If you have visited the exhibit Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway in recent weekends, you may have encountered UW students hanging out in the gallery, showing off fossils and talking to museum visitors. These students are part of a group called Rocking Out – they focus on presenting hands-on outreach programs in the earth sciences, and they’ve been kind enough to lend their time to the Burke Museum so that visitors have the opportunity to touch real fossils and ask questions about what they see on exhibit.
These shells are the fossilized remnants of a scallop-like creature that dominated the shallow marine seas off the east coast of North America for about five million years in the late Miocene to early Pliocene. The shell is known as an “index fossil” because it is so plentiful over only a short segment of the stratigraphic record, characteristic of a very specific piece of geologic history. Chesapecten jeffersonius has found its way into American history as well. It was the first fossil described in North America by English colonists, and remains the state fossil of Virginia. The Burke museum has a fantastic collection of fossils actively used in research, including this very special scallop. Be sure to stop by the Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway exhibit to say hello and meet the remarkable Chesapecten jeffersonius.
Tutankhamun lived in “interesting times.” He grew up in the royal court at Amarna, and was ultimately buried in western Thebes. Archaeological evidence from these sites provides crucial insights into the dynamic religious and political changes that took place during Tutankhamun’s rule.
With Dr. Mary-Ann Pouls Wegner, Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Toronto.
Recorded: January 27 @ Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario
Duration: 1:19:46
Hugues de Varine estará de visita a Portugal entre 24 e 29 de Março de 2010.
Programa (sujeito a confirmação)
Dia 24 (quarta-feira)
Visita a Mértola: Museu Municipal e Campo Arqueológico de MértolaDia 25, quinta-feira
11h00 Évora
Universidade de Évora, onde fará parte do júri de arguição da tese de mestrado de Lígia Rafael
Lisboa
Palestra na Universidade Nova de Lisboa para alunos dos mestrados de Museologia e de Práticas Culturais para Municípios (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Departamento de História) – apresentação do livro “As raízes do futuro: o património ao serviço do desenvolvimento local” (18h00)Dia 27 e 28 (Sábado e Domingo)
Museu do DouroDia 29 (Segunda-feira)
Lisboa: Padrão dos Descobrimentos
VIII Jornadas do ICOM-Portugal – Museus e Harmonia Social (10h- 16h)
11h45 – Comunicação de Varine: “Museus e Coesão social – Museus e Harmonia Social”
WEB DEVELOPER. The Amon Carter Museum seeks a Web Developer to provide
server-side coding (site functionality and backend systems) to develop and maintain the museum’s Drupal-based Web site and other online initiatives; help develop the Web-site infrastructure to optimize the online user experience, increase online audiences, and advance the mission and strategic plan of the institution.
Duties include:
In 1997, a Washington Post article suggested that “For one evening, the inaugural ball gown is the most important dress in the country.” For one young designer in 2009, the first lady’s inaugural ball gown was probably the most important dress in the world.
27-year-old Jason Wu is the creative mind behind Michelle Obama’s gown, donated to the museum in a ceremony yesterday. (I was lucky enough to be in the audience for the special event.) Born in Taiwan, Wu was nine when his family moved to Vancouver; he later studied in Tokyo and Paris, before enrolling in the Parsons School of Design. He debuted his collection in 2006.
And in 2009? Along with the rest of the world, Wu saw First Lady Michelle Obama step out on television wearing his gown (he had no idea it was being seriously considered until that moment). “To say that she has changed my life is truly an understatement.”
As Director Brent D. Glass has expressed in previous blog posts, the museum is committed to telling the story of what it means to be an American, a story that includes overcoming barriers to achieve the American Dream of freedom and opportunity. Jason Wu’s achievements are an example of such a story. “I could never have imagined that, as a 26 year old Taiwan-born immigrant who came to the United States with dreams of becoming a fashion designer, that I would one day be standing here,” Wu revealed. “I’ve learned first-hand that America is truly the land of opportunity.”
Mrs. Obama is the first African American to assume the role of first lady and an inspiration to many. What was going through Wu’s mind when he designed an inaugural ball gown for such a woman? “The truth is, I was simply inspired by the moment. I was inspired by Mrs. Obama’s poise, grace and intelligence. I was inspired by the overwhelming optimism that she and President Obama represent. I was inspired by the fact that I was able to come to the United States to realize my dreams. I cannot think of anywhere else where this kind of opportunity could exist.”
Concluding his remarks, Jason Wu turned to address Michelle Obama on stage, placing his hands over his heart: “Thank you for having the courage and vision to choose a gown made by a young designer who didn’t fit the traditional mold. Thank you for reminding us all that in this country nothing is impossible. Most of all, thank you for allowing my story to be a small part of this incredible moment in American history.”
