Robert-Goldwater-Library

Contemporary African art blog

The content on goldwaterlibrary.org constantly changes -- blogs added to the blogroll, the sidebars rearranged, new features added -- often and usually without comment. Only the most compulsive among its readers will notice the change from one visit to another.

So when I stumbled the full text of an early (1949) article on African art in a new-to-me blog, African Painters, my first impulse was to add it to the blogroll and move on. An explanation by its moderator, Joe Pollitt, of what he's up to comes from his blog's box-out:

Here is a blog about contemporary art on and off the continent of Africa. To push forward the concept of African cultural development I have created this blog but more importantly than that it's a place where we can blow-off steam and discuss the impossible task of defining a continent.

Judging from its archives the UK-based blog has been available since May 2006.

In an effort to find some biographical information on Pollitt to fill out this post, I ran across Stanford University Library's exhaustive compilation, African Art on the Internet, which describes African Painters as

Contemporary art from African artists worldwide. The majority of the artists  are from West Africa especially from French speaking countries or francophone West Africa. Artist profiles and photographs, examples of work, reviews and commentary, tribute to Alexander Skunder Boghossian.  Discussion forum.

For those Africanists unfamiliar with the SUL site, I strongly recommend a browse through. It includes a search engine that crosses all of its Africa pages (alas, not the 'art' page alone).

(As an aside, the blogging of an obscure, pre-blog treatise on African art reinforces my concerns about managing scholarly information appearing in the blogosphere -- which I discuss in my companion blog.)

Journal of Pacific History

Journal of Pacific History,  vol. 41, no. 2 (September 2006)
Photography and History in the Pacific Islands
guest editor : Max Quanchi

Visual histories and photographic evidence
Max Quanchi
pp. 165-173

Photography and Christian mission : George Brown's images of the New Britain mission 1875-1889
Helen Gardner & Jude Philp
pp. 175-190

Losing the forest but not the stories in the trees : contemporary understandings of F.E. Williams's 1922 photographs of the Purari Delta
Joshua Bell
pp. 191-206

The imaging of Samoa in illustrated magazines and serial encyclopaedias in the early-20th century
Max Quanchi
pp. 207-217

Providing access to Maori and Pacific photographs
Diane Woods
pp. 219-225

The Tiby Hagen Collection at the Archives of New Caledonia
Isabelle Amiot
pp. 227-232

The New Guinea Collection photographic databases, University of Papua New Guinea
Sam Kaima
pp. 233-235

The Internet Mission photography archive
Paul F. Stuehrenberg
pp. 237-238

Preservation and access to South Seas photographs
Ewan Maidment
pp. 239-247

Online access to this issue available via WATSONLINE (Restricted to Metropolitan Museum of Art networked locations)

RGL call no. : A J868

Pictured above : Portrait of men in ceremonial dress, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, ca.1890 - (collection) Council for World Mission/London Missionary Society - (owner) Council for World Mission. From the Internet Mission Photography Archive [see earlier post about the archive].

 

African Languages Grow as a Wikipedia Presence

Photo: Chris Keane for The New York Times
Ndesanjo Macha, who trained as a lawyer in Tanzania and now directs a Boys and Girls Club in Greensboro, N.C., writes for Wikipedia.

via NYTimes:
African Languages Grow as a Wikipedia Presence
By NOAM COHEN
Published: August 26, 2006

At the second annual Wikimania conference, held this year at Harvard Law School, there was what might be considered a quintessential Wikipedian moment: as Martin Benjamin, a researcher at Yale University, gave a talk about the Swahili dictionary he is creating online, Ndesanjo Macha was simultaneously sitting in the audience using a Wi-Fi connection and laptop to put the finishing touches on his Wikipedia entry, "Martin Benjamin," in Swahili.

It was just the 1,025th article written for the Swahili version of Wikipedia (sw.wikipedia.org), the online, open-source encyclopedia founded five years ago by Jimmy Wales, and the fifth Mr. Macha had written that weekend in Cambridge, Mass.

In founding Wikipedia, Mr. Wales has said, he aimed to create "a free encyclopedia for every person on the planet in their own language," a goal he has defined as having 250,000 entries in every language spoken by more than a million people.

