Temperantia | ARTtube

Temperantia | ARTtube

One of many awesome videos on this multi-media site from the Netherlands!  

It features the Print Room at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts

An interesting resource I ran across through the ARLIS listserv today!

Statue of Liberty postcards from Ellis Island

"CCAHA specializes in the treatment of art and historic artifacts on paper and provides preservation education, training, and consultation.  Established in 1977, CCAHA is one of the largest nonprofit conservation facilities in the country."

CCAHA is having a number of interesting events this fall, including a "Care and Preservation of Textiles" training program in September 2012 and a program in November called "The Next Chapter: Rare Books in Modern Times." Conservators from all over the US will participate, including participants from Winterthur, the New York Public Library, and the Morgan Library and Museum.

Mattress Factory, a museum in Pittsburgh

I ran across a really great museum on the internet recently: The Mattress Factory, which describes itself:

"The Mattress Factory is a museum of contemporary art that presents art you can get into — room-sized environments, created by in-residence artists. Located in the historic Mexican War Streets of Pittsburgh’s North Side since 1977, the Mattress Factory is one of few museums of its kind anywhere."

This piece by Sarah Oppenheimer is called 610-3356 and is an actual hole in the floor of one of the galleries.  It connects to a window in a gallery below, providing a view out that window.

The Mattress Factory also has a permanent exhibition of its own visitors called MF iConfess, a "confessional-like" structure in the museum lobby where visitors answer the question "What does the Mattress Factory mean to you?" (and other things!). 

One of the current exhibitions is called Sites of Passage which documents the performance artist Tavia La Follette's participation in an Artists Residency program in Egypt in the summer 2010.  

During her residency, she started a project called Firefly Tunnels, which she describes as "metaphorical passageways for the exchange of ideas through the language of Performance Art."   The multimedia collaboration project involves artists from Egypt and the United States and includes some fascinating images.

Creusot-Monceau Ecomuseum

Model of a steam engine by William Murdock, 1784

I ran across a really interesting museum collection focusing on industrial machinery in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in France.


They have a gigantic model built over twenty years starting in the 1890s that includes 38 automatons and replicates industrial activities throughout the whole plant in Franche-Comte.

Francois Bonhomme (1864): Forge in Creusot

You can  read a bit about the idea behind this community museum in this article in MuseumCommunities.