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Helen Partridge Love
Glaze Spectrum Maker & Curator

About

In early 2017 Helen Love was asked by Aberdeen Art Gallery to make a library of ceramic glaze test tiles for the wall of their applied arts section.

In response, Helen challenged herself to make the brightest spectrum possible using 8 common metal oxides and no commercial stains.

There followed a frenzy of glaze testing, 1500 glaze tests to get to the final of nearly 500.

Rejected test tiles

Two versions of this glaze library of test tiles can be viewed in person. One is on the wall of the ceramics workshop at Gray's School of Art where all the glaze tests were mixed in their glaze lab and fired in their kilns.

The other is on display to the public in Gallery 5 "Crafting Colour" of Aberdeen Art Gallery.

Helen with some of the Design and Code team

Helen with her spectrum

As a ceramic technician working daily with students, Helen saw the potential to use the testing data she recorded for their benefit.

Collaborating with creative agency Design and Code, the data Helen collected over the years was transformed into this digital resource.

Colin Leonard, Founder of Design and Code says "We were thrilled when Helen asked us to collaborate with her on this exciting project. It's an amazing piece of work, a two-year labour of love! It has been a real joy to form this partnership with Helen and help share her findings with the wider community."

Hopefully this teaching tool will draw people in to the world of glazing and they will begin to understand the chemistry and experiment themselves.

Variables

There are 4 main variables which affect the colour of a glaze. These equate to the filter buttons on this website.

Making a test glaze

Follow these steps to make approximately 200ml of glaze.

1. Wear a dust mask.

2. Weigh ingredients precisely, treating percentages as grams, into a cup.

3. Mix water in until the glaze is like pouring cream.

4. Push through 100 mesh cup sieve into another cup using a stiff brush.

5. If you have added too much water just leave to settle and then pour some water off the top.

6. Always stir a glaze before use.

7. Remember to label containers and number glaze tests.

8. All the glaze tests were dipped.

Extra information

Wear gloves, apron and eye protection when handling barium, bone ash, copper, cobalt, lithium, manganese, nickel or vanadium as these are harmful. Do not eat, drink or smoke.

Glazes work out much cheaper when you make them yourself.

Oxides added are over and above the 100% (potters percentage). Glaze recipes often do not total to 100 anyway.

Temperature chart

Pyrometic cones

Cone numbers are used in ceramics as a kind of universal shorthand for different firing ranges. Roughly speaking here are the temperatures represented by pyrometric cones.

Each pyrometric cone is made of ceramic material formulated to bend at a specific temperature. However they will react at a lower temperature if the firing is slower, just like the glazes.

Firing schedules

Oxidation firing (Electric kiln)
The usual glaze firing programme used for these tests (unless otherwise mentioned) was:
90C per hour up to 300C (194F/hr. to 572F)
120C per hour up to the top temperature (248F/hr.)
soak for up to 20 minutes but only if the kiln is big and/or very full.

Reduction firing (Gas kiln)
Takes approximately 7 hours.
Warm slowly to start with.
When the kiln reaches 1000C (1833F) reduce the oxygen by partially covering vents until flame shows but not enough to stop the temperature from climbing steadily.
At 1260C (2300F) open the vents and take approximately 20 minutes to bring up to 1280C (2336F) to burn off soot.

Other firings
such as Raku, Crystal/Iron red firing or Shino reduction are explained with each glaze recipe.

All the glaze tests were fired horizontally.

Food safety

Food safety research was not carried out on the glazes, and a few are certainly not food safe.

Information can be added to each glaze, so any help on this is welcomed. Just email Helen at h.love@rgu.ac.uk

Please visit here, here and here for more information on food safety.

Protective gloves must be worn

Bonus blacks

Black is not a colour in the spectrum, but potters sometimes need black so we added these recipes:

Satin Doll Black
cone 9.5, from Val Cushing
40 alberta slip
15 nepheline syenite
10 barium carbonate
15 talc
10 whiting
10 flint
1 chromium oxide
2 red iron oxide
2 manganese dioxide
2 cobalt carbonate

Satin Doll Black 2
cone 9.5, from Val Cushing
65 alberta slip
15 nepheline syenite
10 barium carbonate
10 talc
5 black iron oxide
1 chromium oxide
2 manganese dioxide
2 cobalt carbonate

Frogpond Metallic Black
cone 6 from www.frogpondpottery.com
78.9 potash feldspar
10.7 calcium borate frit
5.5 whiting
5 china clay
4 copper carbonate
4 manganese dioxide
2 cobalt oxide

Cartwright Black
cone 6
73.5 potash feldspar
10.2 red iron oxide
10 calcium borate frit
5.1 whiting
4.1 china clay
4.1 copper carbonate
2 cobalt carbonate

Love Odyssey Black
cone 6
20 calcium borate frit
10 whiting
30 nepheline syenite
10 china clay
30 flint
4 iron chromate (you can add up to 8 iron chromate)

Cooper Black Slip 2
cone 6
fire on greenware
80 of the body clay you are using
12 red iron oxide
5 manganese dioxide
2 cobalt oxide

Glossary

For more information on materials and substitutes search here.

Photographs

The colour of the tiles in the photography had to be absolutely true or there was no point in having them at all.

The photos were taken using a copystand with daylight bulbs and then each photo was compared to the actual test tile and adjusted in Photoshop, "a bit more blue, a bit more purple!", until the colour was true to life.

Thanks to Fergus Connor and Naomi Christie for all their help with the photos.

Photographing the tiles

Instagram

Feel free to share photos of your glazes and notes on the results on social media.

Each tile has a unique hashtag (for example Vanadium 25 is #glazespectrumV25), which you can easily copy to the clipboard and paste before you post.

You can also search for specific hashtags to see how ceramicists may have posted their results and experiences of using that glaze.

#glazespectrumCu31 - Iris Walker Reid

#glazespectrumCo17 - Celda Tyndall

Support

We are enormously grateful to the individuals who have generously supported Glaze Spectrum:

Adam Hoyle, Aimee Morris, Alexis Budd, Alison Duncan, Alison Grubb, Amy Lawson, Anita Varga, An Gielis, Ann Capewell, Bev Rowe, Bodil Partridge, Bryan Johnson, Bryan Thomson, Colin Florance, Daniel Sutherland, David Slade, Diana Fallowes, Diana Sykes, Elizabeth Degenszejn, Elizabeth Furrie, Ellen Fox, Elspeth Winram, Ewan Sinclair, Fiona Booys and Citylit Ceramics Diploma, Genevieve Davis, Gerald Buchanan, Hamish Stewart, Hilary Nicol, Jane Barclay, Jane Cairns, Jude Barber, Judith Williams, Katy Farago, Kelly Cairns, Kirsty Collins, Kristina Aburrow, Kristine Partridge, Mairi Macleod Gray, Maribel Femenia Vinao, Mary Watson, Mel Colquhoun, Mick MacNeill, Mikael Reid, Miranda Clayton, Natasha Riddoch, Nelly Harris, Neil Cobban, Nick Beavon, Nicola Furrie Murphy, Pat Short, Steve Hay, Steven Draper, Tess Day, and Teresa Munby.

