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Slides were used to teach history of art and architecture since around 1880s until they were replaced by digital modes such as PowerPoint. Since the founding of the Fogg Art Museum in 1895, the Fine Arts Library has served the needs of teaching faculty, art museum staff, undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and historians at Harvard and around the world. By 1920s, many universities had slide libraries, including Harvard. Since then, over the decades, FAL has acquired over 600,000 slides, mainly from the courses taught by Harvard faculty for teaching.

In the past couple years, the Fine Arts Library’s Digital Images and Slides Collection has been engaged in a large-scale move of our 35 mm slides to off-site storage at the Harvard Depository.

This collection of over 600,000 slides documents the history of world art and architecture up to the early 2000s. Access for retrieval of items needed by future researchers is being provided through creating HOLLIS records. We have digitized most of the slides, but the archiving of this significant teaching format, nearly in its original arrangement, will serve as a valuable record both of the past art historical interests of faculty and students, and as a tangible reminder of bygone classroom teaching practices.

These are some samples from our slide collections. We’ll be showing some of these slides at our Open House on September 18th.

#SlideCollections #Slides #Photography #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #FineArtsLibrary #Harvard #HarvardLibrary #DigitalImages

This facsimile of The Royal Psalter of Sainte-Chapelle, an illuminated manuscript originally made in Paris in the early thirteenth century, is filled with a delightful variety of geometric, floral, and zoomorphic line fillers.

Medieval scribes and artists filled the empty space between lines with humor, providing a break from often serious texts and also creating visual balance and symmetry. We suspect that they must have had a lot of fun creating these quirky creatures.

The Fine Arts Library holds a collection of over 300 full-color facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts from a wide range of periods and traditions. The collection primarily includes religious texts, but representatives of secular works on poetry and literature, astronomy, travel, sketchbooks, and science and medicine are also included.

#Facsimile #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #FineArtsLibrary #Harvard #HarvardLibrary #SpecialCollections

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Betye Saar who passed away on July 26th, only four days before turning 100 years old.

Saar was a celebrated contemporary American artist (1926 - 2026) and leading figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s. Through visual storytelling, Saar’s assemblage work often confronts American racism, colonialism, and stereotypes of Black people in this country.

Rest in peace, Betye Saar.

#BetyeSaar #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #HarvardLibrary #RestInPeace

February is also National Embroidery Month, and we’re excited to show you some cool items we have in the Special Collections. The first one is a hand-embroidered canvas book made by Candace Hicks who collects coincidences from the books she reads and gathers them in her artists’ books and installations.

Hicks created a variant series of hand-embroidered books, copying the form and design of dime-store "composition" books. In this volume, Hicks kept a record of coincidences in the books she was reading and noted every time the word “coincidence” occurred.

Common threads : Volume 28 Hicks, Candace [Austin, Tex. : C. Hicks,] 2011. English HOLLIS number: 990128839780203941

#NationalEmbroideryMonth #Embroidery #ArtistsBooks #CandaceHicks #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #Fineartslibrary #Harvard #HarvardLibrary

Gasen (畵筌) is a Japanese instructional manual for those learning to draw or paint. This Gasen, a six volume set, was published in 1721, and was created by Hayashi Moriatsu (林守篤). It is considered to be the first of comprehensive, full-scale art manual in Japan.

Hayashi Moriatsu was trained in the Kanou school, which was quick to draw upon Chinese painting manuals. He introduced them as part of the Kanou school’s body of knowledge. The book is designed for beginners, including painting theory and guides on pigments with clear, and accessible illustrations. (Summarized and translated from: 小林宏光Kobayashi, H. (2018). 近世画譜と中国絵画 : 十八世紀の日中美術交流発展史: Kinsei gafu to Chūgoku kaiga : jūhasseiki no Nitchū bijutsu kōryū hattenshi)

The preface is devoted to Chinese painting theories such as the Six Laws, Three Classes, and Twelve Things to Avoid. Volume 1 includes orally taught secrets by Yuugen Ogata, who was Moriatsu’s master teacher. The next four volumes focus on Kanou School painting methods: vol. 2, instructions on how to draw landscapes and plants; vol. 3, birds and animals; vol. 4, Chinese figures; vol. 5, Japanese figures; and vol. 6, methods of mounting and appreciating painting, and how to roll and unroll scrolls. (Summarized from JAANUS: Japanese Art and Architecture Net Users System)

The images shown here in this post are from Gasen (畵筌) by Hayashi Moriatsu, volume 2 (how to draw landscapes and plants), including how to draw different types of movement in water and flowers in the summer.

