If you are a fan of the The Commons on Flickr and live in the NYC area, come to our Common Ground meetup this weekend to celebrate—we’ve got tons and tons of neato stuff to give away! The folks from the NYPL are going to be joining us to meet and greet and answer questions about the fantastic images being uploaded to The Commons. We’ll be running a really big slideshow curated by the Flickr community in the lobby, so come find us this Saturday October 3rd, 6-9:30 pm! That’s smack dab in the middle of a fabulous opera-inspired Target First Saturday, so there will be lots to do here that evening.
Don’t forget, this is a global meetup, check out these other venues if you live closer to these areas:
Sydney, Australia. A bit jealous of our colleagues over at the Powerhouse Museum who have been making preparations all week for an outdoor slideshow on the facade of their building. The Powerhouse peeps are teaming up with the State Library of New South Wales for a joint event.
Brisbane, Australia. The State Library of Queensland is also presenting the slideshow outdoors on their Queensland Terrace—one of my personal favorite buildings in all of Australia is the Queensland Library, so that should be an amazing event in a great location!
Canberra, Australia. The Australian War Memorial is also taking part with a projection in their orientation gallery.
Safety Harbor and Tallahassee, Florida. The State Archives of Florida are running two events in the area.
Rochester, New York. George Eastman House is hosting an event in their theatre and that means you can meet Ryan…he’s the one we have to thank for the slideshow because he did a ton of work programming the voting tool and the slideshow via the Flickr API. Thanks, Ryan!
Corvalis, Oregon. Don’t miss the photograph on this event listing—these Oregon peeps have a sense of Flickr-humor and we love them for it.
…but perhaps the Swedish National Heritage Board has us all beat! They are hosting their event in the Medieval St. Karin Church ruin in central Visby on the island of Gotland, Sweden. That very same church ruin is actually pictured in one of the photographs they’ve uploaded to The Commons. It kind of doesn’t get more meta than that!
Coming to a meetup? Tweet using the #CommonGround hashtag and if you upload photos to Flickr, tag them CommonGround2009 and we’d love to see them added to The Commons group. Hope to meet you there!
Are you a fan of the materials being uploaded to the Flickr Commons? Well, we are huge fans and that got a few of us wondering about a way to thank the community of people who’ve rallied around our materials by tagging, commenting, investigating and looking. Paula Bray (Powerhouse) was thinking it was high time to take community favorites, do slideshows on our buildings and have a giant global meetup to celebrate! Sure sounded like a good idea to us, so save the date of October 2nd and 3rd—each institution will be posting more information about their hosted meetup as we get closer. For our part, we are teaming up with the New York Public Library at Target First Saturday for a joint event—stay tuned.
In order for us to have a slideshow, we need your help. Ryan Donahue at the George Eastman House created a way you can go and vote for which images you’d like to see during the meetup. So, you’ve got until September 16th to tell us which of your favs should be in the slideshow.
Seeing the response to historic photographs that we have posted on Flickr Commons begs a look back on why we have these images and who created them. Being an art museum library and archives our mission is to collect and make accessible research collections that serve to document the objects held in the Brooklyn Museum’s encyclopedic collection. We also preserve the research documents created or collected by the Museum staff who have acquired objects since the founding of the Museum as a library back in 1823. What that means is that we have a rich historical legacy of text and images that allow us to look back in time and recall the period in which the objects were created–where, when, how and why.
Susan A. Hutchinson, Founding Museum Librarian, with William Henry Goodyear, Founding Curator of Fine Arts in the Library Reading Room circa 1910.
Since the images collected by William Henry Goodyear (1846-1923) are generating interest today we thought it would interesting to look back at Goodyear and several of his colleagues who built the Museum’s collections over the years. So let’s declare 2009 the year of looking back and learning from history. Hopefully this exercise will educate us all as we move forward and learn about each other and our cultural heritage. Who knows maybe we will end the year in a more peaceful way than we started.
Let me start with a quote from artist John La Farge to William Henry Goodyear: “You have opened the window that has been closed for centuries, and have let in the light”.
I believe that La Farge was referring to Goodyear’s intense interest in photography as a tool to document the world he saw. A Yale graduate and student at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, Goodyear devoted himself to teaching and lecturing about the history of art and architecture. After graduating from Yale in 1867, he traveled to Germany, Italy, Palestine and Syria to pursue his interest in architecture. It was in Pisa in 1870 that he began to focus on architectural details and later published in an article entitled “A Lost Art” in Scribner’s Magazine, the first of many essays he wrote about architectural refinements. Goodyear started his museum career in 1882 as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in 1899 came to the Brooklyn Museum as the first curatorial appointment made by the newly founded museum. At Brooklyn, Goodyear led a series of research and collecting expeditions with a mission to build an art collection. He oversaw the growth of the American, European and ancient art collections including the casts of Ancient and Renaissance sculpture as well as designing and installing exhibitions of newly acquired art.
Hall of Sculpture with Casts, circa 1904.