Thanks also to the donors who wish to remain anonymous, the students at Gray's School of Art who helped with all the testing, Robert Gordon University for glaze firings in kind and Potclays for their donation of glaze materials.

If you'd like to contribute to this project, the fundraiser is still open!

Press

A massive thanks to the following for featuring Glaze Spectrum in their publications, articles, magazines and social media.

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Helen Partridge Love Glaze Spectrum Maker & Curator In early 2017 Helen Love was asked by Aberdeen Art Gallery to make a library of ceramic glaze test tiles for the wall of their applied arts section. In response, Helen challenged herself to make the brightest spectrum possible using 8 common metal oxides and no commercial stains.

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Switzerland’s leading national design competition. Organised annually by the Federal Office of Culture since 1918. June 13 – 18 2023, Basel

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Have "a nice and well designed day" - Love, Wim.

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Experimental way of connecting 'collections' allowing viewer to add lines as connections.

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DVEIN is a director with two heads, one is called Teo and the other Carlos. We work in commercials, music videos and films and we love experimentation.

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Archived card layout - all shown in one place - user can click and view more information.

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Goodfight is a Los Angeles based fashion lifestyle brand and creative studio.

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A Vegetative Deep Dive
into the Inner Workings of La Granja Ibiza

A Vegetative Deep Dive
into the Inner Workings of La Granja Ibiza

Days at La Granja start early, when the gardens hang in mist and the cool dawn air fills with birdsong and the chirping of insects. Soon the farmers arrive. They feed the chickens and a fat brown Iberian hog named Coco. As the sun rises over the pinewoods and aromatic fruit trees of Ibiza's wild north, the farmers begin to harvest the crops that will wind up in La Granja's kitchen, where morning preparations are already underway.

Play sound Listen to an environmental soundscape of the farm.

Since opening five years ago, La Granja, a 10-hectare biodynamic farmstead anchored by an 18th-century stone house, has become a polestar for a new and growing movement on the Balearic island. Nodding to Ibiza's authentic hippie heritage and locally rooted vision of a greener, slower future, today's La Granja is a laid-back agroturismo project that also functions as a platform for discourse on farming, sustainability and our relationship with the food we eat.

But the best way to understand La Granja is to begin, quite literally, at the roots. We followed a selection of crops as they made their way from soil to sustenance in a highly sustainable, zero-waste process presented by the farmers, cooks, critters and creative minds who make the farm what it is today.

Writer Charly Wilder

Directors Studio Airport

Camera Operators Luuk de Kok & Mischa van Schajik

Producers Lawrence Hazen & Hanna Thalén

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Encyclopedia of the Farm - La Granja Ibiza - Slow - Slowness.com

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https://experiments.withgoogle.com/draw-to-art

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Every great work of art started as a sketch, but what if your sketches could help you discover great works of art?

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The absurdity of celebrity culture, basketball, kitsch, and the objects of our contemporary world, in particular plushies, are the basis for New York-based artist and designer Shana Sadeghi-Ray's work. Born in Boston, her multimedia pieces investigate how and why we ascribe meaning to objects while also reflecting the aesthetics of the first generation who grew up with the internet. In turn, she often works with found objects, either creating installations and sculptures from them or photographing them to be used on graphics. She combines these photographs with illustrations and lettering and, as such, her work retains a tactile and analogue quality even when used in a commercial sense for brands such as Supreme, Marc Jacob and Better Gift Shop.

We last wrote about Shana's work two years ago, where she explained that she's been a life-long hoarder and collector, a hobby that has directly inspired her work and fascination with objects. One recent project, in particular, displays Shana's obsession with collecting and is entitled Collection Project. Presented as collages where photographs of objects are superimposed onto coloured backgrounds, it acts as a way to invite those not able to physically enter her space into her world. "The nostalgia and identifiable characters make it easily relatable to the viewers," Shana says. "I was initially overwhelmed and was feeling embarrassment by the amount of things I owned and started this series to try to curb my compulsion to collect. The opposite happened, and I have come to terms with this desire, accepting it as a part of who I am." While we learn through Collection Project of Shana's proclivity for holding onto things, we also understand various facets of her personality through which things she chooses to hold onto.

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How Shana Sadeghi-Ray's obsessions with collecting informs her design work

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The absurdity of celebrity culture, basketball, kitsch, and the objects of our contemporary world, in particular plushies, are the basis for New York-based artist and designer Shana Sadeghi-Ray's work. Born in Boston, her multimedia pieces investigate how and why we ascribe meaning to objects while also reflecting the aesthetics of the first generation who grew up with the internet.

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THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL MISSION OF SISTER GERTRUDE MORGAN
04.10.20 - 13.12.20

SISTER GERTRUDE MORGAN ARTWORKS PRESS RELEASE

I am a missionary of Christ before I'm an artist.

Photographed by Lee Friedlander, lionised by Andy Warhol, re-mixed by King Britt, the remarkable Sister Gertrude Morgan (née Gertrude Williams) was a rare and rarified figure in the aesthetic history of 20th century America: a confident female artist, whose visceral image-making went hand-in-hand with the saving of souls.

Born in 1900 in Lafayette, Alabama, Morgan was as modest as she was larger-than-life. Her New Orleans Gospel Mission was a spiritual home for believers and non-believers alike. For it was here that she proselytised and painted and rattled her tambourine, when she was not out singing, preaching and teaching Bible to neighbourhood strays.

These moments became the content of her legend. Morgan depicted the everyday alongside the divine, outputting her pictorial rhetoric onto any surface she could find. Scraps of card, window blinds, paper fans and serving trays carried her repertoire. They evoked a biographical other-wordly hybrid, where New Jerusalem resembled New Orleans, and where the good Sister's marriage to Jesus, God or both, swirled among the heavenly bodies and eliptical texts.

Although the Black Arts Movement was peaking on the East Coast of America, Morgan remained remote from their community, separated by not only by geographical distance, but also by artistic intent. She was a local Louisiana hero, even a star: a stout, middle-aged, African-American lady, who was successfully painting - and exhibiting her painting - at a time when few peers dared even expose their material, let alone in the racist, misogynist and conservative South.

Often to be seen on the streets in her signature white pinafore, it was the performative nature of her practice which brought her to the attention of Larry Borenstein and Allen Jaffe. Working together, these high-octane stalwarts of the city brought Morgan's work into dialogue with the wider arts community via Borenstein's art gallery at Preservation Hall. Morgan's prolific output led to a fast uptake amongst the New Orleans arts community of the 1960s and 1970s, reaching New York via Andy Warhol's Interview and a 1973 article by Rosemary Kent.
Major exhibitions were to follow, including the Corcoran Gallery's barrier-breaking Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980 (1982), which toured the US. Almost 40 years after her passing, a major retrospective curated by William Fagaly opened at New York's American Folk Art Museum.

