JSTOR Blog
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Happy 87th birthday to former New York City Mayor Ed Koch from ARTstor and artist Dmitry Borshch! Mayor Koch recently posed for this portrait, which is now included in the Catalog of American Portraits maintained by The National Portrait Gallery. View more of Dmitry Borsch’s work in the ARTstor Digital Library.
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In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss noted that we often reserve rich foods for celebrations: “These are some of the delicacies which one would not buy and consume alone without a vague feeling of guilt.” And guilty we would feel if we were to celebrate the passing of another year without…
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“I’m trying to capture the architecture, the play of light on stone, and the beauty of the church. I try to find a way to express the spirit of the church. Sometimes I’m just moved by the shapes and the patterns.” PJ McKey “I’m trying to find hints of what moved the people who built…
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The Artstor staff is hurrying to wrap up projects before the long Thanksgiving weekend that starts this Thursday. The holiday is officially celebrated in the United States every year on the fourth Thursday of November.
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Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, widely known as the father of photography, was born on November 18, 1787, France. Dauguerre, also a painter and theatrical designer, was already a celebrated figure for his invention of the Diorama, a spectacle featuring in-the-round theatrical painting and lighting effects. He eventually partnered with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce to make lasting images using…
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On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a brief, powerful speech at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He addressed the country’s civil war, reminding weary Americans of the values they were fighting for. Its closing words were: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining…
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Many countries throughout the world celebrate Armistice Day on November 11 to commemorate the effective end of World War I on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918. A common custom dictates a two-minute moment of silence at 11:00 AM as a sign of respect for those lost in…
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Continuing our spooky Day of the Dead/Halloween theme, we now present you with a slide show of the Danse Macabre. The Dance of Death was an allegory that began in the Middle Ages (possibly in response to the ravages of the black plague) in which death dances with people from all walks of life; it…
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The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a three-year grant of $413,378 to support a project investigating and evaluating ways of improving library and museum searching and social tagging by presenting users with thesauri, taxonomies, and other structured vocabularies as a way to discover relevant content. The results will ultimately be useful…
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Some blocks in my neighborhood are getting downright spooky – front yards are filling with spider webs and tombstones, and ghosts peek through the bushes. Along with the piles of pumpkins and inevitable candy corn appearing in the supermarket, they are a reminder that Halloween is just around the corner. Americans celebrate Halloween on October…
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This installment of our Focus series presents an account of the Great Depression illustrated with selections from the numerous collections in the Artstor Digital Library that center on history. The Great Depression was the longest lasting and most severe period of low general economic activity and unemployment of the 20th century. Lasting approximately a decade,…
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The initial entry of our new Focus series presents a chronicle of the telephone using some of the numerous collections in the Artstor Digital Library that center on history.
