Fall 2011 Commencement Images

The VRC has posted our images from the Department of Art and Art History's fall 2011 commencement ceremony on our Flickr page. Congratulations to all, our very best wishes for the future, and please stay in touch with the department. Our Alumni Newsletter and Facebook are easy ways to let  us (and your classmates) know where life is taking you.

Do you have images from this or other departmental events? Please help us document our departmental history by joining the department's Flickr group and sharing them there.

VRC Bombay TV 2 Video

To illustrate some of the ways we help our faculty and students, and also to show that we do our jobs with humor while striving for excellent services and products, the VRC has created a very short and hopefully entertaining video about our scanning services. We used Bombay TV 2, a site offering a selection of clips from vintage Bollywood movies, which you can choose, arrange into a sequence, and provide subtitles to create your own movie. See the video here:

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/v2/play.php?id=152979

But seriously, if you are faculty member or student in the Department of Art and Art History, please ask us how we can make your life easier. Scanning? Training? Equipment? If you are in need of a service or equipment item that we don't currently offer but which fits within our mission -- to provide and facilitate access to images, imaging, and related information resources for teaching and research -- we would like to hear about it.

Disclaimer: No faculty members, students, or Bollywood stars were harmed in the making of this video. All characters are fictional; any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidence and unintended (except the guy who gets thrown through the plate glass window -- that really happened!). The VRC welcomes discourse about the representation of American academic problems as expressed through the representation of an Other culture, namely that of upper-class 1970s Mumbai, which itself is represented here through the lens of 1970s Hindi cinema. Similarly, we invite the discussion of any post-colonial ethical issues that may be called into question by framing this presentation with humor, or questions arising from the androcentric positioning of an aggressive male protagonist who is assisted entirely by female characters -- especially if these discussions occur over lattes.

VRC Image Collection Now Available in LUNA

We are very pleased to announce that our image collection is available to Art and Art History faculty and students in the new and improved LUNA browser interface. Please see our Finding Images Web page for access information.

Recent videos from our Visiting Artist Program are now also available to Art and Art History faculty and students in LUNA. As of November 2011, these date back to 2007, but we are in the process of converting our entire collection to the streaming format to make available online to our faculty, students, and staff. Please see our Visiting Artist Videos Web page for more information.

Contemporary Art in the VRC Image Collection

The VRC digital image collection focuses on materials that relate to the curriculum of the Department of Art and Art History. In addition to images of works by our faculty, graduate students, and artists from the Visiting Artist Program, the VRC acquires other images related to our faculty's teaching and research interests -- specifically those that are difficult to obtain in other places. Recent additions to the collection include hundreds of images of contemporary art, with a special focus on sculpture and installations. The artists represented are too numerous to list, but sources for images include vendors and fair-use scans from books. Some examples of recent sources are:

• Judith Collins, Sculpture Today (2007)
  
• Hugh Davies, Blurring the Boundaries : Installation Art, 1969-1996 (1996)
  
• Nicolas De Oliveira, Installation Art in the New Millennium (1999)
  
• Jiehong Jiang and Saatchi Gallery, The Revolution Continues: New Art in China (2006)
  
• La Biennale de Venezia, Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense (2007)
  
• Whitney Museum of American Art, Biennial Exhibition (1997)
• Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles (2005)
  

Stop by the VRC if you have questions about how to search for these kinds of materials effectively in our collection. We also welcome suggestions for our image collection from our faculty and students.

VRC Flickr Group

The Visual Resources Collection has created a Flickr group, "a new place for sharing images among faculty, students, and staff members of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder." We invite all Art and Art History faculty members, MA and MFA graduate students, studio and art history undergrads, staff members, and alumni to join the group and share images that relate to:

-- creative work and interests;
-- research and scholarship (e.g., photographs from travels);
-- departmental activities and facilities (e.g., show openings, the new Visual Arts Complex, etc.).

We encourage lots of tagging and descriptions; this helps with identification and context, and enhances access for all. To enable sharing of images for educational purposes, the use of Creative Commons licenses is encouraged where appropriate. We would like to see this become a valuable resource both within and beyond the department.

Tip: Cooliris, the free image browser plug-in I discussed a couple of weeks ago, is a really great tool for quickly and seamlessly scrolling through images in Flickr group pools. Try it; you'll like it!

Art and Art History Visual Resources Image Collection

The Art and Art History Visual Resources Collection invites all current CU faculty and students to explore our digital images with the Luna Insight Java software, available in the VRC. Come by room 82 of the Fleming Building and pick up a CD, load it onto your machine, request a username and password, and begin exploring our growing collection. It includes images of works from the department's MFA thesis exhibitions since 2000, the Visiting Artist program, contemporary art, and much more. You can search by title, date, artist, artists' CU affiliation, subject, style/period, media, location, and many more criteria. You may export high resolution images for use in teaching and learning at CU.

Art and Art History faculty and graduate students are encouraged to request images for inclusion in the collection. Please contact Elaine Paul for more information.