Looking at the gown beside her—which she hasn’t seen since the day she took it off—Mrs. Obama talked about the memories of inauguration day that came rushing back: the freezing cold weather; the hundreds of thousands of people flooding the National Mall; letters from octogenarians who said they never thought they’d live to see the day. “This gown is a masterpiece,” she gushed. “It is simple, it’s elegant, and it comes from this brilliant young mind, someone who is living the American Dream.”
Students from the Fashion Design and Illustration classes at Huntington High School in New York listened intently as the First Lady spoke. In 2009, the school sent Mrs. Obama a book of inaugural gown designs created by students. During the ceremony, she acknowledged the young designers, reflecting on how much fun it was to look through their creations. “You make us proud,” she praised and noted that Jason Wu is a young man who, not so long ago, was “just an aspiring designer like many of you students here.”
The donation ceremony, for Mrs. Obama, was “about much more than this gown. It’s also about how, with enough focus and with enough determination, someone in this room could be the next Jason Wu. Someone in this room could be the next Barack Obama. It’s about how the American story is written by real people—not just names on a page. And it’s about how something you create today—whether it’s a dress, or a painting, or a story or a song–-can help teach the next generation in a way that nothing else can.”
You can read Mrs. Obama’s remarks in full on the White House Web site. Her gown is now on display in the new “A First Lady’s Debut” gallery, part of the First Ladies at the Smithsonian exhibition. Visit the online exhibition for access to the artifacts and photographs on view, including 24 dresses and more than 100 other objects. Step behind-the-scenes with a curator and a conservator preparing the new "A First Lady's Debut" gallery in this video.
Dana Allen-Greil is the new media project manager at the National Museum of American History.
On January 25, 1904, a military procession to Smithsonian Institution grounds delivered the remains of James Smithson (c.1765-1829) whose bequest created the Smithsonian. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives
One hundred and thirty-four years ago today, Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call. “Mr. Watson,” he said into a transmitter, “Come here. I want to see you.” And Watson, in the next room, heard the words through a receiver.
Later, in his life Alexander Graham Bell would become a Smithsonian Institution regent and he would make a peculiar and bizarre journey to Genoa, Italy, to retrieve the remains of the Smithsonian’s founder, James Smithson, to bring them to the United States. (In life, the Englishman had never visited the States.)
It is the “proper thing to do,” Bell insisted in 1903, when he made the case to go get Smithson’s bones. The burial ground where Smithson was interred after his death in 1829 was being over run by a nearby stone quarry and the graves were being removed.
So the inventor of the telephone left promptly to recover the bones of the man who had given the United State $508,418 (about $10 million today) to create an institution for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.”
Bell got back to Washington in January 1904 and Smithson’s casket was brought to the Smithsonian from the Washington Navy Yard by a cavalry detachment traveling along Pennsylvania Avenue.
The crypt, where the founder was laid to rest, can still be seen inside the Smithsonian Castle’s north entrance vestibule.
While writing and art often interrelate in many cultures, the unity of the two is perhaps most integrated and apparent in ancient Egypt. It may well have something to do with the fact that the two-dimensional representations so characteristic of Egyptian art, begin to appear around 3100 BCE- at almost precisely the same time that hieroglyphic writing makes its first appearance – more than 5000 years ago. Born together, these two means of expression continued in complimentary use for more than 3000 years, well into our own era, and produced a uniquely beautiful and intensely meaningful means of communication.
Dr. David Silverman is the National Curator, Advisor and Academic Content Creator for Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs.
Recorded: Wednesday February 3 @ Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario
Duration: 1:20:34
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
Watch the video of Alan Weisman’s “World Without Us, World With Us”
When researching historic garments, it's important to remember that the names we might give to a garment are not necessarily the same as what would have been used in the past. Though the garment above could easily be described as a short cape or cloak, in the past it had a more specific and individual name: pelerine. One of many types of garments used to cover women's shoulders during the 19th century, the name is possibly derived from a 1717 Watteau painting titled Pilgrimage to Cythera. The painting depicts a group of pilgrims either sailing to, or returning from, the island of Cythera, reputed birthplace of Aphrodite. The women pilgrims or pѐlerines, wear short, shoulder-covering cloaks over their dresses.
2007.897.1 Back view
Pelerines created a smooth, sloped shoulder-line, a desirable silhouette throughout much of the 19th century. Usually cut with a high-neck, pelerines were often made of the same fabric as the dress worn underneath. Trimmings usually consisted of coordinating ribbon, self-fabric bias or simple piping. Very popular in the 1840s, versions of the pelerine remained popular through the 1890s. These images from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery illustrate a variety of 19th century pelerines.