Today Sister Gertrude Morgan has been rediscovered by a younger generation of American andinternational curators. Her work was most recently featured in Outliers and the American Vanguard Art (2019), curated by Lynne Cooke and travelled from the National Gallery at the Smithsonian (Washington DC), to the High Museum (Atlanta) and LACMA (Los Angeles). Her emblematic song I Got a New World in My View (1970) was featured in the Martin Luther King Jr biopic, Selma (2014); and her classic Let's Make a Record was reworked by DJ and producer King Britt in 2005. The Everlasting Gospel Mission of Sister Gertrude Morgan is the first major gallery exhibition of work to be seen in a European context.

Sister Gertrude was strong and frisky. She described to me how God came to her in a dream, and told her to stop playing the guitar and instead to illustrate the Bible. But God did not say anything about stopping playing the tambourine, so she continued with that.

Lee Friedlander, photographer (2009)

The first time I heard her voice it just pierced my whole spirit.

Lee Friedlander, photographer (2005)

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THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL MISSION OF SISTER GERTRUDE MORGAN 04.10.20 - 13.12.20 SISTER GERTRUDE MORGAN ARTWORKS PRESS RELEASE I am a missionary of Christ before I'm an artist.

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The Museum of Everything is the world's first and only wandering museum for the undiscovered, unintentional, untrained and unclassifiable artists of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

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Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Gagosian Gallery Victoria Miro Gallery Contacts

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At the start of the project, this room was completely white - white ceiling, white floor, white walls, white furniture. People come in, they are given a sheet of coloured stickers in different sizes, which have been produced specially for the project and in accordance with the artist's specifications; her choice of colour, her choice of finish, and her choice of size. And then everybody is invited to place the stickers anywhere they like in the room, according to any pattern, any idea they have, anything they like they can do with the stickers.

Kusama is best known for her brilliantly coloured dotted surfaces, her installations with blow-ups and her walls covered in brilliant spots. And in her biography, she talks about experiences really of a very young child, almost sort of hallucinogenic experiences, where her vision of landscape and people was clouded by spots. And in her very, very first mature works of art, just after finishing art school in Kyoto, the spot emerges as a pattern in her work. And from that period of time, she comes back to the spot with great regularity, and by the end of the sixties, she is actually painting a landscape, she's painting spots on people's bodies, onto animals, and the spot becomes a very regular motif throughout her work.

It's her way of kind of covering the surface. It's a reflection of her vision, but it's also a way of embracing the whole world in a kind of overall pattern. And the interesting thing about this work in particular is that where she's moved from creating an environment of spots that we passively appreciate or enjoy a walk through, she has now moved on to actually involving the audience in the creation of this dotted, spotted interior.

I think Kusama is now seen alongside people like Murakami or Damien Hirst, or Jeff Koons as a kind of globally branded artist. Her spots are ubiquitous, and they are instantly recognisable. They are on the face of the London tube map at the moment. Everywhere we go we see...to the biennials and triennials across the world, you see big Kusama installations. But what is also important to recognise is she really does fit into art history, and she was there in late Surrealism, she was there at the birth of Pop. She has a relationship to Minimalism, she's a real key practitioner in the beginnings of performance and action art. So she's very much somebody who is an insider, but she was never attached to any one movement for very long, so she's always...also somebody who kind of is an outsider. She moves in and out of the kind of principal avant garde moments of the mid to late twentieth century.

And now she stands beside them, because she has got that status where she is a kind of unique, almost celebrity artist of our era.

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At the start of the project, this room was completely white - white ceiling, white floor, white walls, white furniture. People come in, they are given a sheet of coloured stickers in different sizes, which have been produced specially for the project and in accordance with the artist's specifications; her choice of colour, her choice of finish, and her choice of size.

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Lignes de possibles: Arachnophilia with Tomás Saraceno at the Festival La Manufacture d'idées

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Magnificent Obsessions Why We Collect The impulse to collect is human. We collect for many reasons: to gather information about the world, to preserve the past, or to follow our interests and

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Louise Nevelson once noted that 'artists are born collectors'. 1 The artist herself was a life-long collector and that pastime ultimately came to inform how she worked, culminating in her monumental 'walls', of which Black Wall (Tate T00514) is exemplary. Indeed, Black Wall, like many of Nevelson's early walls, could even be said to enact the thematics of collecting, accumulating and storing, to the extent that it might be understood less as a taxonomic display than as a large assortment of things that have been gathered together to store or keep safe.

In the 1950s Nevelson was not alone in her impulse to collect, although perhaps the ways in which her sculpture alludes to that interest was prescient at the time. Today, the artist-as-collector is all the more common a phenomenon, one that spans a range of practices. Artists like Mark Dion and Damien Hirst have begun to straightforwardly transform their collecting habits into an aesthetic mode, leading to the production of artworks-as-collections. 2 The topic even provided the focus for a 2015 exhibition titled Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector, held at the Barbican Art Gallery, which explored the history of the relationship between the hobby of collecting and professional aesthetic practices. That exhibition paired private collections with the original artwork of artists as diverse as Peter Blake, Pae White and Andy Warhol, positing that it has long been the case that personal collections have informed artistic practices in both form and content, probably as long as the hobby itself began to firmly take hold within mainstream culture.

Collecting became widespread in both the US and the UK at mid-century, so much so that it crossed the boundaries of avant-garde and popular culture. In the 1950s assemblage artists such as Robert Rauschenberg began frequenting surplus stores along Canal Street in New York and scavenged the streets for junk, while other artists, including Joseph Cornell and Nevelson, expanded the collecting practices they had begun as early as the 1930s, the period that saw the most rapid growth, standardisation and diversification of collections.

Collecting as a hobby

In the United States hobbies had been fast growing since the turn of the century, particularly in metropolitan areas like New York. The initial rise in the practice of collecting as a hobby corresponded directly to the nineteenth-century increase in manufactured goods, which ensured widespread availability and standardisation. For an activity to become a recognised hobby, many people had to be able to participate, and for collecting in particular, some agreement on the value of a collection had to be reached. As such, despite the fact that collecting as a practice emerged much earlier and focused more around unique and often natural objects, as historian Steven Gelber has suggested, 'collecting came into its own in an industrial capitalist world'.' 3 And what was initially a craze that began to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century took hold all the more rampantly as a rise in leisure time emerged in tandem with the decrease in labour hours in the US in the early 1900s.

