The fall has been a whirlwind of activities related to the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition entitled Materializing "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art that opened here on September 14th and will continue into mid-February. The exhibition is devoted to examining the defining impact Lucy R. Lippard’s groundbreaking book Six Years had on the emergent conceptual art movement.
Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science has received an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant through the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarians Program to train next generation art and museum librarians in the NYARC libraries. M-LEAD-TWO (Museum Library Education and Digitization Technology-Web-Online) is a three year grant that provides scholarship support for 15 diverse MSLIS students (five per year) and a two-semester paid internship program.
A is for A show I just Assembled About Artists' Alphabet books. Each letter of the Alphabet is represented by A book. You'll be Amazed how many different ways that Artists interpret the ABCs.
Collecting a rich array of scholarly research materials for the study of Western art held by museums and galleries all over the world has always been one of the core missions of the Frick Art Reference Library. It should come as no surprise then that the Library has one of the most comprehensive collections of catalogs of European fine arts from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, with an especially rich selection of nineteenth-century imprints.
Your history books will tell you that the advertising industry as we know it in was born in the 1920s. Your television will tell you that it really took shape in the 1960s. The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives own several scrapbooks which show that some aspects of our modern advertising industry were born much earlier. The current Library display exhibition at the Museum Library includes one of these scrapbooks, a number of loose tradecards advertising various businesses, many of them in Brooklyn, as well as books and postcards.
Kids, animals, and pretty girls: amateur photography publications are full of them.
I recently discovered that it's been that way since the earliest years of photography. Because I trolled through a hundred or so of these publications for the current MoMA Library show "How to Make Good Pictures:" Manuals and the Popularization of Amateur Photography.
The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) directors are planning for the future. Recently, we secured an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to explore collecting born-digital (i.e., originating in a digital format) art historical materials.
As the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) intern for 2012, I am fortunate to be spending time at all three New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) libraries. The Frick Art Reference Library and those of the Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) share many attributes. One of these is the important role that collecting expeditions played in increasing the holdings of each institution. Interestingly, in the early twentieth century these libraries supported major expeditions that were led by women. These bold travelers came from a variety of backgrounds and socioeconomic classes and were ahead of their time.