"A freely available repository of thousands of natural history specimens has been created by researchers in the US.
The openVertebrate (oVert) project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a five-year initiative between 18 US institutions to create 3D reconstructions of vertebrate specimens using computed tomography (CT) scans"
Working with the catalogue in Sellevold et al:s 1984 book Iron Age Man In Denmark, I am surprised to find a lot of information about whether the crania are brachiocephalic, mesocephalic or dolicocephalic in their proportions. On p. 184 the authors explain why they do this. It's because the measurements and indices in an influential 1928 study "are still routinely used by most anthropologists". Oh, right then?
Almost a year after declaring bankruptcy, the San Francisco Art Institute and its famed Diego Rivera mural have been sold to a nonprofit led by the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow
My colleague Marla Taylor, curator of collections at the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology, is helping museums create a guide to center Native American and indigenous perspectives in collections stewardship https://sarweb.org/iarc/icc/
#MuseumsWithoutMen launching today, aims to continue the #feminist project of bringing women's work (& other excluded groups) into the sight of gallery goers & those interested in #art.
This builds on decades of work by Feminist art historians, but Katy Hessel, is right much remains to be done.
Since C15th #women#artists have often been celebrated in their own time & then written out of a male-dominated #arthistory which still shapes #museums' collections & hanging.
"…a November judgment from the UK Court of Appeal means #museums can’t go on claiming #copyright in photographs of #publicdomain art works. Museums have used this claim to create costly licensing schemes. For art history books and dissertations that need the images for discussion, the costs are often prohibitive. And, it turns out, the #GLAM sector isn’t even profiting from it."
Los Angeles has a new museum and its focus is on slime. The Sloomooo Institute will have 13,000 square feet of installations including vibrant slime waterfalls, a DIY slime bar, and a Nickelodeon-style sliming station. Perhaps best of all, this is the museum's fifth location, so you can be pretty sure that the promotional images aren't generated by AI. Thrillist has more details.
It's a dire week for #heritage and #culture in #Wales unfortunately, and the protests and petitions didn't do enough to dissuade the Senedd from severe cuts. 😔
Appeal: does anyone have any juicy photos of museum/collection textiles that I may use in a training session? (With credit, obviously.)
I'm after:
👔 packed/stored textiles (stored well or poorly, your choice!)
👚 examples of different types of historic and modern textiles
👗 examples of damage to textiles (stains, tears, pest nibbles, anything!)
🧶 identified fibres under a microscope
The only complete surviving cartoon by Michelangelo will go on show in an exhibition opening at the British Museum this spring (Michelangelo: the last decades, 2 May to 28 July), focused on the final 30 years of the Renaissance master's life.
The show aims to switch attention away from his youthful period of production, throwing light on works made in the years leading up to his death at 88 in 1564.
IndieWire's Carole V. Bell says that the movies many of us think of in terms of Black film are from the 1960s, at the earliest. But when curator Doris Berger looked through the archives of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, she found a treasure trove that dated back to the 1890s. She and National Museum of African American History and Culture film and photography curator Dr. Rhea Combs collaborated on “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898 to 1971,” which is now on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Here's a look at what to expect from the exhibition, as well as where to start if you want to explore early Black movies.
National Museums Scotland Assistant Curator of Modern & Contemporary History, Dr Georgia Vullinghs explores the connection between the North Sea oil industry and a 12th century Saint.
Museum and art people will, I think, very much appreciate Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World (2023). Bringley worked for ten years as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York City.
It’s a book about restoring ourselves through quiet contemplation and encounters with creative minds and hands. It’s also about how to see beneath the surface of things.
In the era of alternative facts and news that is sometimes fake, often just proclaimed fake if unpalatable, we get a pro-Ukrainian propaganda exhibition at the Army Museum in Stockholm as ordered by politicians, and co-funded by the arms industry. A lot of inconvenient facts are omitted, such as Sweden's off-and-on alliance with Russia. 1/2
And I'm reminded of the post-modernist era in 1980s and 90s #academia. This is when Michael Shanks, Christopher Tilley and Bjørnar Olsen among others wrote that it's impossibe to reach any objective knowledge in archaeology, so we should all just create narratives that further our lovely Leftist political goals. 2/2
The 2000 year old skull of a Peruvian warrior was found to have been fused together with metal in one of the world's oldest examples of advanced surgery, according to a museum.
Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma says the skull which is in its collection, is reported to have been that of a man who was injured during battle before having some of the earliest forms of surgery to implant a piece of metal in his head to repair the fracture. #surgery#Peru#history#Osteology#museums
Sign it if you can: these #museums and #libraries are losing so much funding and so many staff members under the proposed cuts, it's absolutely unworkable.
We all have our specialities in #archaeology. I don't have any experience of directing a multi-hectare contract excavation and bringing it to the final report. And most colleagues who do have that experience haven't spent years looking at finds. So in excavation reports you will quite often find references for the classification and dating of finds, not to the literature, but to "pers. comm. Old Guy/Gal".
It is with mixed feelings that I note that I have become that Old Guy.
West Virginia, USA Legislature: Removing bona fide schools, public libraries, and museums from the list of exemptions from criminal liability relating to distribution and display to minor of obscene matter (www.wvlegislature.gov)
Bill status tracking link: https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/Bills_history.cfm?input=4654&year=2024&sessiontype=RS&btype=bill...