But while larger Wikipedias, like those written in English (1,377,015 entries and counting) and French (348,243 entries), wrestle with questions of accuracy and vandalism, as well as the imposition of limits on who can create and edit entries, smaller Wikipedias face more basic questions: How do you create an online encyclopedia when few native speakers have access to the Internet? What use is an encyclopedia when literacy rates among a language’s speakers can approach zero? (This is not a problem for Swahili.) And who should control the content of an encyclopedia in a local language if not enough native speakers are moved, or able, to contribute?

If only native speakers of Swahili had contributed to that version, the Wikipedia might not exist at all. Though Mr. Macha, 36, who trained as a lawyer in Tanzania and is now director of the largest Boys and Girls Club in Greensboro, N.C., is a major source of entries, none of the other primary contributors grew up speaking the language: "One is German, one is in Texas, and one is in Canada," said Mr. Macha, who was the only African — or African-American — to attend the entire three-day conference.

"They are all white, and to me it is very interesting — it shows that the world is not flat, that the world is still round," he said. "We have allies, people who are willing to help us, but we need to be in charge of our own identity. When it comes to producing information, we don’t want to be dependent."
[read full article]

Online exhibition of Navajo textiles

The Arizona State Museum and the Gloria F. Ross Center for Tapestry Studies announced Tuesday the rollout of an online exhibition of Navajo textiles, Navajo Weaving at Arizona State Museum.

Left to right: Wedge Weave Blanket, ca. 1880-1885 (Catalog No. 2004-747-1; Gift of Heather and Oliver Sigworth); Lillie Joe (c. 1940-), Teec Nos Pos Outline rug, 1984; A selection of historic weaving tools and baskets. Left & right photos, Jannelle Weakly.

Remote Access Enabled

Remote Access to Watson Library’s Electronic Resources

Metropolitan Museum of Art staff with Watson Library checkout privileges are now able to access the majority of the library’s subscription databases remotely.  This means that you can access our online resources from any computer outside the Museum with an Internet connection - your home computer, your laptop, or another institution’s computer. 

Instructions for remote access are included below.  Resources for which access has been enabled are also listed.  If you need remote access and do not have checkout privileges, please contact Lisa Beidel at x2344.

Remote Access Instructions

1. Connect to WATSONLINE at http://library.metmuseum.org/.
2. Search for the title of the electronic resource or database, e.g. JSTOR.
3. Click on the hyperlink for the resource in the record, directly underneath “Link to:”.
4. You will be prompted to enter your Last Name and MMA ID Number.
5. You will then be able to search within the electronic resource.

List of Resources Available Remotely:
Please note that a few of the library’s electronic resources cannot be accessed remotely due to license agreements, or the fact that they require a password.

If you experience problems connecting to any of these resources remotely, please email Oleg Kreymer at xxxxxxx 

American National Biography Online
AMIGA
Anthropology plus
Art Index
ARTbibliographies Modern
ArtFact Pro
Artnet
ARTstor
Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals
Bibliography of Asian Studies
Bibliography of the History of Art
Britannica Online
Columbia Gazetteer
ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online)
Grove Art Online
HeritageQuest
Index to 19th Century American Art Periodicals
JSTOR
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
New York Times on the Web
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Oxford English Dictionary
SCIPIO
Times Digital Archive
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary Unabridged

Historical Postcards & Photographs from Missionary Collections Online

Images of 362 postcards from the Yale Divinity School Library's collection, primarily documenting missionary work in Africa (with a few from Asia and Oceania), are available for browsing on the American Theological Librarian Association's Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative's (ATLA CRDI) database. The postcards, dating from the 1910s-1920s, were produced by mission sending agencies to garner support for the missions' work and provide information about non-Western peoples and customs.

The Yale Divinity School Library also has made digital images from their collection available on the Internet Mission Photography Archive, which hosts historical images of Africa, China, Madagascar, India, Papua-New Guinea, and the Caribbean from collections based in Britain, Norway, Germany, and the United States. 

...as reported in African Research & Documentation, no. 100 (2005), RGL call number: A A2583r

[image source]

Maya Archaeological Photos Online

Harvard Library Digital Initiative and the Carnegie Institution of Washington Collection of Maya Archaeological Photographs / contributed by David Schafer, Senior Collections Manager

Symbols, Spring 2006

RGL call number: A S987

...[T]he Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) sponsored excavations at nearly 1,000 archaeological sites for over thirty years.  These excavations were supervised by notable archaeologists such as Alfred Kidder, Sylvanus Orley, Harry Pollock, Eric Thompson, Ledyard Smith, Edwin Shook, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff.  When CIW closed its anthropology division in 1958, the Peabody Museum acquired the archival records of the their excavations, including over 50,000 black-and-white negatives and photographs ...