Able to be performed in one's own time and within the home, hobbies provided obvious benefits. They were touted as 'productive' pastimes, said to offer various means of engagement that took one's mind off work completely, but that nonetheless allowed the mind (and often the body) to remain active. 4 A clear 'outcome' was seen to result from their undertaking, one considered to be satisfying and enriching. As an activity that could bridge the realms of work and play, collecting became idealised as a hobby, while effectively exposing the tension at the heart of many leisure-based activities that seemed all too much like substitute forms of professional labour.

The Depression era was also responsible for changes to the rhetoric of hobbies in ways that increasingly closed the gap with work. It was all the more common, for instance, for hobby lobbyists to note that a hobby was in fact 'a job you can't lose'. This line was joined with those that linked idle hours to crime and degradation, such that hobbies, it was argued, were an antidote to all. In that they taught 'the rewards of hard work and the value of neatness', helped to 'develop special knowledge', and prevented 'mischief', hobbies were activities performed in one's own time that aligned fully with 'socially sanctioned values'. 5

Collecting, like other hobbies, had its own set of rules that were followed by all true collectors, as well as a hierarchy that distinguished good collections from bad. Beyond the key requirement of settling upon the correct type of collection - one that perhaps was undervalued but ripe for appreciation - classification and categorisation were two principal components of a collection, responsible for securing its clear, systematic order, and thus its proper status. This was partly a way of imparting a degree of science to the activity, to combat any pejorative associations with the amateur that clung to terms like hobbyist and hoarder. 6 By cataloguing and classifying, the collection could thereby be seen to yield the knowledge and understanding conventionally associated with taxonomic systems, which order, rank, and define.

Nevelson, Cornell, and the artist-collector

In the 1940s and 1950s convention held that there were rigid parameters bounding the types of collecting and the manner in which it could be conducted as a personal hobby. There is, for instance, a key distinction between tangible collections, which mimic the real economy (think baseball cards or stamps), from those that do not (life-lists made by birdwatchers, for example). 7 Artists like Cornell and Nevelson, who collected widely, produced tangible collections yet operated in ways that were more akin to the collector of intangible things. They each put together ad hoc categories in place of conventional systems of classification, and as a result collected in ways that disregarded the usual values ascribed by a real economy. Cornell collected pipes, sherry glasses, marbles, postcards, books and ephemera, and he spent massive amounts of time classifying and cataloguing his collections. But the results were housed in files and shoeboxes rather than proper display cases, a storage system that amounted to a sort of 'laboratory', as he saw it, for exploration and inspiration (fig.1). 8 As a practice, this approach departed freely from the conventional organisational procedures of the hobbyist.

Fig.1
Cornell's basement studio, 3708 Utopia Parkway, Flushing, New York 1964
Collection of Duff Murphy and Janice Miyahira
© Terry Schutté

Fig.2
Nevelson's Spring Street home, New York, c.1963
© Louise Nevelson

Nevelson collected somewhat more narrowly. While she first sought out wooden items abandoned in the street - furniture parts, crates, old toys, posts and architectural fragments - as the 1960s progressed into the 1970s Nevelson began ordering various sculptural elements rather than waiting until she happened upon preferred sizes and shapes. Other objects of choice were strewn around the artist's studio and apartments as well. One visitor to her Spring Street studio (fig.2) described opening cupboards to reveal 'a hoard of oddments and tchotchkes: vanity sets, inlaid boxes, tarnished trays, ugly Edwardian candlesticks with silver frills, like the stock of a dotty junkshop owner who cannot bear to part with anything'. 9 This begins to approach the quasi-hobby of 'junk snupping', a casual term which began to circulate in the 1920s that referred to the collecting of old commonplace items. 10 The antique shops that once lined Second and Third Avenue in New York - not far from her studio in the 1950s - are known to have been haunts of the artist. 11 But even in the case of Nevelson, there was a kind of instinctual impulsiveness that governed her choice of items for personal use and display that had little to do with established parameters.

Nevelson could not even rightly be said to have specialised in antiques since her primary interest was in castaways. And while she also collected Native American and African masks and pottery, early American paintings and other Mesoamerican artefacts that could be construed collectively as 'primitive', none of these constituted proper items to collect by the 1940s. There was rarely, if ever, a guiding principle or epistemic framework that governed either her collecting habits or her organisation of the objects afterwards. 12 Instead, she tended to simply fill rooms in her home with her acquisitions.

What this points to is the way in which Nevelson, and Cornell too, embraced the avidness and enthusiasm of the hobbyist without conforming to the established idea of the collector as someone who accumulates objects 'in a particular systematic way that necessitates the development of specialized knowledge'. 13 If specialised knowledge was brought to bear on their collections - and it is hard to see what that would be - Cornell and Nevelson did not showcase it. Their means of collecting was always made to appear haphazard and based on whimsy rather than any external measures of value, knowledge or completeness.

Excess and order

Rather than utilising the common curio cabinet of the collector, or the basement shoe box storage methods of Cornell, Nevelson mixed storage and display within her home, a practice that had a significant impact on her work. 14 Her 'walls', which, as legend goes, relate directly to her habit of piling spare parts for assembly along the floor in crates and other boxes, are the most well-known examples of her tendency to blend these two considerations of the collector. Indeed, directed acts of storage were combined seamlessly with the display of other objects that hung on walls and sat on shelves around the room, such that, as can be seen with Black Wall, the two were pointedly conflated and confused within the space of her home.

The casual way that Nevelson amassed wooden items was matched by the unconventionality of her domestic methods of display. Rather than producing a carefully constructed space using principles of interior design, the rooms of her home were often overfilled to the extent that it was difficult to distinguish between what was functional and what was decorative. Her tendency to overcrowd reputedly led to Nevelson's routine need to empty out or purge the space. Describing her home in 1958, Time magazine reported that because 'her house began to feel crowded not long ago, she put all her furniture out onto the sidewalk, keeping only a couch, a table and three chairs'. 15 Critic Hilton Kramer has confirmed the account: 'Its interior seemed to have been stripped of everything, not only furniture, rugs, and the common comforts of daily living, but of many mundane necessities.' 16 According to Jean Lipman, herself a collector of Nevelson's work, these alternating acts of accumulation and emptying persisted throughout her life. 17 That Nevelson routinely discarded, dissembled or otherwise relinquished her collections constitutes an unusual attitude toward a life-long hobby, one that matched the kind of whimsical attitude with which she pursued it to begin with.