In addition to his curatorial mandate, Goodyear dedicated time to developing his architectural theory that historic buildings were planned with irregularities which he referred to as refinements. This study focused on architectural monuments found around the world from the Cathedral of Pisa to the temples of Egypt with stops in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece and Turkey. Like his colleague Stewart Culin, founding curator of Ethnology from 1903 to 1929, Goodyear seems to have been interested in everything and this is evidenced in his photographs of people and places around the world from a street vendor in Istanbul to the vivid depictions of the world fairs of Chicago and Paris. Goodyear recognized the importance of these fairs as an educational tool to introduce cultures from different parts of the world. He, like Culin, also saw objects at the fairs and recommended their acquisition for Brooklyn. These photographs by Alfred Percival Maudslay were exhibited at the Chicago Columbian Exposition and collected for Brooklyn after Goodyear and Culin saw them at the fair. Indeed, Goodyear worked obsessively using photography as a tool to educate and a method to document his findings in the field in addition to his writings.
Maudslay photographs on view in the Chicago Columbian Exposition, circa 1893.
It seems that throughout his long life he developed theories that explored new themes in the history of art starting with his “Grammar of the Lotus” documenting continuing use of the lotus form in decorative art since its use in Ancient Egypt. He also wrote several popular histories of art and was one of the first to use actual photographs, as opposed to engravings, to illustrate these texts. He took and collected photographs and used them in the form of lantern slides to illustrate his many lectures–over 130 for the Brooklyn Museum alone–ranging from the art of ancient civilizations to the art of the nineteenth century. In addition to being known as an architectural historian, Goodyear was a scholar of anthropology, archaeology and ethnology with a focus on America, Egypt, Greece and Rome. All of this is evidenced in the photographs (lantern slides, negatives and prints) and his research (published and unpublished) found in the Museum Libraries and Archives.
His photographs offer detailed images of historic structures before the devastation of world wars and rampant twentieth century architectural “redevelopment.” His documentation of many buildings has served as guideposts to reconstruction of several monuments that have been destroyed or renovated over the years. But his influence went beyond architecture since it was his vision that laid the groundwork for two major art museum collections–the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was responsible for recommending the acquisition of several important objects including the antiquities collection and library assembled by Charles Edwin Wilbour, America’s first Egyptologist. Goodyear also established the first children’s museum in America – the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Today we all benefit from Goodyear’s scholarship and foresight as we see the world before us through his photographs and writings.
More to come about these early visionaries in Brooklyn, but today we are honoring Professor Goodyear by releasing more images from his archives of street scenes and mosques in Turkey in response to comments on Flickr Commons.
You may have read about the departure of George Oates in the media, but if not check out Seb’s blog post on the subject for starters. The thing that I worried about most with George’s absence was the idea that our cheerleader—the person who had a very personal connection to each Commons Institution, the one who spread her enthusiasm for our collections to the Flickr crowd—was suddenly gone and how does a gaping hole like that get filled? Well, I learned something very valuable. When community is strong, shifts can take place that fill the gap and in this instance, that’s exactly what happened.
To my relief, a few days after we found out about George, I came in to work one morning to a message in the Brooklyn Museum’s Flickr inbox. I won’t quote the whole thing here, but BigBean sent a lovely note asking us to join a group - “I was very surprised to find that there was not one single flickr group devoted to the Commons! In true flickr tradition, I decided to start one. On flickr, groups is where it’s at!”
Boom! In the simplest way, using Flickr’s existing structure, suddenly we have a fantastic group run by some really committed admins and the participation that is going on there is as rich as it gets and it’s only been two days. This new group provides a direct link to the people within the Flickr community who really love The Commons and this was something we had been missing. Previously, we could make one-on-one connections, but the group allows for much greater interaction among all participants.
As most of you know, we’ve got a set of challenges we have to think about as we move forward in The Commons and, now, the feedback from this group will help us greatly. To say we are looking forward to following and participating in this group is, well, a bit of an understatement.
One of the interesting things about The Commons is anyone can do it, which is pretty cool. Often, I think, larger institutions have an advantage over the smaller ones in that they get to put personnel behind coding projects to get their materials out the door. For a smaller institution, the coding barrier can be a difficult one—it makes projects expensive and often not doable. Here at Brooklyn, we fall somewhere in between—we are lucky to have a talented team of developers on staff, but it’s never enough for all the projects we’d like to do or to keep up with the demands of our existing infrastructure. As readers of this blog (or if you’ve ever seen me speak at conferences) already know, we will often try and find a Scrappy-Doo solution to get us through, which allows us to experiment before committing resources to major project or, sometimes, the scrappy solution enables us to do a project that we could otherwise never commit staff time to.
The Commons can help smaller institutions by eliminating the coding barrier. Flickr already has ways to upload and change data in batch and there’s a strong community of developers coding Grease Monkey scripts to help add functionality where Flickr stops—thank you Flickr, for a rockin’ API. While some members of The Commons created their own batch upload tools to draw directly from their internal systems, Brooklyn just used existing tools (Flickr’s Uploadr and Organizr paired with Steev’s GM scripts) and this worked well for us without the need of another big project, but it didn’t eliminate issues of workload—it just transferred them to another area. (more…)
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