Italian Futurism was an artistic and social movement that launched when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in 1909. Marinetti and his cohort worked to exalt "the new and the disruptive" over the coming decades and they did so by embracing visual arts that included advertising, poems, novels, and political manifestos. This remarkable digital collection from...

Navigating The Imagination, a Joseph Cornell interactive created by the Peabody Essex Museum, allows a visitor to open up some of this artist's boxes, shake out the objects, and play with them (at least virtually). Short on text and long on pictures, the interactive begins with a compartmentalized box holding details from Cornell's works. Cornell's magic and mystery is preserved as viewers...

Sara Mary Barnes Roby (1907 - 1986), born into a wealthy family in Pittsburgh, and herself a painter, believed that the best way to support the visual arts was to acquire and exhibit the works of living artists. To this end, she established the Sara Roby Foundation and began collecting American art in the mid-1950s. While the collection is strong in the work of realist painters like Reginald...

MoMA presents this retrospective of the vast and varied work of German artist Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), who worked in an "unusually broad range of mediums ... including painting, photography, film, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, television, performance, and stained glass, as well as his constant, highly innovative blurring of the boundaries between these mediums." The exhibition website includes...

The late artist Alighiero Boetti is probably most well known for his series of embroidered maps of the world, "Mappa," that he designed and handed over to Afghan craftswomen to stitch, resulting in intricate and finely crafted pieces. Why, then, does this quote from the artist open the exhibition website: "First of all I prefer thought. This is the basic thing. I really think manual skill is...

Everyone's abuzz about Cindy Sherman - her current retrospective at MoMA was reviewed in the Arts sections of the "New York Times" on February 23rd, she's in the February 27th "New Yorker," and was even mentioned in the "Wall Street Journal" on March 5, in an article by Pia Catton, who admits to being skeptical of Sherman's elevated status in the art world. So it's a good thing that we can all use...

Starting from the premise that abstraction in art was not "the inspiration of a solitary genius," this website from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) features a network map of the connections of over 80 artists. Starting from the alphabetical list of artists, select any artist's name to be taken to their individual entry and their small network. An arrow takes you back to the larger network map....

Founded in 1945, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago features contemporary photography, video, film, sculpture, and other visual arts, both in its galleries and its extensive onsite performance series. For persons considering visiting the museum, the site contains information on current and upcoming exhibitions, which have featured artists from the sculptor Alexander Calder to Gillian...

Representing over a decade of work by the NGA Archive staff, this site offers a narrative summary and key facts for each of the more than 750 special exhibitions held at the Gallery from 1941 through 1997. Users can search the list by keyword or browse by year. Returns include exhibition title, dates, an overview, attendance, location, catalog and/or brochure, and other venues. The list will be...

Harvard Art Museum uses the abilities of the Web to present this collection of seventeen rarely seen paintings by Piet Mondrian, known as the "transatlantic paintings," begun between 1935 and 1940 in Europe and completed or altered after Mondrian arrived in New York City in 1940. The nine pages of introduction explain the techniques that curators at Harvard used to study the revisions that...