Dress and pelerine
1848-52
Museum Purchase
84.5.2A-C
Pelerines were often associated with relatively casual situations. The fashion press suggested ensembles including pelerines for visits to the country or the seashore. More formal pelerines were made of lace or delicate crochet. In March of 1853, Godey's Lady's Book suggested lace pelerines for "ladies who, for convenience or lightness of dress, wear low corsages [bodices] in the evening, but do not like to leave the neck entirely exposed." Wearing a pelerine in this situation hinted at exposed flesh, while still providing a modicum of modesty.
84.5.2A-C Back view
This pelerine, from a young girl's ensemble, has a more shawl-like shape. Some pelerines had extended front tabs, which hung down the front of the body. As the pelerine changes shape, the boundaries become hazy. With extended fronts, does it become a tippet or a mantle? Maybe a mantlet? If the back drops down the body, does it become a cape or cloak? Though it might seem like splitting hairs to some, when researching it's important to know all possible search terms.
Readers, are there names or categories of dress that you find confusing? Send us your questions!
Blader hier.Er is ook een zoom mogelijkheid zodat de tekst (in het Nderlands) goed leesbaar is.
The Walker Channel, in existence since 2003, has recently undergone a re-design. The old Walker Channel was originally built to serve Real Video and stream live webcasts using Real Video. It had slowly evolved over time to use more friendly MPEG-4 and H.264 video, and even moved from Real Video for live streaming to the better ustream.tv. But it never really caught up to the modern, YouTube era of video. The re-design we just completed did that, and added a few other goodies.
Quite obviously, the site has undergone a major visual overhaul. The old site had almost no hierarchy to the video archive, which worked OK with a handful of video, but with 200+ in the archive, it became unwieldy to find a particular video or just browse.
Just like with our iTunes U site, we’ve split our internal, museum centric departments into more logical genres. For example, instead of just “Performing Arts”, we have Dance, Theater and Music. We also highlight content by it’s recentness, and, more importantly by it’s popularity (view count). None of this is ground-breaking in 2010, but it’s a big upgrade from 2003.
We’re now serving all our video content as streaming h.264 video. This means you can watch a video and jump to any place in the timeline before it has buffered to that spot. Using h.264 enables us to easily switch to HTML5 and support other devices down the road. We converted all our older Real Media video into h.264 mp4s.
We also utilize YouTube to serve many of our newer videos. We have already been putting all our Channel content on YouTube for about a year, so there’s no need to upload it twice. YouTube serves a relatively high-quality FLV or MP4 file, and this means we do not pay for bandwidth, which is not an insignificant cost consideration.
Where we’re not using YouTube, we’re using Amazon CloudFront and their new Adobe Streaming Media Server. This means that we don’t have to run our own instances of EC2 and Wowza to encode & stream the video. We upload our video manually, so we don’t need to encode our video in “the cloud”.
We also upgraded our camera and video capture equipment to enter the beautiful HD world. We now capture all lectures in HD and webcast them live at 640×360. Going forward, archived versions will be posted at 720P (1280×720). Drawn Here (and there): HouMinn Practice is our first video posted in HD, and it looks great. Here’s a visual representation of what this new video means, comparing the resolutions we have from older content:
Click to enlarge and get the full effect.
We also have also added a video switcher to our hardware repertoire. The switcher lets us show the presenter’s slides, in-stream, rather than just pointing the camera at the projection screen. This switcher enables a dramatic improvement in video quality, and will be especially useful for Architecture / Design lectures, which typically feature many slides.
Starting with our new recordings in 2010, we’re adding closed captions and transcripts for nearly every video. This video is a good example. That means a couple things:
We create our transcripts by sending our video to CastingWords. The transcripts that CastingWords generates is then fed into YouTube’s machine caption processing feature, generating a captions for the video in the form of a .SBV file. The .SBV file is then pulled back into the Walker Channel, where we convert it on the fly to W3C TimedText format for use in jwplayer as captions.
We also re-format the captions as a transcript for display in the Transcript tab on the video. Captions tend to be broken up not by sentence, but by how the speaker is talking and how they’ll fit on screen. Transcripts, on the other hand, are read more traditionally, and should be read in complete sentences. So we break the captions up and re-form them in complete sentences with associated timecodes. Here’s an example screenshot:
Note the fragmented captions (in video) with transcript (below), in full sentences.
We’ve added comments! Like what you see or want to add your thoughts? Leave a note. One neat thing in the comments that we convert mentions of specific time into a link to jump the video playhead. So if you leave a comment with 3:13 in it, it will turn into a link to that spot in the video.
Similarly, when that happens we change the hash for the page to a link to that spot. The URL will change from http://channel.walkerart.org/play/my-video/ to http://channel.walkerart.org/play/my-video/#t=3m3s. Using that link anywhere else will jump the playhead to that point in the video. YouTube does the same thing, so we borrowed the idea.