Until recently, access to this important collection of photographs was limited to researchers who could spend days of weeks literally browsing through file cabinets full of pasted-up photoboards in the Peabody Museum archives.

The Peabody Museum recently completed a four-year cataloging and digitization project sponsored by the Harvard University Library Digital Initiative.  During the initial phase of this project, collections staff created 50,000 catalog records in the museum's database, using the old paper catalog cards.  Staff subsequently digitized and processed over 40,000 photographs, added enhanced descriptive data, and linked all the information to the database records ... Since copy-positive film does not exist for all 50,000 photographs, museum staff are currently using digital cameras to photograph some 15,000 remaining prints ...

The processed images are now available on-line at both the Peabody Museum's Collections Online website and the Harvard University Library Visual Information Access Database.

Pictured above: Sacred Cenote; Peabody Number 58-34-20/29798. Photograph. Central America; Mexico; Yucatan; Chichen Itza [source]

Documenting exhibitions on the web: Addendum

Using WATSONLINE to find exhibition histories

Individual efforts such as the Brooklyn Museum Digital Collections' African Art Exhibition of 1923 dovetail nicely with an ongoing initiative in the libraries of the Metropolitan Museum to provide 'one-stop' WATSONLINE access to valuable electronic resources hosted on the web.

MMA library catalogers have been encouraged to add unique records in WATSONLINE for web sites of pertinent interest to museum researchers, such as databases, indexes, archives, journals and articles. You can find the Brooklyn Museum Digitial Collections web site by looking it up in WATSONLINE:

African art exhibition of 1923

The Goldwater Library staff is always on the lookout for new web resources of pertinent interest to scholars of African, native American, and Pacific art. Let us know your favorite web sites so that we can add them to the library catalog.

Documenting exhibitions on the web

An exciting new initiative in online art documentation has recently been mounted on the Internet by the Brooklyn Museum as part of an ongoing digital initiative to increase access to the collections held in the Libraries and Archives.

Digital Collections: African Art Exhibition of 1923 brings together correspondence, gallery installation photography, the exhibition catalog, clippings and other textual material pertaining to the Brooklyn Museum's Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo exhibition.

Quoting from the web site's home page,

The exhibition opened in April 1923, and displayed African objects [curator Stewart Culin] had acquired in Europe from dealers. Along with his colleagues, Culin set the parameters for cultural representation in museums through his collecting decisions and innovative installations. The cultural terms he used in his writings and exhibitions are representative of terms in use during his time, and his opinions and biases are evident throughout the collection.

Documents and photographs in the Culin Archival Collection, the Museum Library, and other departments in the Museum that relate to this African art exhibition have been digitized and are described in this presentation.

Deirdre Lawrence, Principal Librarian/Coordinator of Research Services at the Brooklyn Museum, gave an advance presentation on the Brooklyn Museum's efforts at the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) conference last May. The session, Online Access to Exhibition Histories: The Role of the Art Museum Library [pdf file], showcased three projects to provide access to exhibition documentation across the spectrum of traditional document types and the coordinating role art museum libraries can play in gathering and web publishing these materials.

The decorated houses of Nubia

Written by Louis Werner, photographed by Michael Nelson

from Saudi Aramco World, July/August 2006 {full article here}

... EVEN MORE DISTINCTIVE than the floor plan of a Nubian house is the decoration of its exterior doorway, or bawaba, which mixes vivid color, adobe brick filigree, figurative and geometric images in mud and white lime-plaster relief, and wall-mounted objects like ceramic plates, automobile headlights, mirrors, cow horns and dried crocodiles. While the full range of these decorative materials has shrunk in recent years, the impulse to draw attention to one’s home, and to its doorway as a symbol of the family, remains strong.

The late art historian Marian Wenzel was a member of a multidisciplinary team that documented Nubian life and culture in the mid-1960’s, before it was submerged by Lake Nasser. Her book House Decoration in Nubia (1972, University of Toronto Press), which applied the methods of art criticism to social anthropology, established the chronology of design motifs and techniques in Upper Nubia during the 20th century. Starting with the supposition that no artwork is anonymous and no folk tradition is truly timeless, she determined that the iconography of Nubian house décor was a 20th-century phenomenon, traceable to the handiwork of a few known builders-turned-artist...