The National Portrait Gallery in London now provides free downloads of a large range of images from its Collection for academic and non-commercial projects. Over 53,000 low-resolution images are now available free of charge to non-commercial users through a standard Creative Commons license. In addition, over 87,000 high-resolution images are also free for academic use…
Herbert “Skip” Cole, UCSB Professor Emeritus of African Art, has announced a new publication Invention and Tradition: The Art of Southeastern Nigeria (Prestel Press). The book “celebrates and explores the sculpture and masks of the many diverse ethnic groups living in Southeastern Nigeria.” For other faculty publication posts, click here and here.
There was a sobering article in the New York Times this weekend about the destruction and looting of African artifacts and archeological sites, primarily in Mali. The author, Holland Cotter, notes that in addition to good old fashioned looting, Al Qaeda-related Islamist groups are destroying sites on fundamentalist religious grounds. He outlines the movement…
If you’re not already aware of Calisphere you should have a look at it. A project of the California Digital Library and serving both the UC system and K-12 education, Calisphere is a gateway to a profusion of primary sources about… California! The content comes from all UC campuses as well as non-UC institutions (including…
They almost got away with it. Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Pants was discovered stolen from the Sofia Imber Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas, Venezuela in 2002, but in fact it had been stolen at least two years earlier. The thieves had replaced the painting with a copy and no one had noticed, even though the fake…
In honor of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, two sites have launched with images from Britain’s past. Queen Victoria’s Journals, through the efforts of the Royal Archives and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, is an interactive site with online digital images of every page in the entire sequence of Queen Victoria’s diaries from 1832-1840.…