Posts Tagged ‘museum’

Maps of Henri Cartier Bresson’s Travels by Adrian Kitzinger @ MoMa

Monday, April 26th, 2010

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[Editor’s note: Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) helped to define photographic modernism starting in the 1930s when he began working for Life and other news “picture” magazines (exhibit at MoMa in New York thru June 28, 2010). He snatched beguiling images from fleeting moments of everyday life. He traveled the whole world over, as this series of maps from Adrian Kitzinger shows. Because he visited some cities more than once, the cartographer employs a clever technique of showing overall trips with colored route lines and visited cities in normal black type. If subsequent visits were made, the city name is underlined in the route color of the 2ndary, tertiary, etc trip. Some indication is also made for the mode of transport. Photo below is from after WWII as a women denounces another for ratting on her to the Nazi secret police during the war.]

Republished from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

These maps, by Adrian Kitzinger, have been adapted from the maps he made for the detailed chronology of Cartier-Bresson’s travels in the book that accompanies the exhibition. The principal itineraries are named by year and distinguished by color, and are keyed to a descriptive list on each map. Please note that some quite similar colors designate entirely distinct itineraries.

Cartier-Bresson’s travel is rendered as lines (solid by land or sea, dashes by air) following the most probable routes; when a route cannot be reasonably surmised or clearly shown, locales that belong to a single trip share a color code: underscores or colored type. Some more far-flung connections are indicated with dotted arrows. Places Cartier-Bresson visited independently of a recorded itinerary are represented as circles with gray rather than white centers.

View more maps at MoMa . . .

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Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes (Corcoran in Washington, DC)

Friday, June 12th, 2009

[Editor’s note: If you travel to DC this summer, check out this installation from renowned contemporary artist and architect Maya Lin of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial fame. There is a fee to enter the private museum.]

Republished from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Run dates: March 14, 2009 — July 12, 2009

This spring, the Corcoran Gallery of Art will present Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes—a dramatic installation of major new works by this renowned contemporary artist and architect.   On view from March 14 through July 12, the exhibition addresses contemporary ideas about landscape and geologic phenomena.  Lin’s second nationally-traveling exhibition in 10 years, Systematic Landscapes explores how people perceive and experience the landscape in a time of heightened technological influence and environmental awareness.

Lin (b. 1959) came to prominence in 1981 with her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. and has since achieved a high degree of recognition for a body of work that includes monuments, buildings, earthworks, sculpture and installations.  Traversing Lin’s constructed landscapes in this exhibition—moving around, under, and through them—we encounter a world that has been mapped, digitized, analyzed, and then reintroduced by Lin as actual, physical structures.  Her work blends a typology of natural forms, from rivers to mountains to seas, with a visual language of scientific analysis represented by grids, models, and maps.  In doing so, Lin merges an understanding of the ideal and the real, encouraging an encounter with conceptual, sculptural and architectural modeling.

Systematic Landscapes is centered on a trio of large-scale sculptural installations: 2×4 Landscape (2006), Water Line (2006) and Blue Lake Pass (2006).  Each sculpture offers a different means for viewers to engage with and comprehend a schematic representation of landscape forms.  In these projects, Lin examines how people’s modern relationships to the land are extended, condensed, distorted and interpreted through new computer technologies.  She translates a series of dramatic landscape environments selected for their inspiring beauty and connection to life-supporting habitats into spatial environments where viewers can engage with them in an art gallery setting.

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Directional Signage and Maps in San Francisco

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Here are several pictures taken at the new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and at SFO airport last week. The museum’s exhibits and aquarium make extensive use of maps and directional signage. They even feature an lenticular foil showing before and after glacier loss. The California Beef Council map was seen at the Fry’s parking lot in San Jose. The bathroom signage is from the SFO airport where they have both an in and an out for the restrooms 🙂

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Ed Prado Museum Tour … Now on Google Earth (Duke CIT)

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

[Editor’s note: Google has started to add museum collections to Google Earth. The Prada in Madrid includes a self portrait by Albrecht Dürer, Las Meninas, the dark Goyas, and the Fusilamientos del Tres de Mayo. Video includes section on how Google took the photos. Thanks KL!]

Republished from the Duke
Original January 14th, 2009 by Randy Riddle.

Google has added the El Prado museum to Google Earth, allowing you to not only see the buildings, but to do a “virtual tour” of 14 paintings in the collections, viewing them in incredible detail – each painting is captured and presented in 14 billion pixels.

Below is a short video and you can also read a blog post at Gizmodo about the project.