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Tag Archives: museums
How a Museum Restores a Beautiful Painting from Hundreds of Years Ago | SPLOID #art #paintings #museums #restorations
Charles Le Brun’s painting of Everhard Jabach and His Family was finished in 1660. Now that it’s 2015 and hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my favorite museum in New York, it was in need of a little bit of, um, reviving. The Met guides us through as it restores the giant piece of art and shows the steps the artwork needed to shine again. READ MORE: How a museum restores a beautiful painting from hundreds of years ago | SPLOID
Why Do Presidents Get Their Own #Libraries? | Atlas Obscura #POTUS #museums
In May, the Obama Foundation announced that Chicago will be the future location of the Barack Obama Presidential Center, which will include a library and museum. The center will become the 14th institution in the National Archives and Records Administration’s presidential library system, which includes centers dedicated to all presidents from Herbert Hoover onwards.
Over the years, millions of public and private dollars and ostensibly, man hours, have been spent curating these institutions. Which begs the question: why?
Franklin D. Roosevelt began this tradition when, in 1939, he decided to hand over his personal and presidential records to the federal government when leaving office. Two years later, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum was built in Hyde Park, New York to house these records. READ MORE: Why Do Presidents Get Their Own Libraries? | Atlas Obscura.
The Future Of #Museums Is Reaching Way Beyond Their Walls | Co.Exist #AMNH
The American Museum of Natural History has always been one of the most popular destinations in New York City. With about 5 million visitors a year, an increase from 3 million in the 1990s, it—along with the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art—is among the top 10 most-visited museums in the world.
Even with this influx of people coming to its doorstep, however, the museum is now equally focused on drawing a crowd beyond its campus.
“In the old days, a visit to a museum like ours would be a one-off. You come, you visit you go home,” says Futter. “Now people have a relationships with us very often before they get here. They come, and [their visit] is like a giant exclamation point—and then they return home and continue to engage with us wherever they are.”
AMNH today is a sprawling outreach institution that is using apps, social media, and educational programs to slowly grow its reach. READ MORE: The Future Of Museums Is Reaching Way Beyond Their Walls | Co.Exist | ideas + impact.
Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces Included! | Open Culture #art #digital @rijksmuseum
We all found it impressive when Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum put up 125,000 Dutch works of art online. “Users can explore the entire collection, which is handily sorted by artist, subject, style and even by events in Dutch history,” explained Kate Rix in our first post announcing it.” “Not only can users create their own online galleries from selected works in the museum’s collection, they can download Rijksmuseum artwork for free to decorate new products.”
But we posted that almost two and a half years ago, and you can hardly call the Rijksmuseum an institution that sits idly by while time passes, or indeed does anything at all by half measures…And so they’ve kept hard at work adding to their digital archive, which, as of this writing, offers nearly 210,000 works of art.
Download 422 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Open Culture
You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.” If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications’ collection of free art books and catalogs. READ MORE: Download 422 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Open Culture.
Projection Mapping Brings an Ancient Greek Statue to Life | WIRED
PURISTS WILL SCOFF, but we could be nearing a future where new technologies make art museums come to life. Not hyperbolically, in the sense that virtual reality displays and touchscreen tablets let you interact with art in new ways (we’re already seeing that in spades, thanks to smart renovations at places like the Cleveland Museum of Art and the new Cooper Hewitt.)
This is more literal. In this near-future, works of art might actually register facial expressions. They might blink, or look right at you. READ MORE: Projection Mapping Brings an Ancient Greek Statue to Life | WIRED.
3D printing produces a perfect replica of a sixth-century sword | CNET
A damaged sixth-century sword in a museum in Norway has been perfectly reproduced as new through 3D printing.
READ MORE: 3D printing produces a perfect replica of a sixth-century sword | CNET.
Crowdsourced Metadata Games: A Primer | Information Space
The challenge: You have two minutes to educate a Stupid Robot by describing the picture below as precisely as possible. The catch: you can only list one word of any given length from 4-10 letters, and the robot will reject words it already knows. Therefore, you must be accurate, creative, and specific all at once.
An image from the British Library’s collections on http://www.metadatagames.org
If, like me, you found this challenge oddly entertaining, you might enjoy Metadata Games, a set of interactive tagging games designed to help libraries and museums crowdsource useful metadata for their collections.
READ MORE: Crowdsourced Metadata Games: A Primer | Information Space
The Videogame History Museum has found a home in Frisco, Texas | Engadget
Making a pilgrimage to the Videogame History Museum has been tough so far; most of its collection is in storage, and what little you do see has been going on cross-country tours. Pretty soon, though, it will have a permanent public display. A Frisco, Texas community board has approved a deal to give the Museum a 10,400 square foot location inside the citys Discovery Center by this April.
READ MORE: The Videogame History Museum has found a home in Frisco, Texas | Engadget
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