What comes to the fore in descriptions of the collecting methods of artists like Cornell and Nevelson are the ways they imparted a kind of privacy to their practices that seemed to detach them from conventional collecting activities. Indeed, this approach increasingly stood apart from the commercialised hobby culture of the 1950s. As Gelber suggests:

[commercialisation] may have made hobbies less pure in some sense by openly tying them to the marketplace, but hobbies had always traveled on a track parallel to work. The postwar environment gave participants the option to acknowledge the deeper meaning of productive leisure by making amateurs more of a mass market and making the products of leisure more obvious commodities. 18

In contrast to this tendency, artists at the time began to assert the possible connections that hobbies, as a kind of personalised labour, might have to freedom, intimacy, imagination, and tactility over and above any sort of marketable outcome. 19 In a section of The Arcades Project entitled 'The Collector', Walter Benjamin asserts something of the power of collecting by pointing to the way in which it undoes the traditional course of events. Where the manufactured object, like the harvested crop, is made to be dispersed and consumed, the act of collecting works against this tide, curbing the call of function in favour of a sort of 'completeness'. Benjamin writes:

[I]t is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object's mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection ... It is the deepest enchantment of the collector to enclose the particular item within a magic circle, where, as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired), it turns to stone. 20

In one sense, Black Wall can easily be seen as a display case of discarded trophies, castaways that have lost their use value and now derive a new value from their accumulation. Following Benjamin, however, these collected objects, detached from their original function, might also amount to a new type of completeness, a kind of encyclopaedic history of wood in its various states of manufactured being. 21 Or at least this idea springs to mind, if only to be swiftly undercut by the means with which Nevelson obscured and obviated any easy classificatory system that might have been suggested by the work's gridded structure. Black Wall can only be apprehended as a 'collection' abstractly, in part because of the monochrome black paint, but also because placement within individual crates is often repetitive, redundant even, and overdone as well, so that there is no adequate space left for 'display'. Without this, the work's status and ultimate function as a collection is undermined.

The failure to provide adequate space for 'display', a hallmark of the more randomly arranged walls of the 1950s, appears to issue from the casualness of Nevelson's method of collecting. She was known to pick up discarded wooden fragments found on the street or in some other abandoned state, and on occasion enlisted friends, with whom she walked through the city, to help her collect bed frames and headboards, or other used parts that might otherwise have gone to waste. As a result, many of her first walls have a bric-a-brac feel about them. As one critic of the early work noted: 'Conglomerations of wooden blocks may suggest barrels in a yard, the paraphernalia of a diary or a kitchen, at a remove from actuality, as vividly and solidly as her nests of boxes suggest dedication to some unguessable hobby.' 22 Similarly, Hilton Kramer observed in 1958 that while her contemporaries 'err on the side of frugality and emptiness, she has moved swiftly into a kind of gluttony of images'. 23

While Kramer correctly evokes the feeling of excess upon encountering Black Wall, to suggest that 'images' emerge is not quite accurate. Instead the sculpture showcases variation and apparent (carefully arranged) haphazardness. 24 For example, the variation in the size and orientation of the boxes - with the smallest box nestled near the centre to fill a gaping hole left by the surrounding oversized crates - thwarts any sense of classificatory clarity. Similarly, each stacked crate contains different wooden fragments, juxtaposed in ways that seem to show off the similarities and differences between them: rough and refined, large and small, rounded and dagger-like, manufactured and natural. The irregularity of the boxes and their contents, as well as the provisional feel of the accumulation, appears to deny the application of any organisational logic. In fact, a sort of contest seems to be played out in many of the most cluttered crates, as though the fragments are trying to resist the threat of order. What comes to the fore here is the way in which the accumulation of materials and organic overgrowth feels as if it is itself responsible for the multiplication and mutation of the boxes. By refusing to conform to the status of 'display', Black Wall asserts itself as an embodiment of the act of collecting, rather than the image of a collection.

The tactility of the collector

Nevelson encouraged this understanding of accumulation as an act within her early gallery installations, such as her 1958 exhibition Moon Garden Plus One at Grand Central Moderns in New York (fig.3). This installation was made to look environmental, comprising multiple works in concert with one another to create a closed-in, intimate, almost cave-like atmosphere. Here again, the installation amounted to more than the image-oriented visual profusion observed by Kramer. The overall effect, as with much of the work itself, was tactile rather than optical, accentuated by the decision to block out windows, dim lights, and replace existing lights with a spare number of luminous blue bulbs. An interest in tactility, Benjamin proposed, is characteristic of the collector: 'Possession and having are allied with the tactile, and stand in certain opposition to the optical. Collectors are beings with tactile instincts.' 25 Nevelson might be seen to have built this sensibility into her walls and environments, which act to assert the value of the tactile.

Fig.3
Louise Nevelson, Moon Garden Plus One, exhibition at the Grand Central Moderns gallery, New York, January 1958
© Louise Nevelson/DACS, 2016

Although the boxes Nevelson used in her walls are usually described as crates, several of the containers in Black Wall have the kind of dovetail joints that indicate they may have originated as drawers, a detail that points to the way the work retains the feel of a vessel for storage, for close touch, proximity, and even secrecy. In one box, for instance, the chiselled-out hole once occupied by the lock mechanism of a drawer is readily visible. The sides of the same drawer retain thin routed grooves, which would have held movable dividers by which its contents would have been compartmentalised. Such details represent yet another way in which Nevelson's materials, despite and because of their extensive fragmentation and reorientation, retain the tactile as well as visual pleasures of their prior lives: wooden turnings arouse the sensation of grasping a chair, for example, or running one's hand across a balustrade.

Moreover, the stacked quality of Black Wall - the boxes are pieced together, piled, balanced haphazardly, flipped on their sides, and in some cases turned sideways - only serves to make the physical act of creation even more palpable. Again, the poles of display and storage appear to have sprung from one and the same action. The sensation is peculiar, particularly when contextualised in relation to the experiential and often performative art of the late 1950s and early 1960s, exemplified by Allan Kaprow's happenings. In the case of Black Wall the 'event' is replaced with its component parts, housed in a way that brings out the domestic ordinariness of its making. This is not a closet or a cupboard exactly, but it is not entirely dissimilar either. The lack of straightforward organisation or classification lends the work the feeling of having been brought together over time, as if a series of minor moments led to the creation of this somewhat grand amalgam.

Fig.4 Louise Nevelson

Open Zag III 1974
© Louise Nevelson

The significance of these associations become all the more pronounced when a work like Black Wall is compared to Nevelson's relief sculptures from the 1970s, such as Open Zag III 1974 (fig.4), made of similar materials and also painted a uniform black. Both consist of an amalgamation of wooden fragments, but their manner of display differs: in the reliefs, the sense of construction and composition replaces the sense of containment that the crates provide in the wall. That vivid tactility of Black Wall yields in the later work to an optical sensation of materialised brushstrokes mixed with a sense of textured form of the kind found, for instance, in the surrealist frottage of Max Ernst. The reliefs, it could be said, take on the feel of drawings as much as they do of sculptures. In contrast, Black Wall feels less intentional, less thoughtful, but also seems to be the product of a long, slow period of time. Its wooden fragments, nearly all of which formed part of domestic objects, no longer seem connected to their original function; instead they seem to simply assert their status as kept, preserved, or contained.

