Agreement Between Timothy W. Drescher and ARTstor

*Collaborative Agreement Reached Between Timothy W. Drescher and
ARTstor *

Timothy W. Drescher, Ph.D., and ARTstor announced today that they had
reached an agreement to collaborate on the digitization and
distribution through ARTstor of several thousand high quality digital
images from Drescher�s unique archive of photographs of community
murals.

As an independent mural historian and photographer, Timothy Drescher
has been professionally studying, documenting, and campaigning for the
conservation of community murals throughout the United States � in Los
Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and elsewhere- for many years. His
own publications range from the standard study of San Francisco Bay
Area Murals: Communities Create their Muses, 1904-1997 (3rd ed., 1998)
to a thoughtful analysis of �Priorities in Conserving Community
Murals� (a paper presented at a 2003 conference at the Getty
Conservation Institute). His slides and photographs of Chicano and
other community murals have been widely published in works by a wide
range of scholars.

Through this collaboration, ARTstor will digitize several thousand
slides from Timothy Drescher�s archive, as well as selected materials
from the archives of many muralists and other students of community
murals, including especially that of the late Eva Sperling Cockroft,
co-author (with John Pitman Weber and James Cockcroft) of Toward A
People's Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement (1977) (for the 1998
revision of which Drescher wrote the Afterword update) and (with Holly
Barnet-Sanchez), Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals
(1990). Timothy Drescher is curating the selection of images for
digitization, stressing documentation of entire murals as well as
details, contextual establishing photographs, and selected
documentation of mural processes.

In reaching this agreement, Timothy Drescher and Max Marmor, ARTstor�s
Director of Collection Development, expressed their shared enthusiasm
in collaborating to use digital technologies to make these high
quality images of community mural sites more broadly available for
noncommercial educational and scholarly purposes. �I�m delighted that
ARTstor is making these important images available to a large group of
students and scholars using the same usage criteria that muralists
have used interpersonally for over three decades,� comments Drescher.
�Our new collaboration with Timothy Drescher represents an important
milestone in ARTstor's ongoing effort to provide teachers, scholars
and students with high-quality digital images of contemporary art in
all its richness and diversity. Tim Drescher�s images have been widely
consulted by scholars through a range of publications on community
murals, and we are delighted to help make them available now online
for non-commercial use in education and research, in the same spirit
in which muralists themselves have exchanged images over many years,�
adds Marmor.

Timothy W. Drescher has, for many years, played a key role in the
documentation, study and conservation of community murals, including
co-editing Community Murals Magazine from 1976-1987. He works closely
with other scholars and photographers in this field.

ARTstor was created in 2001 as a nonprofit initiative of The Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation, and is now an independent non-profit
organization dedicated to serving education and scholarship in the
arts and the humanities. Currently, more than 520 non-profit
institutions in the U.S. and Canada are participating in ARTstor. A
pilot distribution is underway in the UK and Australia/New Zealand,
and further international availability is being actively explored.