Two Berkshire County art museums recently received grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support their work, including examining and utilizing technology in the art world.The Williams College Museum of Art has used roughly $450,000 in grants to digitize its 14,000-item collection over the past seven years. So far the entire collection is online, with half of it digitized — meaning a scanned image of the artwork is available. Museum director Christina Olsen says the next step is providing more information about the works.
“What we don’t have is deeper cataloguing,” Olsen explained. “Cataloguing is a term that museums and libraries use for deeper data about collections. Who did them? Is it a print, painting or sculpture? What do you know about the date, who we got it from and where it was exhibited. Any of those additional kinds of information that people really want.”
Part of a $500,000 Mellon Foundation grant will support that effort, while some of the funds will be used to re-imagine how people search and browse WCMA’s collection online.
“Say you are interested in knowing how many French 17th century prints the museum has,” Olsen said. “It would help you know that. Or if you’re interested in knowing how many works by women artists does WCMA have? So all of that, you can only pull that up if there is data in the background and we’ve categorized the works in those ways. That’s what the grant will help us do. In addition to letting you do that by typing it into a box, what the grant will help us do is think about how do we visualize that data and graph it. How do we provide ways for people to look at the collection not just in discreet parts, but as a whole.”
Olsen says digitized artworks are not replacements of original items, but are rather surrogates since characteristics like scale, texture and color cannot be fully conveyed in an image. She says an online art database should be its own experience and also serve as a way to get people to come to the physical museum. Olsen explains early on, there was worry the internet would stop people from coming through museum doors, but contends that was misplaced.
“In WCMA’s case we have a really, really great collection,” Olsen said. “Particularly a great collection of American 19th and 20th century art and modern contemporary art. A lot of people don’t know it because we have a small building and a lot of the collection is in storage because we can’t show it all at a given time. So getting it out there is a draw. There is also a whole bunch of people who probably won’t come to WCMA because they don’t live near here, but are really interested because they are scholars, students or because there is some aspect of what we have that is interesting to them. This collection is for them too. So it isn’t only intended as a means of getting people in the door. It also exists as a totally legitimate and important aspect of a museum’s mission and program in 2016.”
WCMA will also use the grant to hire a digital collections project manager. Meanwhile, The Clark Art Institute, less than a mile from WCMA, is receiving $600,000 from the Mellon Foundation. The money will support The Clark’s Research and Academic Program, which has brought together roughly 300 scholars from 30 countries over the past 15 years for art fellowships. The program’s associate director Chris Heuer says one focus will be how technology impacts the arts and how artists communicate.
“Who deal specifically with images, moving images and three-dimensional materials,” Heuer explained. “What specific to their communication and the way they talk to each other and is that going to be affected by all these changes in telecommunications, networks and global technology? Or not? We’re not really interested in finding technological solutions or nifty app-like fixes for all these things, but to really look at these things critically from a distance and an intellectual point of view.”
The three-year grant will also support exploring art and partnerships in Latin America and how conflict impacts the humanities.
“We’ve got several different concrete programs, one of which is a design workshop taking place in Williamstown in June which is about edges in conflict,” Heuer said. “Looking at from a macro-level what conflicts, geopolitical, physical and ecological, what that might actually mean about what we talk about art today and art from the past.”
The Clark’s Research and Academic Program’s initiatives produce academic articles, exhibitions and conferences.
