Art
Digital Matisse
Speaking of museums and their digital presence, MoMA has an interactive exhibit covering their recent Matisse exhibition. I was lucky enough to be in New York for the AHA conference in early January, and I was able to see "Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" before it ended. Photography was not allowed inside the exhibit, though, so the images here are from the web. The New York Times also has an interactive Matisse "walk through." It functions as an active panoramic image, whereby you can scroll as though you were walking through the exhibit at MoMA.
Both of these interactive digital projects are wonderful, but of course nothing compares to viewing the artwork in person. I was surprised to see how large and expansive the cut-outs were, like The Parakeet and the Mermaid (over 11 feet high, and over 25 feet wide).
Museums and Digital Presence
It’s wonderful to see museums considering their digital presence as an extension of their purpose – online exhibitions and other digital projects greatly enhance the collections. This article at the New York Times describes the interconnectivity between museums and visitors that the digital provides, and also the possibility of connection between museums themselves:
Sooner or later, all museum websites will be interconnected, so that any museum might take advantage of scholarship produced by any other. There’s no reason, after all, that the Museum of Modern Art shouldn’t link its Jackson Pollock page to Pollock pages of museums throughout the world.
...Where is all this going? The British Museum has a succinct answer in the concluding sentence of its About Us page: “The website is not merely a source of information about the collection and the museum, but a natural extension of its core purpose to be a laboratory of comparative cultural investigation.”
I visited the “Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World” exhibition at LACMA a few years ago, and thanks to their digital archive of the exhibit I’m able to share videos like this with my students.
(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)
BAM Colloquium this Friday
Please join us for the Year-End Colloquium for Graduate Students in "BAM." Designated Emphasis in Book, Archive, and Manuscript Studies – http://bam.ucr.edu (Wayback Machine link)
Friday, June 7, 2013. 10:00am to Noon
English Department Conference Room (HMNSS 2212)
Presentations by Steve Anderson, Cori Knight, and Heather Van Mouwerik
Display of printshop projects by Rebecca Addicks, Ann Garascia, Cori Knight, Jessica Roberson, and Anne Sullivan
This will also be a celebration of the new Mellon Workshop Grant awarded to the Material Cultures of the Book Working Group – http://bookhistory.ucr.edu (Wayback Machine link)
(Revised and republished April 23rd, 2025)