Tuesday, October 13, 2009

accessCeramics

Looking for nice images of contemporary ceramics by recognized artists? Check out the growing collection at accessCeramics. A collaborative pilot project at Lewis & Clark College, it was created by the Visual Resources Collection of Watzek Library and the Art Department. It is "designed for use by artists, arts educators, scholars and the general public, and is intended to fill a void in contemporary ceramics digital image collections on the web." Juried submissions are available through Flickr pages and through the accessCeramics Web site, where access is enhanced by descriptive metadata which allow browsing and searching by artist, glazing/surface, material, object type, technique, and temperature. There are currently 151 artists contributing 2,464 images, numbers which will continue to grow in the coming months and years. Those of you with ties to the Department of Art and Art History at CU-Boulder may recognize the work of Tsehai Johnson and Jessica Knapp. Of course our department boasts many great ceramic talents, both current faculty and alumni, who are all encouraged to submit their work to accessCeramics. This is a fantastic example of academic innovation and collaboration, which over time will only become more useful as a research and teaching tool.

Image: Jessica Knapp, Memorial Wreath (detail), 2007. From accessCeramics, also available on Flickr, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

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