Houstonia: Houstonians Open Virtual Museum in Tribute to George Floyd . “Following the viral video that depicted Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody after an officer kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds, [Karim] Farishta teamed up with Houston architectural visualization company INVI and asked artists to submit work showing the world they imagined, rather than the one they’re living in now. Soon, Farishta and INVI co-founders Afreen Ali and Giangtien Nguyen watched in awe as art from around the world began to flood their inboxes. #ArtforJustice, the project’s creators say, was based around a simple question: How do people of color show up in solidarity? That solidarity took the form of more than 160 submissions from 19 states and six countries in artistic mediums that ranged from paintings to protest photography to sculptures to abstract word art. And more keep coming.”
artworks
My Modern Met: 1,100+ Works of Art by Georgia O’Keeffe Is Now Free to View Online
I have no idea how new this is, but I apparently haven’t cataloged it yet, so from My Modern Met: 1,100+ Works of Art by Georgia O’Keeffe Is Now Free to View Online. “Cultural institutions around the world may still be shuttered due to COVID-19, but fortunately, there’s still a way to browse renowned collections while practicing social distancing. Through Google Arts & Culture, you can virtually tour world-famous museums such as the Musée d’Orsay, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Uffizi Gallery. Now, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico has made 1,100+ works of art by the modern American painter available to view online for free.”
Mwebantu: Chaminuka Art – Zambia’s largest private art collection goes online
Mwebantu: Chaminuka Art – Zambia’s largest private art collection goes online. “Art@Chaminuka is an app designed to bring the Chaminuka Art Collection to life, by allowing guests to immerse themselves in the collection with the help of knowledge of each artifact, and a greater contextual understanding of the collection.”
The Guardian: Experts call for regulation after latest botched art restoration in Spain
The Guardian: Experts call for regulation after latest botched art restoration in Spain. “Conservation experts in Spain have called for a tightening of the laws covering restoration work after a copy of a famous painting by the baroque artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo became the latest in a long line of artworks to suffer a damaging and disfiguring repair.”
ArtNet: Now You Can See Long-Faded Details in Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ Thanks to Google and the Royal Academy in London
ArtNet: Now You Can See Long-Faded Details in Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ Thanks to Google and the Royal Academy in London. “The Royal Academy of Arts in London (RA) is the latest institution to partner with Google Arts and Culture, the tech giant’s platform for the digitalization of the world’s most famous artworks….Twenty of the works are specially presented in Gigapixel clarity, an ultra high resolution made possible by a proprietary Google camera. But one artwork in particular stands out: a copy of The Last Supper made by Italian artist (and pupil of Leonardo da Vinci) Giampietrino.”
Daily Sabah: ‘Osman Hamdi Bey Beyond Vision’ on Google Arts & Culture platform
Daily Sabah: ‘Osman Hamdi Bey Beyond Vision’ on Google Arts & Culture platform. “Leading digital art platform, Google Arts & Culture has introduced six works by Turkish painter Osman Hamdi Bey and their conservation work and scientific findings conducted by Istanbul Sakıp Sabancı Museum’s (SSM) Painting Collection.”
Lifestyle Asia: Art Basel 2020 goes online with over 4000 artworks to admire
Lifestyle Asia: Art Basel 2020 goes online with over 4000 artworks to admire. “Art Basel‘s parent company MCH Group has announced the cancellation of the 2020 edition of its Swiss flagship fair, which had already been postponed from June to September due to the coronavirus pandemic. Organizers are now launching the second instalment of Art Basel’s Online Viewing Rooms, which made their debut in March in lieu of the physical edition of its Hong Kong fair. Art Basel has assembled an international lineup of 281 galleries from 35 countries across the globe, offering collectors the opportunity to discover over 4,000 works from the Modern to post-war and contemporary periods.”
NK News: New website sheds light on “weird and wonderful” contemporary North Korean art
NK News: New website sheds light on “weird and wonderful” contemporary North Korean art. “The site, which also has an Instagram, showcases the private collection of South African doctoral candidate Ruehl Muller, who writes that all pieces are from the Korean Art Studio, ‘a fresh, contemporary art institution modeled on Mansudae,’ a reference to the DPRK’s most well-known art production house.”