Such thoughts lead back to the nature of the 'collection' that comprises Black Wall. Are we to think of Nevelson as the inveterate collector, always on the hunt? Furthermore, given the strong tactility of the collection, the contained and the preserved, does Black Wall properly represent what is often seen as the possession obsession understood by Marx to be the vice of the collector? 26 Because Nevelson enacted the thematics of collecting, rather than presenting an ossified collection, Black Wall not only resists these associations but arguably engages with the organic side of accumulation, manifesting the invisible ways in which the daily and the domestic amass over time.

Unlike the hobbyist, who thinks of collecting as a pastime, one that can edify, ennoble, or otherwise promote value, Nevelson's Black Wall should be thought of less as the manifestation of a pastime than of the daily accumulation of materials, perhaps even with an exaggerated hand, so that it becomes at once overly visible (showy, excessive) and yet hard to see (stored, housed, kept for later). This performance of collecting might in turn be what inspires the sensate experience of her work, the quality of which has been remarked upon countless times since she first began to exhibit her environments. By engaging the body of the viewer as much as it does the eye, Black Wall fails to perform the sensory alienation that accompanies possession obsession - and all of the commercialised implications of the hobby of collecting that it conventionally represents - and thus confirms its status as an improper collection.

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The Culture of Collecting - In Focus | Tate

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Louise Nevelson once noted that 'artists are born collectors'. 1 The artist herself was a life-long collector and that pastime ultimately came to inform how she worked, culminating in her monumental 'walls', of which Black Wall (Tate T00514) is exemplary.

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TCG Card Database | Search the Pokémon TCG Card Database

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Browse the Pokémon TCG Card Database to find any card. Search based on card type, Energy type, format, expansion, and much more.

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Stories are universal. We all read, watch and listen to them. We all tell them. Stories are part of what makes us human. In fact, stories are so ubiquitous, we often don't think about what makes a good story, or question why stories matter in the first place.

Why stories matter to museums?

Museums are often thought of as places that collect, care for, display and interpret objects. While valid in many ways, this view omits the human element of museums.

An alternative approach is to think of museums as places that collate and share human experiences. This is the view put forward by Salvador Salort-Pons, Director of the Detroit Institute or Art in a recent article. More fundamentally, Salort-Pons describes museums as spaces for empathy and "a bonding medium for our society".

Salort-Pons might as well have been writing about stories. Stories share personal experiences in an authentic and easily accessible form. They feel familiar, yet enable us to step into the shoes of others. They are full of detail, but leave space for us to insert our own thoughts, feelings and memories.

We use stories to make sense of the world. While we see ourselves in them, it is through stories that we encounter new perspectives that change how we think and feel.

At their core, stories make us care. They connect us with people and places, even stimulating the release of a hormone usually expressed during intense bonding experiences, like childbirth, breastfeeding and sex.

This emotional connection is the reason stories are so powerful. As any advertiser knows, stories drive people to take action, whether that's buying a product, gifting a donation or making a difference in the world.

From a marketing perspective, stories can help museums raise funds, encourage visits and trigger sales. For instance, when the Tenement Museum in New York wrote about former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in a fundraising mailing it told a story about Roosevelt's work in the local area. By connecting the teenage Roosevelt's story with the Museum's education programmes, the call to action was obvious: donate money and you could inspire a new generation of young Eleanor Roosevelts.

Looking beyond the museum itself, stories help organisations drive change in society. The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH), once a place for art and history, now a place that uses art and history to build a strong community, puts stories centre stage. The Museum's mission statement makes this clear: 'we find, spark, preserve, and trade stories, ideas, and elements of creativity drawn from people across Santa Cruz County'. Stories are how MAH ignite shared experiences and unexpected connections.

How can Museums find stories?

Finding potential stories isn't usually a problem. There are stories are everywhere. Look inside a museum and you'll find stories about the foundation of the institution, the history of the building, the collection, individual objects and the people who made, used, sold or owned them.

Museums are also full of people, who bring their own stories with them, from researchers and other visitors to staff and volunteers. There is never just one story to tell. The myriad options can make finding one single story to focus on feel overwhelming.

The sphere in which museum stories live, undiscovered or untold, is vast. Like a marble slab waiting for the sculptor's chisel, the possibilities are endless.

Finding the right stories is less about looking for them and more about thinking through what you need. You need to know who you are as an institution, what matters to your audiences and what you want your stories to achieve. Armed with this knowledge, you can start to make decisions about the sort of stories you want to tell.

These six questions can help you make smart choices as you develop stories for exhibitions, programming, fundraising and social media.

1. Who is the story about?

Museums habitually use objects as a starting point, but the most affecting stories are all about people. When we read, watch or listen to a story we want to identify with its central character, someone who takes action to overcome a challenge.

This doesn't always mean the character looks or sounds like us. The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, which collects stories as much as objects, describes itself as 'a museum about you, about us'. Since everyone can identify with its themes of love and loss, it is easy to sympathise with others' experiences, whoever they are.

In fact, gathering stories from a range of people can make it easier for us to see ourselves in at least some of them and their lives. An interesting example of this is the BAC Moving Museum in London. In its London Stories performance, visitors explored its building in small groups, encountering members of the public telling their own stories about how they arrived in the city. The show ended with the opportunity to explore an exhibition of objects provided by the performers, each related to their story.

Like many museums working with refugees and migrants, this project gives a voice to those who may not usually be offered a platform. This, in turn, makes the Museum more relevant and inclusive.

Museums keen to engage with diverse audiences need to deliberately choose central characters that feel identifiable to these groups. As Marleen Hartjes of the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands puts it, the concept of accessibility applies as much to stories as it does to physical access: "if the story is not about you," she says, "you will not come at all".

2. What point of view are you taking?

Are you telling the story from the point of view of the central character? Or from someone who encountered them? This may sound like a stupid question, but stories about women or other historically disadvantaged groups have, more often than not, been told from someone else's perspective.

As an example, the story of Mary Mallon, the Irish cook who inadvertently spread typhoid to several New Yorkers in the early 1900s, is usually told from the perspective of the man who doggedly tracked her down. In my own version, published by Wellcome Collection, I deliberately changed the perspective, so we start at the moment when Mallon is confronted by her pursuer. This allows us to see the story through Mallon's eyes, not from the point of view of the man whose actions prompted her life-long incarceration.

Deliberate decisions like this challenge the historical norm, which privileges certain versions of stories above others. Conversely, a decision to tell the same old stories helps these privileges persist.

3. What goes wrong?

We find stories interesting and engaging because the main character encounters some sort of complication or obstacle. This might be a practical challenge or an emotional one.

The most powerful challenges are those we can all relate to - fundamental human issues like love, pain and loss. Complications like this effectively transform a story about one individual into a story of shared experiences.

