Cyprus Mail: Database set up of Cypriot Artists living abroad. “A new platform has gone live featuring Cypriot artists, curators and art historians under the age of 40 who live and work abroad. Launched by the Lefteris Economou Cultural Foundation, interartcy is a digital archive of young creatives and it aims to promote, support, and project cultural creativity through various forms of artistic expression.”
Mackay Regional Council (Australia): Artspace’s Collection Goes Digital. “Residents can now curate their own digital art exhibition from more than 620 works with the click of a mouse. The works, about half of the Mackay Regional Council Art Collection, have been made available through the Artspace Mackay online collection database and this will continue to be added to.” The collection includes contemporary indigenous art as well as ceramics and books.
University of Arkansas: Tyson Family Foundation Gift to Create Digital Library and Art Publication Funds . “Mike Bieker, director of the U of A Press and assistant vice chancellor and director of operations and finance, said, ‘As the University of Arkansas Press celebrates its 40th anniversary, we are grateful for this tremendous gift from the Tyson Family Foundation. These funds will be used for two purposes: to digitize our entire collection of books, making them more widely available and accessible than ever before, and to advance our potential in the field of art publishing by supporting scholarship that explores the history and meaning of art and its effect on our lives. These fantastic initiatives would not be possible without the continued support and generosity of the Tyson family.’”
ScreenRant: Snapchat’s Five Los Angeles AR Monuments: What Are They & How To View Them. “Snapchat has partnered with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to create five augmented reality monuments around LA. The LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives artworks were built using Snapchat’s technology and can be viewed through the Snapchat Camera. They are intended for exploring the histories of LA communities and to highlight their perspectives.”
CNN: Germany to return looted Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. “In a joint declaration published Thursday, Germany’s Ministry of Culture, state ministers and museum directors committed to ‘substantive returns’ of Benin bronzes — artworks made of bronze, brass and ivory that were taken by the British army in a raid on the Kingdom of Benin, in present-day Nigeria, in 1897.”
New-to-me, from Core77: Scan the World Offers 17,000+ Scans of Famous Artworks You Can Download and 3D Print . “Nefertiti, David, Venus de Milo, the Great Buddha at Kamakura. These are just a few famous works of art that have been digitally scanned, and the files made freely available online, so anyone can download and 3D print them. Scan the World: The Open Source Museum has made some 17,000 statues, sculptures, structures and artworks available on their site.”
Spotted via Reddit: ZodiacNFT. From the About page: “Zodiac is a visual discovery engine for NFTs. Combined with a set of proprietary AI modules, Zodiac enables users to search for and discover the best content on blockchain.” It’s a visual search engine for NFTs. I put in a picture of my mother’s dog and got lots of NFTs of dogs and cats. I put in a Norma Shearer meme and got pictures of Marilyn Monroe.
The Courier: WATCH NOW: Haitian art collection is being ‘digitized’ for future at Waterloo Center for the Arts. “It’s roughly 2,000 miles between Waterloo and the island nation of Haiti, but the Waterloo Center for the Arts is the repository for the world’s largest and most significant public collection of Haitian art. There are more than 1,700 pieces in the collection, including colorful paintings by Haitian masters, metal sculptures, beaded and sequined flags and banners, mixed media and other objects representing Haiti’s creative and cultural past and present.”
Mashable: 150,000 handpainted hearts on memorial wall represent each life lost to COVID in the UK. “150,000 hand-painted red and pink hearts line a wall beside the River Thames in London, with each heart representing a person lost to COVID-19 in the UK. The National COVID Memorial Wall sits on the embankment on the south side of the River Thames in London, stretching nearly 500 metres between Westminster and Lambeth bridges. The hearts have been handpainted by volunteers.”
Dallas News: Kittens, tweets and basketball memories — Mark Cuban’s new online gallery is a showroom for the latest craze: NFTs. “Billionaire entrepreneur, Shark Tank investor and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is once again innovating in the digital space, launching a new kind of online art gallery for creators in Dallas and beyond. He’s created a platform to present non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, the digital assets that have been grabbing headlines since an artist known as Beeple sold one for $69 million at the auction house Christie’s in March.”
The Next Web: New AI technique transforms any image into the style of famous artists. “As a talentless artist who likes to imagine myself as a masterful painter, I always appreciate AI tools that turn my embarrassing sketches into masterpieces. Computer artist Glenn Marshall recently developed one of my favorite techniques yet: a text-to-image generator that transforms any picture into the style of famous artists.”
Getty: Use Augmented Reality to Explore a Virtual Museum Gallery from Home. “The Getty Museum is partnering with Google Arts & Culture to launch a new exhibition in Pocket Gallery, an immersive exhibition feature within the Google Arts & Culture app that uses augmented reality to open up a life-size virtual space that you can literally step inside using your smartphone…. Getty’s exhibition is called Better Together: Join the Crowd in Celebrated European Paintings, and is inspired by the social gatherings so many of us are missing during the pandemic. The exhibition features four virtual rooms to explore, and each room displays about seven to ten paintings around a theme: City Life, Music and Merriment, A Breath of Fresh Air, and Around the Table.”
The Hindu: Thanjavur art plates: More than just curios. “In 2018, a team of researchers went from Chennai to Thanjavur to learn more about the art plates of the temple city. Soon they realised that not many residents knew about this unique heritage, even though as a popular gift item, it had kept its few surviving makers busy in cottage-industry units. The craft blending two cultures — Dravidian and Maratha — seemed very much on the wane. From 200 artisan families, there were now only 50 left. The researchers’ study tour metamorphosed into a grassroots project aimed at reviving the indigenous industry, with the Chennai-based Rajalakshmi Group of Institutions offering support.”
The Guardian: Berlin’s plan to return Benin bronzes piles pressure on UK museums. “Berlin is negotiating to fully restitute hundreds of the Benin bronzes in a shift of policy that has been welcomed in Nigeria but will put pressure on museums in London and Oxford to also return artefacts looted from Britain’s former west African empire in 1897.”
The National: A year in lockdown: ‘Art is playing a massive part in the pandemic’. “WHEN the pandemic struck, painter Mousa AlNana turned his home into a giant work of art. The 34-year-old – now holding online workshops to help learners beat isolation – says art has been the one thing helping most people through the lockdown as they sought solace in film, music and books. He says it’ll also help us make sense of what we’ve been through these last 12 months.”
