Movie buffs will love this online version of the Harry Ransom Center's museum exhibit called Making Movies. The emphasis of the exhibit is on the collaborative effort it takes to make a movie. On the site, there are almost 20 features to watch, listen to, revel in, and analyze. The Ransom Center has used its vast collection of "original scripts, storyboards, production photos, and call...
Based at New York University, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a rather unique consortium of various institutions, artists, scholars, and activists dedicated “to exploring the relationship between expressive behavior and social and political life in the Americas”. Equally interesting is the Institute’s desire to move beyond a number of traditional disciplinary boundaries,...
Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1859-1937, was a deeply religious, mystical painter, who, as an African-American, found it difficult to gain acceptance for his artwork in the United States, and lived most of his life in France. The Smithsonian American Art Museum presents this comprehensive online exhibition on Tanner's life and work, utilizing both paintings and archival materials from its collections. The...
Herbert Randall was born in Massachusetts and lived in Michigan before opening his own professional photo shop in New Haven, Connecticut in 1894. He was a student of the built environment, a poet, and was also fascinated with the history of the Nutmeg State. This nice collection from the Connecticut State Library brings together 141 black and white photographs that Randall took around New Haven...
In 1840, Stanford "Sandy" Faulkner penned a folk narrative, to be performed with the aide of a fiddle, about a man traveling through Arkansas who stops to ask for directions. In 1856, Edward Payson Washbourne painted The Arkansas Traveler, a tribute to Faulkner's folk tale. In addition, Faulkner's tale, always presented with musical accompaniment, eventually acquired an established tune and...
If you're looking for compelling sheet music from decades gone by, this website from the University of Oregon Libraries is just the ticket. Initially created to showcase sheet music from the Oregon Music Collection, their digitization work continues apace, and there are already over 650 pieces of sheet music available here. Visitors to the site can browse the collection by title, composer, or...
The history of the book is a fascinating subject, and one that is addressed head on by this most wonderful collection from the University of Washington Libraries Historical BookArts Collection. This digital collection features a sampling of materials held in their Special Collections Division and is primarily intended to serve as a teaching tool. The materials here are contained within sections...
Historical Book Images is a Tumblr site that selectively presents illustrations from books scanned by the Internet Archive for its eBooks and Texts collection. This segment of the Internet Archive, online since 2004, has over 10,000,000 fully accessible books and texts. Historical Book Images is surfacing interesting items from this large corpus and making them available for more users to comment,...
The Smithsonian's Freer Gallery presents this Web interactive on the life and work of the Japanese painter and printmaker, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), the creator of the woodblock print "The Great Wave", one of the most recognized images in the world. The Flash interactive consists of four main sections on Hokusai's art: Brush & Block, Color, Composition, and Subject, plus an introductory,...
This Web exhibition created by the Getty allows visitors to view Byzantine icons from the remote Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai, the world's oldest continuously operating Christian monastery, and also the largest repository of Byzantine icons. Tools provided on the Web site allow you to zoom in on the icons, and see their details from a much closer vantage point than viewing in the...