Brooklyn Museum online

I have reviewed several exhibits at the Brooklyn Museum but I want to discuss, in this post, the wealth of material available throughout their website.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/online/

Also check the rest of their website - treat separate from Sackler Museum, which is next)
and see under podcasts the large number of videos that can be downloaded from iTunes - some are on YouTube

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions has past exhibits (to at least 1999 are good) and listing back to 1800s. Look for blog, and does

Arthur Rothstein and unexpected connections

I came across a photo by Arthur Rothstein while I was listening to a lecture and watching slides by Jeff Curto at --- (describe his site, and the podcast). [This site doesn't seem to have the direct link to the Photohistory webpage]

I looked up Rothstein and found the FSA page. Imagine my surprise when I saw that he had photographed at Gee's Bend in 1937. [mention previous blog entry]
Photos of Gee's Bend - brief mention of quilters at end of page

Main site http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fadocamer.html
Also http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html


The site is confusing but try to figure out the links because these are the depression era photos of the FSA

Photography at the Steven Kasher Gallery

The Steven Kasher Gallery in New York displays photograpic works by its artists online through its 'exhibitions' and 'artists' links. Although this sounds pretty straightforward, not all galleries do archiving and displaying of works this well. Steven Kasher does. There are a few broken or slow-to-load links here and there (took me a while to find a link to photos by Lou Reed) but, all in all, this is an excellent site.

I started out exploring the site by looking for works by Fred W. McDarrah after the New York Times did a short review of his 2006 show at the Gallery. Once upon a time the review was reproduced along with the exhibition pictures on the Press page for McDarrah. Alas, the Press page for this photographer is full of broken links to PDF files of the reviews. The NYT seems to be allowing free access to some articles from their archives, including the review and McDarrah's Obituary just a year after his show at Kasher.

Some of the exhibits are by current photographers, but the real joy of this site is in the many exhibitions of vintage photos. The first archived exhibit is from 2005, "Original Disfarmer Photographs", by Mike Disfarmer. The Wikipedia page for Disfarmer is very short but the links at the bottom of the page include a gallery/sales location and a wonderful video.

This is definitely a website where it's very easy to find yourself wandering down all sorts of photograph-lined distractions. Like all good webwise galleries, Kasher has a Facebook page, which could be updated more often but offers some very good photos from their exhibits.

Click at Smithsonian

http://www.click.si.edu/Default.aspx

On not finding Louise Bourgeois at The Walters Art Museum

The Walters Art Museum has an extensive listing of resources for past exhibits. Unfortunately, many of the older links lead to an error page, and many (not quite all) of the newer ones have just a brief description of the exhibit.  The earliest exhibit that I found with a good link and good resources was for Courbet and the Modern Landscape, held at the end of 2006. As for the other exhibits, you'll just have to click through the links to find one that works and leads to good resources, but that's part of the fun of the web. A word of warning: The error message on pages that don't work looks like some sort of server error but since it's been the same for months, I'm guessing that the pages just never existed, or have been taken down.

As for Courbet, I described two versions of the show back in June 2009, and this time around I discovered that the Museum does Works of Art quite well.  They can be browsed by a variety of means. One word of warning, doing a search can lead to some odd results. After using the search term "Canada" and getting works that had nothing to do with Canada, I found that restricting my search terms was a wise choice, although, again, it was fun to browse through art objects that I wouldn't have found otherwise.

I was originally looking for the page for the exhibit 'Femme' by Louise Bourgeois, put on by this museum and the Contemporary Art Museum of Baltimore, which evidently suspended "operations at the end of May 2012". Most of that museum's webpages seem to still be active, including the one for past exhibitions, so there is a little information there about the Bourgeois exhibit.

The Walters link was broken, but I did find a New York Times review from 2006, which had a very good description, not always complimentary, of the exhibit. About.com's Art History page for the exhibit has a short description with eleven images, which can be very nicely magnified. MOMA's artist page for Louise Bourgeois has 1326 images of her works including this one.  So About.com had the best set of images, and the whole experience left me feeling grumpy about the ability of some museum sites to provide useful information and very happy about those like MOMA which take the issue of providing access to artworks seriously.