durán, Senior Web & Video Developer at Houston Community College Central’s Curriculum Innovation Center, was kind enough to give us a little background on his collection of photographs of carnaval, which were recently released in the Artstor Digital Library. The riotous, rebellious world of carnaval came to life for me when I traveled to my […]

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September 13, 2013

A closer look at Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors”

Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Ambassadors” of 1533 is well known for its anamorphic image of a skull in the foreground, but upon close perusal, the objects on the table between the two subjects prove just as fascinating. To start with, the painting memorializes Jean de Dinteville, French ambassador to England, and his friend, Georges de […]

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August 5, 2013

A challenging treasure: the James Dee archives

In early June, the New York Times published an article about a massive (and massively intriguing) photography archive. D. James Dee, aka the SoHo Photographer, spent almost 40 years documenting contemporary art in New York City and, upon retiring, was searching for a home for his archive. Dee worked for many galleries such as Ronald Feldman Fine […]

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July 18, 2013

Art in context: installation photography

If you read a review or article about an interesting museum exhibition you missed you can usually find images of the featured artworks. But have you ever wondered how the works were presented, where they were placed? Which pieces were shown together, and in what order? You’re not alone – exhibition design is central in […]

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July 1, 2013

Thoughts on the Pride March, past, present, and future

June is Pride Month, and the month in which New York City’s famous annual Pride March parades down Fifth Avenue towards Christopher Street in front of the Stonewall Inn, birthplace of the historic Stonewall Riots of 1969. As I meander around Greenwich Village days before the event, I pull out my phone and begin taking […]

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July 1, 2013

When It Rains

Lately in New York (and plenty of other places too), it seems to rain more often than not, and we would be lost without our umbrellas and our rain boots. On June 7, the first tropical storm of this season—whose lilting name Andrea belied her punch—dumped four inches of rain on the city, doubling the […]

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June 14, 2013

Happy Father’s Day from Artstor

Happy Father’s Day! Every year on the third Sunday of June we celebrate our dads – whether or not they’re as stylish as the one in this portrait by Anthony van Dyke in the Musée du Louvre, courtesy of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux.

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May 13, 2013

Fashion from the Great Gatsby’s roaring twenties

“I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby The recent movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby has turned the spotlight on the […]

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May 3, 2013

May is National Barbecue Month, allegedly

May is National Barbecue Month, allegedly. Why the hedging? Because the closest to an official citation we could find was this post on the USDA blog from 2012. But we’ll go with it because a) it gives us the excuse to post this mid-19th century watercolor from The Walters Art Museum, b) we like barbecue, and c) it’s close […]

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April 23, 2013

Butterfly sightings

Spring time is here and butterflies are already making their annual appearance, according to butterfliesandmoths.org. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a slideshow of selections from a wide variety of eras, regions, and fields of study, from science to art to costume design. Search the Artstor Digital Library for butterfl* to find more than 1,000 images with the keywords […]

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