The tension created by this complication is what makes us want to get to the end of the story. We are driven to find out what happens or, if we already know, to discover how the situation was resolved.

In the Museum of London's exhibition Fire! Fire! the opening exhibition panel introduced a major obstacle:
London in 1666 A city recovering from the plague of 1665 A city of around 400 000 people A country at war with France and the Netherlands One night in September a fire starts in a bakery The Great Fire of London begins...
It's a great opening statement, which poses more questions than it answers. Audiences should be hooked, wanting to know more about how this story unfolds.

Laid out line by line on a black background, the design of the panel was reminiscent of the opening screen in a movie. This reflects the theatrical focus of the show; visitors later explored a dimly-lit seventeenth-century street and found themselves enveloped by digitally projected flames, as if assuming a role within the story.

4. What events will you share to move the story on?

Unlike the stories we all wrote as children, narratives aren't usually a chronological list of everything that happens. Once your audience is engaged by a sympathetic character and the challenge they face, a story needs a series of events that show how the character resolves the problem.

In the Science Museum's interactive touring exhibition The Science of Spying, visitors were given the opportunity to play a role in the narrative. The physical layout of the exhibition guided visitors through a series of story events, taking them from complication to resolution. After being 'recruited' at the entrance - where they received a spy ID - they made their way through a set of training exercises and received their mission. The mission is effectively the obstacle they need to overcome. With their preparation complete, they were sent undercover, infiltrating an organisation to collect information and crack a code. The story ended with their escape and debrief.

While this narrative-led exhibition was set up as a chronological adventure, other stories unfold in less time-driven steps. The trick is to arrange these events to reveal only as much as the audience needs to know at that specific point. Think about when your audience will ask questions like Who? Where? When? Why? and What happens next?. Then select and arrange a series of events to address this.

5. What details will you share?

In tandem with events that push the story forward, stories need information that adds context and detail. Mixing these two elements is a fine balancing act. Too many events and it's difficult to understand what is happening. Too much detail and you reduce your story to a stream of consciousness.

Museums and archives are fantastic places for finding historical details. Archive resources reveal what people wore and read, how they decorated their home, what they ate, how they spoke and what they thought. More broadly, they can provide information about the weather, the cost of everyday things, social norms and attitudes to everything from health to wealth.

The details you share should place your audience right inside the story. These touches of colour, like the tints and audio added to the Imperial War Museum's World War I footage in They Shall Not Grow Old, bring the story to life.

The Anne Frank House in the Netherlands shows how small details, like horizontal pencil lines scrawled on a wall, can have greater impact than raw facts. The lines mark the changing heights of people living in the House during the German occupation of Amsterdam in World War II. They remind us that Anne and her family are like any other family, despite the extreme circumstances they found themselves in. What's more, the lines show us what an incredibly long time the family spent hiding in the House's secret annex. A bald statement telling us the number of years is far less effective.

6. How does the story end?

All stories come to an end. The conclusion of a story sees the challenge or complication resolved by the actions of the central character.

Resolutions can be happy, sad or, as is the case with most true stories, somewhere in between. They involve the character changing the world around them in some way, the character changing themselves or both.

We find endings satisfying because they release the dramatic tension set up earlier in the story. They also provide an opportunity to consider what the main character has learned in the process.

Overall, good storytelling is about making smart choices. Choose a sympathetic character, an appropriate perspective and a compelling complication. Select a series of events that show how the character tackles the complication, colourful details that help us understand what is happening and a satisfying resolution. And choose what formats to use and how to distribute and share stories.

Of course, there is one fundamental choice: whether to find, create and share stories in the first place. Perhaps that is a moot question, though. As museum consultant Leslie Bedford wrote almost two decades ago, "Museums are storytellers. They exist because once upon a time some person or group believed there was a story worth telling, over and over, for generations to come." For museums, like humans, stories are a natural part of life. It's just a matter of choosing which stories to tell and how.

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Why do stories matter to museums and how can museums become better storytellers?

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Stories are universal. We all read, watch and listen to them. We all tell them. Stories are part of what makes us human. In fact, stories are so ubiquitous, we often don't think about what makes a good story, or question why stories matter in the first place.

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Without art, human society would become immeasurably poorer. We would no longer be able to see the world through the eyes of artists or experience how art can make us think differently and reflect critically about our own experience of being in the world. Our ability to decode images would be compromised. No longer would we be exposed to artworks that alter our perceptions, and shift our understandings of the everyday.

As part of our revolution, we have gathered a number of artworks from the Tate, Centre Pompidou and MMK collections. The works need to be committed to memory, so that they can be taken into the future.

Art plays a vital role on an individual and societal level. Our manifesto highlights what art represents, and therefore what will be lost if we fail to preserve it in our memories. We urge you to take heed and to join our community, experiencing artworks so that you can remember them, carrying their arguments, their meanings, and their importance into the future with you.

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TRANSFORMATION

Art transforms the way we see the world by altering everyday objects and encounters.

Against an increasingly rushed experience of the world, artworks teach us to look more critically and perceptively at our relationship with commonplace items. By presenting visions of reality made strange or surreal, art helps us to have a deeper more profound relationship with the world.

Vernacular objects are transformed into something fantastical, reminding us to consider and take pleasure in the everyday, and proposing alternative ways of understanding the world.

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INTERCONNECTING

Art visualises our relationships with other people and encourages us to forge new relations.

As technology develops and the digital realm encroaches on the physical world, we will become increasingly isolated in our daily lives and disassociated from the concerns of others. With this situation only becoming more extreme, artworks can help us to visualise interpersonal relationships and connections to the people around us.

Through art, emotional understanding and empathy for each other's lived experiences will be better promoted and maintained.

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Art teaches us how to recognise the long lasting influence of images.

Artworks help us to navigate the visual world of the future, by examining, critiquing and drawing attention to the means by which people use visual communication. Art can articulate the power and importance of visual language.

In an era almost entirely saturated by images, artworks will help us to understand the values and arguments that people, governments and corporations produce and disseminate using visual imagery, and to reflect on their repetition, mutation and endless proliferation in the digital age.

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PERCEPTION

Art can show us different ways of perceiving the world.

In the future, as now, we require artworks to highlight our processes of perception, reminding us that each of us views the world from our own distinct perspective. Even as we become more reliant on technology, the fact of our individual bodily lives remains unavoidable.

Through the power of art, we can keep hold of an understanding of vision and personal perspective, recognising the ways in which artworks can shift our outlooks and our sense of being in the world.

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Art enables us to question systems of understanding by ordering and disordering knowledge.

As we navigate a state of potentially overwhelming access to information, art helps us by making sense of and challenging systems of classification and hierarchy.

By learning the lessons and strategies utilised by artists and bringing them into the future, we can question how and why we harness and express knowledge, and the symbols used to do it.

