Author : Harvard Art Museums
Publisher : Harvard Art Museums
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 22,25 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Architecture
ISBN :
With some 280,000 objects, the Harvard Art Museum is the largest university art museum in the United States. This first handbook of the collections surveys their full scope, from early-Egyptian bronzes and Chinese ceramics to contemporary paintings and prints.
Author : Massumeh Farhad
Publisher :
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 43,63 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Art
ISBN :
"Praised by the New York Times as "a highly important exhibition book," this lavishly produced catalog reproduces illustrated texts from the groundbreaking exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Called "fabulous" by the Washington Post, Falnama was the first show of its kind dedicated to the art of divination in the Islamic world. The Falnama were brilliantly painted compositions created in Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Falnama: The Book of Omens combines rare images with scholarly texts on the deeper meaning of dreams, omens, and divination. Featured in this first publication ever devoted to the Falnama as a genre are intact volumes as well as text folios and illustrations now dispersed among international public and private collections. Essays by scholars of Safavid, Ottoman, and Byzantine history and language, complemented by full-color illustrations, offer detailed analysis of the form, content, and meaning of these rarely seen works of art. The first-ever translations of three of the four monumental copies provide insight into a vivid and enduring aspect of human concern--the unknown."--Publisher's website.
Author : Steven Lubar
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 11,53 MB
Release : 2017-08-07
Category : Art
ISBN : 0674983297
Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, information and emotion. Curators consider visitors’ interactions with objects and with one another, how our bodies move through displays, how our eyes grasp objects, how we learn and how we feel. Inside the Lost Museum documents the work museums do and suggests ways these institutions can enrich the educational and aesthetic experience of their visitors. Woven throughout Inside the Lost Museum is the story of the Jenks Museum at Brown University, a nineteenth-century display of natural history, anthropology, and curiosities that disappeared a century ago. The Jenks Museum’s past, and a recent effort by artist Mark Dion, Steven Lubar, and their students to reimagine it as art and history, serve as a framework for exploring the long record of museums’ usefulness and service. Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every collection and exhibition. Lubar explains work behind the scenes—collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building—through historical and contemporary examples. Inside the Lost Museum speaks to the hunt, the find, and the reveal that make curating and visiting exhibitions and using collections such a rewarding and vital pursuit.
Author : Freda Matassa
Publisher : Facet Publishing
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 22,58 MB
Release : 2011-05
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1856047016
This landmark publication is the first to draw together all aspects of museum collections management in one handbook. It is designed for anyone with responsibility for a cultural collection and covers everything a collections manager needs to know. It describes professional practice in managing cultural objects and works of art, whatever the size and nature of the collection. The book includes essential information on: Legal aspects of collections Ethical issues such as due diligence and immunity from seizure Up to date concerns such as sustainability, crossing borders and financial constraints Loans, acquisitions, inventory and movement. The book describes all collections management procedures in a simple step-by-step process and is clear and easy to use with all procedures based on international museum practice. Examples of real forms, policies and documents drawn from major museums are included throughout the text and act as guides for any transaction. Readership: Packed full of practical information, advice and good practice, this will be essential reading for all museum professionals, curators of private collections and museum studies students.
Author : R. J. Gettens
Publisher : Courier Corporation
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 39,14 MB
Release : 2012-09-26
Category : Art
ISBN : 0486142426
The combined training and experience of the authors of this classic in the varied activities of painting conservation, cultural research, chemistry, physics, and paint technology ideally suited them to the task they attempted. Their book, written when they were both affiliated with the Department of Conservation at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, is not a handbook of instruction. It is, instead, an encyclopedic collection of specialized data on every aspect of painting and painting research. The book is divided into five sections: Mediums, Adhesives, and Film Substances (amber, beeswax, casein, cellulose, nitrate, dragon's blood, egg tempera, paraffin, lacquer, gum Arabic, Strasbourg turpentine, water glass, etc.); Pigments and Inert Materials (over 100 entries from alizarin to zinnober green); Solvents, Diluents, and Detergents (acetone, ammonia, carbon tetrachloride, soap, water, etc.); Supports (academy board, dozens of different woods, esparto grass, gesso, glass, leather, plaster, silk, vellum, etc.); and Tools and Equipment. Coverage within each section is exhaustive. Thirteen pages are devoted to items related to linseed oil; eleven to the history and physical and chemical properties of pigments; two to artificial ultramarine blue; eleven to wood; and so on with hundreds of entries. Much of the information — physical behavior, earliest known use, chemical composition, history of synthesis, refractive index, etc. — is difficult to find elsewhere. The rest was drawn from such a wide range of fields and from such a long span of time that the book was immediately hailed as the best organized, most accessible work of its kind. That reputation hasn't changed. The author's new preface lists some recent discoveries regarding pigments and other materials and the pigment composition chart has been revised, but the text remains essentially unchanged. It is still invaluable not only for museum curators and conservators for whom it was designed, but for painters themselves and for teachers and students as well.