New York Times: Five Art Accounts to Follow on Instagram Now
The New York Times: Five Art Accounts to Follow on Instagram Now. “For the past couple months, my Instagram feed has been filled with benign photographs of homemade food, flowering plants, and the creative projects people had undertaken while in coronavirus-mandated lockdown. Then, on May 25, George Floyd was killed in police custody in Minneapolis, sparking protests around the country. Instagram had already been a space for organizing and activism, but overnight that seemed to become its primary purpose. Calls to action, pictures and videos from demonstrations, and educational posts about defunding the police flooded into view.”
BBC: British Airways to sell art collection to raise cash
BBC: British Airways to sell art collection to raise cash. “British Airways is selling some of its multi-million-pound art collection to raise cash to help it through the coronavirus pandemic. The collection includes art by Damien Hirst, Bridget Riley and Peter Doig, with one work believed to have been valued at more than £1m.”
Atlas Obscura: The Delightful Doodles and Hidden Scribbles on the Backs of Artworks
Atlas Obscura: The Delightful Doodles and Hidden Scribbles on the Backs of Artworks. “AROUND A DECADE AGO, GEORGE Eksts was digitizing a 19th-century photograph for the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London, when he turned it over and noticed that someone had doodled on the back. The front side showed an image of Kashmiri temple ruins, taken by the photographer Francis Frith. But on the reverse, rotated 90 degrees from the orientation of the photograph, were bizarre pencil portraits of a headless man, as well as a long-beaked creature with human legs.”
CNET: See Rembrandt’s The Night Watch in ‘hyper resolution’ as 44.8-gigapixel photo
CNET, from mid-May (still catching up): See Rembrandt’s The Night Watch in ‘hyper resolution’ as 44.8-gigapixel photo. “A museum in the Netherlands has published the largest, most detailed photograph ever of Rembrandt’s famed 1642 painting The Night Watch, making it possible for anyone to zoom in on the masterpiece in exquisite detail…. It’s 44.8 gigapixels (44,804,687,500 pixels) and made up of 528 exposures divided into 24 rows of 22 pictures stitched together with the help of neural networks.”
‘Archives tell us different stories about how things were’: Inside the journey to document Modern Arab art (The Nation)
The Nation: ‘Archives tell us different stories about how things were’: Inside the journey to document Modern Arab art. “On a most basic level, archives help establish what happened, when. For Arab art history, the problems facing a precise or exhaustive chronicle are double: existing archives are often incomplete, damaged or inaccessible, because of conflict in the region. And the analysis made by canonical art history of what was happening in the Middle East and Turkey – written primarily by US academics – views art of the region through the prism of its engagement with western art.”
FAD Magazine: Swiss artist Zimoun to premiere audio performance online
FAD Magazine: Swiss artist Zimoun to premiere audio performance online. “The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery has announced the rollout of its second digital archive: the ZIMOUN exhibition. Going live on June 9, ZIMOUN is the second in a series of launches inviting the public to reunite with curators and artists as part of TRACE: Archives and Reunions. To mark each launch, The NYUAD Art Gallery will host a reunion with the artist. For this reunion, Swiss artist Zimoun will premiere a new work composed specifically for the Gallery’s online audience: a sound performance, to be experienced at home, with headphones, in the dark.”
TSA Art Magazine: German Museum Organises a Digital Initiative for Looted Benin Bronzes and Artifacts
TSA Art Magazine: German Museum Organises a Digital Initiative for Looted Benin Bronzes and Artifacts. “>German art institution, Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) in Hamburg with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung, is setting up an international project that will digitally unite the globally dispersed works of art from the former Kingdom of Benin. Tagged Digital Benin, and involving German, Nigerian, European and American experts, the project aims to bring together object data and related documentation material from collections worldwide and provide the long-requested overview of the royal artworks looted in the 19th century.”
