The Brooklyn Museum Libraries have recently acquired over 160 books concerning Mexican, Haitian, and Spanish Colonial Folk Art, 92 of which are unique to NYARC libraries’ holdings and over a dozen that are not in WorldCat at all. This exciting gift comes to us through the generosity of Margery Nathanson, proprietor of the Grass Roots Gallery de Artes Populares, which was in operation from 1980 to 1990.
The Frick Art Reference Library’s Photoarchive consists of more than 1,000,000 reproductions of works of art of the Western tradition dating from the 4th to the mid-20th century. Although photoarchives were the foundation of art historical study in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these extraordinary resources, which allow researchers to review comprehensive holdings of individual artists and regional schools, have become increasingly rare during the past decade. Because of limitations of space, staff, or funds, many photoarchives have been dismantled. Several historic research collections, however, including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, have been preserved in part or in their entirety at the Frick Art Reference Library. Scholars, students, dealers, and artists active in New York City now have access to a diverse collection of study photographs in one location.
Several MoMA Library staff members are heavily involved in an exciting upcoming event, the 3rd annual Contemporary Artists' Books Conference, to be held at PS1 on November 5-6. The conference is sponsored by Printed Matter, and held in conjunction with the NY Art Book Fair. The program will include speakers, panels, artists' presentations, and receptions.
One of this summer’s most amusing and charming acquisitions at the Frick Art Reference Library and the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a book devoted to Campari, the apéritif favored by the Italian Futurists. Yes, all those manifesti were fueled by the bitter red drink whose recipe has remained secret since its appearance in 1860. In Italy, Campari mixed with soda water has been sold as Camparisoda (alcohol content 10%), in a distinctive bottle designed in 1932 by Futurist member Fortunato Depero (1892–1960).
Anyone who has slaved over a book exhibition for months has probably had that experience when a friend, who is not a "book person," comes to see the show. You can tell from their reaction that the experience is something similar to seeing an art exhibition with the paintings displayed still nailed shut inside their wooden shipping crates. When you go to European museums, you realize how lucky we are in the United States that artworks are not usually displayed behind glass. But books—interactive books, which require someone to handle them in order to make them "work," in order to be able to see and read them—invariably are.
It is important for the staff of the Frick Art Reference Library and the other New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) libraries to work collaboratively and with other institutions. With this mandate in mind, the reference staff of the Frick recently visited their colleagues at Yale University to learn about the collections held at the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library and the Yale Center for British Art Reference Library and Photograph Archive.
In case you were wondering, searching a card catalog is officially an obsolete skill. As most librarians and researchers know, this is not exactly the truth as there still remain pockets of very valuable cards out there that have yet to be converted to an online format and provide the only access into historically important collections, but I digress … Most card catalogs are obsolete and stand as artifacts to our pre-Internet past, but we (i.e., librarians) love card catalogs and are always excited to see the cards that our predecessors painstakingly crafted take on a new life as a work of art.
TEN TONS OF ART ARRIVE AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. MUSEUMS ANNOUNCE PROJECT FOR FIRST COMPUTERIZED ARCHIVE OF ART. FIRST MORTGAGE LOANS OBTAINABLE ON HOUSE IN THE MUSEUM GARDEN. SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON ARTISTS’ RELATIONS FORMED. LECTURE ON ART UNDER THE DICTATORSHIPS. CHILD JURY SELECTS PRIZE-WINNING PICTURES AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART.
Recent Tweets? No—these are MoMA press releases from the past half-century.