Wikipedia Loves Art, full house!

In addition to our original partners (Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, V&A) we’ve now been joined by Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Houston Museum of Natural Science, The Hunter Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New-York Historical Society, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Taft Museum of Art—in all, 17 16 institutions willing to help engage their community of photographers to help get the wiki folks what they need.

My own personal props have to go out to Victor over at MoMA, who wins the gold star for bending over backwards to figure out the best way they could participate and still ensure everything falls into the public domain. Victor, that’s dedication! CJN212, thanks for the legwork over there. I have to say from an organizer standpoint, I couldn’t be more thrilled about how many institutions took the leap work with us on what will hopefully become a massive cross-institution community collaboration!

wiki_meeting.jpg

Not so super-secret meetup for the Wikipedia NYC Chapter. Topic of discussion? You guessed it: Wikipedia Loves Art. Wiki peeps and guests including Denise and Hazel from the MET, Victor from MoMA and moi. Check out that awesome ceiling w/ globe lights at Columbia University.

In the next week, we’ve got a lot of work to do to get scavenger hunt lists published and many of us are making final preparations for meetups. All details, including the lists will be published to the Wikipedia Loves Art Flickr group, so keep an eye on things over there (and congrats to us for creating what might be the longest Flickr group description…ever). There’s even a discussion getting started about the best way to shoot in museums to avoid glare off cases while working with no flash, no tripod restrictions.

Now that we have institutions, we need photographers! Please help us spread the word. Remember, because of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s offer, there’s a way you can participate from almost anywhere in the United States even if your local museum is not on the participant list. Good luck everyone, we are looking forward to seeing your shots!