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Autumn has arrived in New York City and there are signs of it everywhere. The leaves are turning shades of red, orange, and gold, and when I stroll under the trees I look out for acorns falling. Outside of the city the changes are more striking. Before long the leaves will be piling up. When…
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Bonnie Burnham, President of the World Monuments Fund (WMF), the leading independent organization dedicated to saving the world’s most treasured places, talks to Christine Kuan about the history and future projects of WMF. The Artstor Digital Library recently launched WMF’s images of architecture, sites, and monuments from around the world. CK: What is the mission…
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By Erin Giffin, University Of Washington [The images in this post were selected to accompany the final exercise for the course “Introduction to Western Art — Ancient” (Art History 201) offered during autumn quarter 2010. This 300-student survey class balanced lectures by Professor Margaret Laird with meetings in smaller sections supervised by graduate student Teaching…
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It’s been several years since the attacks on 9/11, but the events refuse to be confined to history. They continue to shape life and discourse in New York City, the United States, and the world, and the subject touches on disciplines as varied as social studies, journalism, political science, international relations, religious studies, economics, and civics.…
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By Dr. Jennifer Zarro, Tyler School of Art, Temple University Artstor makes possible what we know to be the best teaching practices in higher education. Using Artstor in my class, Race, Identity, and Experience in American Art, allows for multiple possibilities for teaching and learning. It is an especially important resource for this course which…
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The Artstor Digital Library offers many excellent resources to support Latin American Studies, encompassing materials from the Pre-Columbian era through the Spanish conquest, and from Cuba’s revolution in 1959 to images of Carnaval in Brazil in 2008. A history of the region can be illustrated with images from the encyclopedic collections available in the Digital…
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The Artstor Blog is the place to find new interdisciplinary teaching ideas with our new series: Teaching with Artstor. This week we feature “Re-historicizing Contemporary Pacific Island Art” by Marion Cadora, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. — My research in the Department of Art and Art History at University of…
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Extending from Morocco and North Africa to Turkey and Iran, the Middle East is interesting and complex economically, socially, politically, and culturally. The Artstor Digital Library offers many collections that document the rich history of the region that gave birth to the world’s earliest civilizations and major religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Explore…
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We welcome our United States users back to their desks after the Independence Day holiday weekend with a pointer: The Digital Library provides thousands of images related to American Studies ranging from colonial times to the present, including photography, architecture, decorative arts, graphic design, painting, and sculpture. The Artstor Digital Library is rich with collections…
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Franklin Furnace was founded in 1976 by artist Martha Wilson to champion ephemeral art forms neglected by mainstream arts institutions. The organization provided a much-needed forum for artists’ books, temporary installation art, and performance art, and launched the careers of artists whose work has greatly influenced art and cultural discourse in this country. After 35…
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Artstor just launched the Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South (Library of Congress), architectural photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston’s systematic record of early American buildings and gardens in the South. Johnston’s masterly portrayals of the exteriors and interiors of houses, mills, churches, mansions, plantations, and outbuildings transcend their purpose as records, and her prints…
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Congratulations to the five winners of this year’s Artstor Travel Awards! They will each receive $1,500 to be used for their teaching and research travel needs over the course of the next year. Colette Apelian, Fine Art faculty, Berkeley City College: “Online Teaching and Architectural Solutions to Climate Problems in the Islamic World” Keri Cronin,…
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Keri Cronin Department of Visual Arts faculty, Brock University In January 2011 I launched a new senior-level undergraduate course called “Picturing Animals.” This is a research-intensive course that explores the history of visual culture through a thematic focus on representations of nonhuman animals. From Albrecht Dürer to Damien Hirst, we take a critical look at…
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Elizabeth Perkins Columbia University graduate student While reading through conservation records at the National Gallery in Washington, I found many references to Giovanni Bellini’s fingerprints all over the faces in his portraits. I squinted and stared in the gallery, but despite my best efforts and the indulgence of a lenient security guard, I could not…
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Julia Reinhard Lupton Professor of English and Comparative Literature, The University of California, Irvine With its extraordinary image collection and sensitive search functions, Artstor has changed the way I teach Shakespeare. Images of the Globe Theater and panoramic maps of Elizabethan London set the stage for our engagement with the plays. When teaching The Merchant…
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An art historian teaching one of the few online surveys of Islamic art at the community college level shares how uses architectural examples to help students understand how design across the Islamic world responds to climate.
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Jacquelyn DeLombard Beginnings Pre-School owner/teacher, Philadelphia Museum of Art Teacher Resource Center volunteer Several weeks ago, the pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children from Beginnings Learning Center were at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) for one of the five lessons they attend during the school year. For the program, “Museum Looks and Picture Books,” PMA had…
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Did you know Artstor is an excellent resource for Asian Studies? The Artstor Digital Library shares several collections that document Asian cultures, history, religion, architecture, and art. Magnum Photos offers thousands of documentary images from Asia, beginning from the post-war period to the present, covering everything from Mahatma Ghandi’s India to the Japanese city of Obama…
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