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We recently wrote about Slow Art Day, and were quite happy to finally try it ourselves this past weekend. To recap, a recent study estimated that museumgoers spend an average of just 17 seconds looking at an individual artwork. To combat this habit, Phil Terry, CEO of Collaborative Gain, started a movement in which a volunteer host […]

  Artstor has recently released more than 1,100 photographs of Central Park from the Foundation for Landscape Studies in the Digital Library. We celebrated the occasion by speaking with Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, who founded the organization in 2005 and serves as its president. Ms. Rogers is a pivotal figure in the history of Central Park. She […]

This post has been updated to include new information about Artstor’s public collections, formerly made available on Shared Shelf Commons. The Delmarva Peninsula gets its name from the three states it’s a part of: DELaware, MARyland, and VirginiA. You could say Delmarva is technically an island, since you have to cross one of five bridges […]

Easter is around the corner, and with it comes the inevitable barrage of images of the Easter bunny. The strange thing is that the only mentions of rabbits in the Bible are prohibitions against eating them in the Old Testament. So what gives? The underlying idea is that rabbits are connected to the idea of rebirth—not only […]

Artstor announces the first four recipients of a new initiative to preserve and increase the availability of at-risk collections. The selected projects are: The James Cahill Archive of Chinese art (University of California, Berkeley) Excavations and finds in Oaxaca by Judith Zeitlin, 1973 and 1990 (University of Massachusetts, Boston) Ronald M. Bernier Archive, Buddhist initiation rituals […]

After the coldest recorded February in New York City since 1934, spring has finally sprung, and we could not be more relieved.

A poorly taken photograph of a dress and the simple question “what color is it?” spread all over social media and was picked up by several news outlets. Some people in our office saw black and blue, others white and gold, but we all agreed—enough is enough with #thatdress! The Artstor Digital Library offers you […]

Have you ever wondered why you rarely see the names of the greats from the Italian Renaissance reoccur in art history?  Why do we not see more than one artist with names such as Ghirlandaio, Masaccio, or Tintoretto? It’s because a lot of these were not really names, they were nicknames! Some, like Verrocchio (“true […]

Gong Xi Fa Cai! Happy Lunar New Year! The Chinese Year of the Goat begins February 19, 2015 and lasts through March 5, 2015. You might see references to this being the year of the sheep, or even of the ram. This stems from the fact that the Chinese use one character (yang in Mandarin) for […]

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has awarded $75,000 to Artstor in support of the James Dee Archives project. The Archives are composed of approximately 250,000 slides, transparencies, negatives, and photographs documenting contemporary art in New York City over the last four decades, and Artstor is digitizing and maintaining the archive for use in research and education. […]