#JapaneseArt #Gasen #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #HarvardLibrary #SpecialCollections

Grrr!

Guillermo Deisler (1940-1995) was a Chilean artist who worked in stage design, woodcut printing, visual poetry, and the early global mail art movement.

Deisler was born in Santiago, but spent most of his life in East Germany. In 1973, he was arrested during the military coup in Chile and was forced into exile. He lived in France and Bulgaria, but eventually settled in East Germany.

He created artist books and unique mail art using rubber stamps and poetic imagery, blending word and picture. In 1987, he launched UNI/vers(;), also known as the Peacedream project—an international mail art publication with 35 issues, bringing together visual and experimental poets from around the world.

This publication entitled “Grrr” is an invitation to create meaning of this word on your own.

The note from the publisher in Spanish is translated as below:

“Grrr grrrr gr grrrrrrr gr grrrrrrrrr gr……

We invite readers to create their own translation of this message.”

This publication is a facsimile reissue of Guillermo Deisler’s artist’s book made in Antofagasta, Chile in 1969, under the aegis of Ediciones Mimbre (1963-1973). The facsimile publication was produced by Naranja Publicaciones after 50 years of its first publication. 500 copies were made that maintain the narration of the original and different printing techniques such as risography, letterpress, screen printing and stamping have been mixed.

You will find this and other artists’ publishing collections in our Reading Room.

#GuillermoDeisler #ArtistsBooks #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #HarvardLibrary #Grrr

This is from a series entitled Albums of notes and the original drawing and paintings relating to Ishimoto Shūen's book "歷世風俗女裝沿革圖考", by a Japanese artist named Ishimoto Shūen (active during the Meiji and Taisho periods), which was published in 1911.

Shūen was a notable interior decorator and art historian, who also possessed fine drawing skills. He created these illustrated resources to show the changes in women’s clothing and hairstyles from ancient times to the Meiji period in Japan. He researched various fashion trends in Japan from old books and paintings, so his illustrations are accompanied with detailed annotations.

The first volume is devoted to women's court attire. The next volume is in three parts: court furniture and boxes belonging to the ladies; makeup, hair styles using ribbon, hair pieces; and ceremonial rituals. The third volume is kamon, Japanese family crests. The fourth volume is devoted to hinagata kimono patterns with a number of fine drawings. The fifth and sixth volumes describe court attire for samurai of different ranks.

In today’s post, we highlight drawings from the first volume on women’s court attire.

#HarvardFineArtsLibrary #JapaneseArt #Fashion #HarvardLibrary #SpecialCollections

Here’s our first post in a series from our current exhibit, “Woven Worlds: The Contemporary Tradition of Storytelling through Weaving.” We will be sharing a series of posts to explore each of the included artworks in more depth.

Rhiannon ‘Skye’ Tafoya (b. 1989) is an interdisciplinary artist from the Eastern Band of Cherokee and the Santa Clara Pueblo Tribes.

She employs printmaking, digital design, and basketry techniques in creating her artist’s books, prints, and paper weavings. Both of her Tribal heritages, cultures, and lineages are manifested in her two- and three-dimensional artworks that range in size from a few inches to a few feet. She is inspired by her family history of basketry and observing her father and maternal grandmother weave baskets from red willow, honeysuckle vine, and white oak. While her inspiration comes, in part, from Cherokee traditions, her artworks are decidedly contemporary, featuring sharp lines and bold colors.

Skye creates to preserve, archive, and share personal and familial stories, cultural knowledge, and the Cherokee language. (from the artist’s website)

Weaving is integral to storytelling across the globe. This exhibit highlights the many ways in which Indigenous and diasporic communities use weaving to support lifeways, record history, and celebrate culture. Weaving is a diverse practice traversing fiber arts, basketry, beadwork, and more. The exhibit is open to Harvard ID holders only.

#Weaving #IndigenousArtist #HarvardFineArtsLibrary #Harvard #HarvardLibrary