Modern and Contemporary Art in ARTstor

Content:

* Modern and Contemporary Art in ARTstor
* Collaborative Agreement Reached Between The Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Science and Art and ARTstor


Modern and Contemporary Art in ARTstor

We know that many ARTstor users have been eagerly awaiting the day
when ARTstor would be able to offer a representative body of 20th –
and now 21st – century art. And so we would now like to announce that
we have recently released into the ARTstor Digital Library tens of
thousands of images of modern and contemporary art works by scores of
artists. Artists now represented in ARTstor range from William
Baziotes and Isabel Bishop to Jacob Lawrence and Kasimir Malevich to
Frank Lloyd Wright and Francisco Zuñiga.

We are continuing to negotiate agreements that will allow us to offer
an expanding body of modern and contemporary art images. And in coming
weeks we will expect to announce both the addition of further 20th
(and 21st!) century art images as well as a series of collection
development partnerships that focus specifically on modern and
contemporary art – such as the following announcement of an important
partnership with the Cooper Union in the area of graphic design.

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Collaborative Agreement Reached Between The Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Science and Art and ARTstor

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and ARTstor
are pleased to announce that they have reached an agreement whereby
the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography (part of Cooper
Union’s School of Art) and ARTstor will collaborate on the
distribution through ARTstor of several thousand high quality digital
images of modern graphic design. This collaboration will focus
initially on a digital design archive previously familiar to the
graphic design community as the National Graphic Design Image
Database. We anticipate making these images available to ARTstor users in the course of the spring semester 2006.


The focus of the Lubalin Center’s efforts, including the effort
represented by the former National Graphic Design Image Database, has
been to disseminate material related to the history of visual
communication in the twentieth century and to encourage and support
interdisciplinary studies of visual history and communication. The
present collaboration will make this rich body of visual material and
related scholarship available online in ARTstor, where it will
complement related graphic design materials from a variety of sources.
The audience for these highly valued materials will include teachers,
students, designers, and all students of the history of visual
communications, who will value having the ability to access, browse,
and make rich educational artistic uses of this valued resource.

“The collection created by the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and
Typography represents a pioneering effort in the documentation and
dissemination of graphic design history,” says Ellen Lupton, Curator
of Contemporary Design, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. “The
on-line collection is an invaluable and unequaled resource for
designers, students, and educators." Sheila de Bretteville, Professor
of Graphic Design, Yale University, adds that “an online resource
devoted to the history as well as the most advanced contemporary forms
of graphic design is essential to students, faculty and practitioners
hungry for this visual stimulation. ARTstor’s effort to resurrect the
former National Graphic Design Image Database would be a most needed
and desired start!”

In reaching this agreement, Mike Essl, full-time faculty member in
graphic design at Cooper Union, expressed his enthusiasm in
collaborating with ARTstor to make this important graphic design
resource more broadly available for noncommercial artistic,
pedagogical and artistic purposes. “The Lubalin Center is very pleased
to be working with ARTstor in making our online digital image archives
more widely available to students and researchers in the field and
excited to participate in its representation of modern design
content.” Max Marmor, ARTstor’s Director of Collection Development,
expressed ARTstor’s keen interest in this partnership. “The Lubalin
Center’s graphic design collections, and its admirable efforts to make
them available in digital form, are well-known. We at ARTstor are
delighted to help in reviving the pioneering effort embodied in the
former National Graphic Design Image Database, and to help make the
Lubalin Center’s resources more readily available to artists, teachers
and students.”

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, established
in 1859, is among the nation's oldest and most distinguished
institutions of higher learning. The college, the legacy of Peter
Cooper, occupies a special place in the history of American education.
It is the only private, full-scholarship college in the United States
dedicated exclusively to preparing students for the professions of
art, architecture and engineering. Since opening in 1985, the Herb
Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography has served as a hands-on
research facility for students, faculty, design professionals and the
public. The facility has evolved into a multifaceted resource devoted
to the documentation and preservation of the history of graphic
design.