We’re using solr for the search engine on the channel. Nate had great success with Solr on ArtsConnected, so using solr was a no-brainer for us. The rest of the logic for the channel is built using Django, a python web framework that I also worked with for the My Yard Our Message project. To connect Django and solr, we’re using django-solr-search (aka “solango”). It was necessary to sub-class parts of solango to get it to present solr’s more-like-this functionality that we use for the “Related Media”. In retrospect, I probably should have used Haystack Search instead, since it supports that natively. As we move forward using solr and django in other areas of the Walker’s website, we’ll probably switch to using Haystack.
Funding for aspects of these updates came from the Bush Foundation, under a grant entitled “Expanding the Rules of Engagement with Artists and Audiences and Fostering Creative Capital in our Community“. This grant has many applications within the Walker as a whole, but for the online Walker Channel, it is specifically funding the upgrade of our camera and video equipment.
We have been preparing material for the designers working on the new Ancient Worlds galleries (replacing the current Egypt and Archaeology galleries), who are a firm called Opera based in Amsterdam. They are creating sections of each of the three new galleries in detail, to submit to the Heritage Lottery Fund at Stage C of the application process. The designs so far look great, and it lo
oks like we will be able to display more material than we have on the current galleries, as well as include lots of digital and audio resources.
I have also been working on a loan of Egyptian material to the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery, which is hosting a temporary exhibition called Secret Egypt: Unraveling Truth from Myth. The curator, Chris Kirby, has already secured loans from the Ashmolean, the British Museum and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, amongst others. The exhibition will take place from February to June 2011, and then may tour to two additional venues.
My volunteers Tricia, Rachel and Jo have been working hard on the lithics this week, photographing and documenting them, in preparation for re-storing them in a new cabinet. There are some amazing examples of stone tools which are coming to light as we go through them. I have been continuing with the sorting and packing of the predynastic pottery, and have completed the provenanced material. The next stage will be to sort through the unprovenanced material, looking at excavation numbers, if there are any, to see if the pots can be matched to sites and excavations.
Next week is a busy week: Monday in Oxford for an ACCES Egyptological Archives seminar, Wednesday in Bristol to give a lecture to the Bristol Ancient Egypt Society (http://www.egyptsocietybristol.org.uk/) and Thursday in London for a meeting at the Egypt Exploration Society.
Abstract Resistance, an exhibition that opened about a week ago at the Walker, brings together some four generations of artists, including now-legendary names like Francis Bacon, Philip Guston, and Willem de Kooning. But curator Yasmil Raymond notes that her thinking about this show originated with a group of young artists—including Gedi Sibony, Rachel Harrison, Cathy Wilkes, Andro Wekua—and their use of assemblage in their work. Walker photographer Cameron Wittig captured Raymond and some of these artists as they installed their work in galleries 4, 5, and 6. Â
For more on Abstract Resistance, read the Q&A with Raymond, conducted by Walker curatorial fellow Camille Washington; get local critics’ takes on the show — Tad Simons from MSP magazine , Mary Abbe at the Star Tribune, and Jay Gabler of the Twin Cities Daily Planet – or watch the opening-day talk on the Walker Channel with Raymond and artist/philosopher/professor Jan Estep.  Â
Curator Yasmil Raymond with artist Thomas Hirschhorn
Hirschhorn installing his "walk-in sculpture" "Abstract Resistance," whose title Raymond borrowed for the exhibition
Gedy Sibony installing "Than"
Rachel Harrison installing "Huffy Howler"
Cathy Wilkes at work on a piece commissioned by the Walker
As I stood in the Philadelphia Museum of Art looking at Henri Matisse's perpetually fascinating Portrait of Mlle. Yvonne Landsberg, I heard someone say: "Wednesday." 
Inside the gallery, the recitation of the days of the week flow at the listener, one after the other after the other. But as I discovered while looking at Matisse and Kelly, Days also turns the surrounding galleries into an audio funhouse. One minute you're looking at a painting and a "Monday" pops up. Then you hear nothing else for 10 minutes... and then another day of the week comes out of nowhere. I found that the barrage of information was projected at me so consistently, so insistently and incessantly, that the words lost their meaning. After an hour in the PMA's galleries I had to really, really focus hard in order to remember what day of the week it really was.One detainee who did not wish his name to be transmitted to the authorities alleged that loud music played for twenty-four hours a day throughout the one year period he believed he was held in Afghanistan. He reported that during the last month it changed to sounds of wind, waves and birds.Nauman seems to be reminding us that even the simple and banal can be harnessed in a way that can confound and discomfort. Days may be the most important contemporary artwork on view in an American museum.
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