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| Wednesday, September 26, 2001 WRITER: Jean Cleveland, 706/542-8079, jclevela@uga.edu CONTACTS: Carmon Colangelo, 706/542-1511, ccola@uga.edu Stephen Miller, 706/583-0213, sdmiller@uga.edu UGA LIBRARIES AND ART SCHOOL RECEIVE MELLON GRANT TO DIGITIZE PHOTO COLLECTION DOCUMENTING HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART ATHENS, Ga. — A $155,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation will assist the University of Georgia Libraries and School of Art in digitizing a photographic documentation of the history of American art and architecture. The collection has been the principal source of images for teaching American art history for more than four decades. The Carnegie Study of the Arts of the United States was initiated in 1956 by Lamar Dodd, then-chairman of the UGA School of Art, and funded by the Carnegie Foundation. The study’s objective was to create a collection of images that would support the teaching of American art and produced a collection of 4,551 images that still represent the highest standard of photo-documentation of American art. Staff at the School of Art, which now bears Dodd’s name, collaborated with the libraries on efforts to secure the grant, in addition to being stewards of the collection for the intervening decades. For many years, the slide collection was available for sale to educational institutions, but it has been out of circulation since 1998 due to the sale of the company which handled reproduction and distribution. The Mellon-funded project will culminate in providing access to the collection through ArtSTOR, an online database of educational and scholarly images, and GALILEO, the University System of Georgia’s online library. “Because these images continue to be critical to the teaching of the arts of the United States, access to digital versions of these images over the Internet would represent a major achievement in support of American art studies,” said William Gray Potter, the university librarian at UGA. “It would significantly enhance the expanding body of digital materials available to teachers, students and scholars working in this field.” Funded by the Mellon Foundation, ArtSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization that will develop, “store,” and distribute electronically digital images and related scholarly materials for the study of art, architecture, and other fields in the humanities with a goal of providing a reliable digital library of images for the teaching of art history. “The hope is that by doing so, ArtSTOR will alleviate the need for individuals and institutions to redundantly create and catalog digital images, thus saving those institutions valuable resources,” said Max Marmor, director of collections development for ArtSTOR. “In seeking to determine what teachers, scholars and students need in the way of digital art history images, we believe we can learn a great deal from the way in which great slide libraries have been developed. It is in this context that the importance of the Carnegie Arts of the U.S. emerges. There is perhaps no comparable example of a sizeable collection of images that have been indisputably central to the teaching of art history in this country. Our hope is that by integrating this collection in digital form into ArtSTOR we will have taken a significant first step toward creating a digital image library that responds to widespread and verifiable needs in the art history community.” A primary concern of the initial project was to build an image collection using state-of-the-art technology, said Carmon Colangelo, director of the UGA School of Art. Dodd hired professionals to photograph the objects on color transparencies using sophisticated large-format 4x5 cameras. Two sets of transparencies were made with the second set being sealed and refrigerated so when new technology evolved the images could be taken to the next generation. “This was a remarkable achievement that results in the collection being of practical and historical value more than four decades after the project was conceived,” Colangelo said. “Being especially rich in decorative arts and architecture, the Carnegie corpus will make a special contribution to regional studies, especially of the 17th-19th centuries. It is also unusually rich in Native American materials for its age.” Robert Nix, an art professor emeritus who worked on the project with Dodd, echoes the opinion that the collection was progressive from both technical and content viewpoints. “The key thing was, in this country we got much of our art second-hand from Europe. If it wasn’t European, many thought it really wasn’t good art,” Nix said. “The whole concept that America was creating art, good art, was new and there was little visual documentation that could be used in education. It is the first thing we had in which art treasures of the United States were systematically put together by the best scholars in the fields.” To identify the images, Dodd recruited six nationally recognized scholars to form an advisory board, which in turn invited 17 specialists to select materials from the areas of American architecture, painting, sculpture, graphic arts, the decorative arts, costume design, photography, the theater and Native American art. “Mr. Dodd really had the vision for the project — that America had a long, great heritage of art and it was in many, many diverse fields,” Nix said. “The art programs in the 1950s were booming and colleges and universities had started building academic art programs but they simply didn’t have the materials needed to do the job.” UGA has contracted with Luna Imaging to create the digital images. Digital Library of Georgia staff are finalizing the cataloging of information pertaining to the images. “Digitizing the master negatives will provide much more usable high-quality master images,” said Stephen Miller, director of the Digital Library of Georgia, a GALILEO initiative based at the University of Georgia to provide electronic access to the cultural and historical resources of the state of Georgia. “This will provide greatly enhanced access to a noted representation of the history of art through both digital images and rich descriptive data,” Miller said. “The creation of a high-quality digital archive will have multiple uses in the future, including high-quality print and slide reproduction.” The project will take about one year to complete. |