ArtBabble Goodies

ArtBabble has a Goodies page where you can download badges of all sizes for your blog, Facebook page, etc. My favourites are:
this

or this but there are several more.

And you must try typing and copy/pasting all of the above while holding an annoyed cat in one arm.

Betye Saar - Assemblage/Collage Artist

Back in 2006 I found this NYT article, The Artist Who Made a Tougher Aunt Jemima Hasn’t Softened With Age, about Betye Saar, who was exhibiting her works in a show entitled Betye Saar: Migrations/Transformations at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. There are six pages showing the works in this exhibition, but better images of some of Saar's mixed media work can be fond by selecting her name on the artist's search page. Actually, the images for many artists'works are nicely magnified so you can examine them closely.

A search at SFMOMA finds at least one image of of Saar's work, and some very good interactive features. One of them, Voices and Images of California Art, has profiles of eleven artists, including Saar and Imogen Cunningham. This is a very well done online exhibit, with a wealth of information. The other section, which includes one piece by Betye Saar, is ArtThink, SFMOMA's "curriculum site" which provides ideas and inspiration for students and anyone who might want to explore art-making.

The Wikipedia entry for Saar has some very good links, including my very first Wikipedia correction.

NPR has an excellent article from 2006 available in text with pictures and also in audio, so you can look at the art while listening to the artist - actually there is more to the audio than what is in the transcript.

In the absence of oil tanks

Although this webpage is called "a 360-degree view of the oil tanks" at the Tate Modern, it is really a view of the spaces left after the oil tanks were removed.

You need Flash installed to view the space, and then you can move around and through the "underground chambers". The best way to do this is at full screen since the resolution of the photos is really high quality. Ordinarily, I wouldn't want to wander around large vacant spaces, but this is a really neat way to do it.

ArtBabble begins!

This is so what the Web is about - sharing of information, and art-related sources, and spreading it around to as many places as possible.

I learned of ArtBabble because I got a tweet from the Brooklyn Museum on my Twitter account. I read the New York Times article, visited ArtBabble, became a fan on Facebook (which means I can see other people who are interested in the same things I enjoy), joined ArtBabble so I can save the videos I like to my profile there and promote my blog (although ArtBabble is much, much better and will be even more marvellous once it includes material from around the world.)

The embedded video shown below explains what ArtBabble is all about.



Behind the Babble; now with more art is provided under a Creative Commons license. ArtBabble's terms of use are fairly generous as long as there is no copyright infringement.

ArtBabble originates at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. They have a serious web presence, described on their Interact page.

ArtBabble is different from Europeana since it concentrates on art-related video produced in art galleries and other art sites in the United States. Europeana, by the way, is now fully functional although it still has a Beta sticker on its webpages. There, too, you can have a 'My Europeana' section where you can save searches, links to images, and tag images however you want. Europeana provides information about many types of materials and links to the originating source - if the source doesn't provide free or easily viewable material, you're out of luck. It's still pretty great though.

Rudy Burckhardt

Rudy Burckhardt is the first artist mentioned in a New York Times review of "Subterranean Monuments: Burckhardt, Johnson, Hujar" at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Back in 2006, the exhibition page had only a few images and it's no longer available. The article in the NYT does give a short biography of Burckhardt.

A Google search found an excellent website for a MOMA 2002 exhibition of A Walk through Astoria and Other Places in Queens: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt. This is truly a wonderful and well set up website, except that it is not evident when you first click the 'enter' button that there are two exhibits.

For "An Afternoon in Astoria" you are able to leaf through the pages of the photograph album and zoom in and out with ease (as long as you are using a browser that recognizes that it has a Flash viewer).

Once you are in the album, you can see that there is also a film "Under the Brooklyn Bridge" which is set up so that you can watch film stills and clips from two sequences. Depending on which exhibit you are watching, there are really two 'introductions' to the shows.

Also found on a Google search - Rudy Burckhardt’s Maine - "An exhibition of photographs, paintings, and films presented by the New York Studio School in 2003". This is another example of a very good exhibition site which has been maintained past the closure of the physical exhibition.