Author : Sally Anne Duncan
Publisher : Getty Publications
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 50,92 MB
Release : 2018-08-07
Category : Art
ISBN : 1606065696
From 1921 until 1948, Paul J. Sachs (1878–1965) offered a yearlong program in art museum training, “Museum Work and Museum Problems,” through Harvard University’s Fine Arts Department. Known simply as the Museum Course, the program was responsible for shaping a professional field—museum curatorship and management—that, in turn, defined the organizational structure and values of an institution through which the American public came to know art. Conceived at a time of great museum expansion and public interest in the United States, the Museum Course debated curatorial priorities and put theory into practice through the placement of graduates in museums big and small across the land. In this book, authors Sally Anne Duncan and Andrew McClellan examine the role that Sachs and his program played in shaping the character of art museums in the United States in the formative decades of the twentieth century. The Art of Curating is essential reading for museum studies scholars, curators, and historians.
Author : Eric M Wolf
Publisher : WW Norton
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,62 MB
Release : 2010-07-13
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780393732801
Exploring the intersections of art, architecture, and design, at both renowned institutions and cutting-edge contemporary collections. Museum interior spaces must be as carefully designed as their façades—if not more so—to meet the needs of both the art on display and the viewers. The design and construction of art museums in America thus is a complex process, and one rarely undertaken lightly. The architect must design a building that effectively supports the art exhibited. The museumgoers’ interaction with the art must be enhanced by the architecture, while amenities such as restaurants, cafes, gift shops, and accessible and convenient restrooms ensure their comfort. Finally, the storage of works of art not on display must be accounted for in the building design. American Art Museum Architecture: Documents and Design explores all aspects of, and approaches to, museum architecture—the aesthetic, the practical, the innovative, and the functional. Architectural historian Eric M. Wolf delves into the archives of some of the country’s premier institutions not only to explore the design decisions made at their founding, but also to understand how those institutions have continued to evolve along with their collections, up to the present day. Wolf examines the gradual development of six major museums: the Frick Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Menil Collection in Houston, the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He explains how each museum was originally conceived, how the architecture reflected or modified that original conception, and how the buildings have been reconsidered or revised in later years, as the nature of art, art display, and museum-going has evolved. Extensive archival plans, documents, and photographs enhance the narrative. American Art Museum Architecture also considers the unique architectural challenges often posed by contemporary art. Conceptual art, video installations, and large-scale pieces are increasingly found in permanent collections, at small galleries and encyclopedic institutions alike. Museums built decades ago may have to renovate in order to accommodate such pieces, while newer museums devoted to contemporary work must tackle new architectural challenges when considering how best to house this work. Encompassing both grand nineteenth-century institutions and avant-garde contemporary art collections, American Art Museum Architecture is a timely and fascinating exploration of the ever-changing relationship between architecture and art.
Author : David M. Halperin
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 421 pages
File Size : 26,4 MB
Release : 2012-08-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0674070860
No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis's best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype-ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth. David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, How To Be Gay traces gay men's cultural difference to the social meaning of style. Far from being deterred by stereotypes, Halperin concludes that the genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised features: its aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, adoration of glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers. The insights, impertinence, and unfazed critical intelligence displayed by gay culture, Halperin argues, have much to offer the heterosexual mainstream.
Author : Makeda Best
Publisher : Harvard Art Museums
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 47,57 MB
Release : 2021-09-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9780300260083
Tracing the impacts of militarism on the American landscape, through the lens of art, environmental studies, and politics Devour the Land considers how contemporary photographers have responded to the US military's impact on the domestic environment since the 1970s, a dynamic period for environmental activism as well as for photography. This catalogue presents a lively range of voices at the intersection of art, environmentalism, militarism, photography, and politics. Alongside interviews with prominent contemporary artists working in the landscape photography tradition, the images speak to photographers' varied motivations, personal experiences, and artistic approaches. The result is a surprising picture of the ways violence and warfare surround us. Although most modern combat has taken place abroad, the US domestic landscape bears the footprint of armed conflict--much of the environmental damage we live with today was caused by our own military and the expansive network of industries supporting its work. Designed to evoke a field book and to nod toward ephemera produced by earlier artists and activists, the catalogue features works by dozens of photographers, including Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Dorothy Marder, Alex Webb, Terry Evans, and many more.
Author : David Edwards
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 28,63 MB
Release : 2011-02-28
Category :
ISBN : 0674058461
The Lab explains the idea of the “culture lab,” Edwards’ concept for experimental art and design centers like those he recently founded in Paris and at Harvard. He presents the lab as a new kind of educational art studio based on a contemporary science lab model, and he shows how students learn by translating ideas alongside experienced creators by exhibiting risky experimental processes in gallery settings.
