From video collections to street art, by way of modernist magazines: a map of the best the internet has to offer
Countless art collections can now be visited online. France, for example, has created a website that serves as a guide to all the collections of Paris museums available online. The phenomenon is worldwide. New York’s MoMA has a complete archive of every exhibition held at the museum since 1929. Photographs, documents, and catalogs from each exhibition are available to consult.
Institutions outside the museum sector are also important in this opening up of collections. Videobrasil, whose rich collection has been built over thirty years of activity, brings an impressive database and more than 1,000 digitized, cataloged videos to the internet for online consultation. These records and works provide access to a history of audiovisual production from the perspective of the Global South.
We must also draw attention to a series of independent initiatives, such as Ubuweb, curated by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. This website is a vast archive of experimental work, counterculture, and production on the margins of the mainstream. It also holds a good collection of Brazilian concrete poetry, with works by our masters Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Decio Pignatari.
Among libraries making collections available online, in this discussion of collections related to art history, I would highlight the International Dada Archive’s digital library at the University of Iowa in the United States, which provides the magazines produced by the Dadaists in Zurich, Berlin, and Paris.
In architecture and design, anticipating the celebrations of the Bauhaus’s founding, whose centenary is next year, I recommend the Harvard Art Museums website to our listeners. Its collection holds 30,000 original Bauhaus items, from objects and textiles to graphic designs and models. This collection, one of the world’s foremost, was assembled by one of Harvard’s most distinguished professors, Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus’s founding architect fled Nazi Germany, arrived at Harvard in 1937, and became director of its architecture school in 1938.
For photography lovers, a visit to the George Eastman Museum website is essential. It provides access to more than 270,000 images from its collection online. Besides photographs and daguerreotypes, the archive includes reproductions of its equipment and advertisements.
Brazil has some commendable initiatives, and I will start with the project Morada do Coração Perdido, which brings together the collection of poet and researcher Mario de Andrade and presents his many facets through publications, personal documents, reproductions of his art collection, scores, portraits, caricatures, and even recipes for his favorite sweets.
It is impossible not to mention the website of the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin at USP, which provides access to more than 3,000 titles, comprising collections of literature and history books, maps, iconography, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century periodicals, including the famous modernist magazine Klaxon. The material can be consulted on the website and the works downloaded.
Finally, I will close with a website whose collection is constantly expanding. Arte fora do Museu catalogs artworks in the city’s public spaces. Created by Felipe Lavignatti and Andre Deak, the project began in 2011, relies on public contributions, and has already won several awards.
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