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Using time and space travel as metaphors, art helps us imagine future and parallel worlds

Artworks allow us to move across time and space, enabling us to imagine future models for living and to experience a deeper relationship with chronology.

Artworks can help us reflect on our place in time, and open gateways into other dimensions. Provoking contemplation about our relationship with the past, art can highlight our potential to impact on the present and the future.

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Art allows us to imagine and hold on to untranslatable enigmas.;

Art can accommodate unknowable, untranslatable mystery that can be perceived but not easily expressed.

Rather than existing in isolation, art can help to communicate ways of thinking that might otherwise remain indefinable.

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Art has the power to animate objects with stories and ideas.

Art can draw attention to the power of language on objects, constructing complex webs of values. In different ways, artistic activity transforms materials that already exist in the world: human actions and thoughts are traced in objects that become imbued with energy and meaning.

By remembering artworks, we preserve a way of thinking about the way humans interact with the material world, remembering to be more questioning and critical of the material universe that we encounter.

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The manifesto of An Imagined Museum | Tate

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Without art, human society would become immeasurably poorer. We would no longer be able to see the world through the eyes of artists or experience how art can make us think differently and reflect critically about our own experience of being in the world. Our ability to decode images would be compromised.

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Smart object enhanced museum exhibition - Atlantik Wall at Museon

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What are Archives? | Animating the Archives

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ABOUT THE NETWORK

The Science Gallery Network consists of leading universities united around a singular mission: to ignite creativity and discovery where science and art collide.

The eight galleries of the Science Gallery Network are committed to bringing science, art, technology and design together to deliver world-class educational and cultural experiences for young people.

WHAT SCIENCE GALLERY DOES

Science Gallery delivers unique, transdisciplinary exhibitions, events and educational programmes that engage millions of inquiring minds every year in connective, participative, and surprising ways. It offers a social space to develop ideas, imagine the future, and realise dreams.

Science Gallery's internationally acclaimed approach encourages the development of creative, agile thinkers and doers for the 21st century - perceptive problem solvers that can bring together insights from diverse disciplines by moving effortlessly between these core areas.

OUR UNIVERSITY MEMBERS

Our university members, with Science Gallery, are shaping the next generation of science and technology trailblazers.

Universities are rapidly realising the importance of building meaningful avenues for young people who would not normally engage with the institutions on their doorsteps. By joining the Science Gallery Network, universities can draw on global connections to benefit their local communities, and use their local insights to generate new research with international impact.

BENEFITS OF THE NETWORK

Member universities of the Science Gallery Network reimagine what education looks like in the 21st century. The Science Gallery Network makes this possible by enabling collaborative partnerships with other galleries and universities in the Network.

All Network members have exclusive access to Science Gallery tools and resources, state of the art technology and digital platforms; unique learning and knowledge exchange; peer support; mobility programmes, and much more - enabling a truly global learning experience for university faculty, students and researchers and the local community.

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The eight galleries of the Science Gallery Network are committed to bringing science, art, technology and design together to deliver world-class educational and cultural experiences for young people. Science Gallery's internationally acclaimed approach encourages the development of creative, agile thinkers and doers for the 21st century - perceptive problem solvers that can bring together insights from diverse disciplines by moving effortlessly between these core areas.

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To ensure the health and safety of visitors and staff, interactive technologies-including the Pen and touch screens-are temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Experience more design

Cooper Hewitt's renovation now offers an entirely new and invigorated experience, with interactive, immersive creative technologies at the heart of every visit and 60% more gallery space to explore.

Explore the digitized collection on large touchscreen tables; draw your own wallpaper designs in the Immersion Room; solve real-world design problems in the Process Lab; discover how the Carnegie Mansion worked as house; and understand how donors have influenced the museum's collection over the last 100 years.

"Play designer" on 4K resolution touchscreen tables, developed by Ideum, that feature specialized interactive software designed by Local Projects. The 84-, 55-, and 32-inch tables use projected capacitive touch technology - the same technology found in popular tablets and smart phones. The ultra-high-definition resolution allows you to zoom in on objects to see minute details like never before.

The Collection Browser is available on seven tables installed throughout all floors of the museum, giving you access to thousands of objects in the museum's collection, including those currently on view in the galleries. The largest tables allow up to six visitors to simultaneously explore high resolution images of collection objects, select items from the "object river" that flows down the center of each table, zoom in on object details, learn about its history, and related objects organized by design theme and motif. You can also draw a shape that will bring up a related collection object, or try their hand at drawing simple three-dimensional forms.

Another screen on the second floor reveals the history of the Carnegie Mansion before it became the Cooper Hewitt. You can navigate the Mansion History application using the original floor plan of the building and browse through architectural details, original fittings and fixtures, and the quirks of the mansion's original residents.

The pen: now available

The new interactive Pen further enhances the your experience by letting you "collect" and "save" objects from around the galleries. Carry it in your hand tethered with a convenient wrist strap-it is always ready when you need it.

You receive your Pen with your admission ticket which contains a dedicated web address corresponding to your visit. To collect objects, simply press the flat end of the Pen to any museum label. Transfer your collections to the interactive tables to explore them in more detail or add more objects. At home or on your mobile device visit cooperhewitt.org/you and enter the code printed on your ticket-everything you collected and created will be waiting for you! Come back to the museum and keep building your collection, or share it with your friends.

Find out the full story behind the realization of the Pen and how it works.

Immersion Room

The Immersion Room on the second floor uses digital and projection technologies to bring the museum's collection of wallcoverings, the largest and most significant in North America to life. Browse hundreds of high-resolution digitized wallpapers and see them projected at full-scale, floor-to-ceiling on the surrounding walls. Sketch your own designs, adjust the colors and manipulate repeat patterns, and see them projected on the walls around you. Selected wallcoverings are accompanied by brief audio commentary with designers, who share design insights and inspiration.

Process Lab

In the dynamic and interactive Process Lab, you can brainstorm design solutions through hands-on and digital activities. The Process Lab emphasizes how design is a way of thinking, planning and problem solving, and provide a foundation for the rest of the design concepts on view in the museum.

Preview the New Cooper Hewitt Experience

Video produced by Local Projects

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The New Cooper Hewitt Experience | Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

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To ensure the health and safety of visitors and staff, interactive technologies-including the Pen and touch screens-are temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience. Experience more design Cooper Hewitt's renovation now offers an entirely new and invigorated experience, with interactive, immersive creative technologies at the heart of every visit and 60% more gallery space to explore.

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Reimagining the Museum Experience for a Digital Era | Gensler

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The AKC Museum of the Dog combines hands-on moments with classical displays to engage visitors.

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Museum Trends is an online resource for the latest in the future of museums

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teamLab Planets TOKYO / チームラボ プラネッツ TOKYO DMM.com

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Stroll through the museum with Google Street View and see five new online exhibitions about Vermeer, Rembrandt and other artists

Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections at the Rijksmuseum, says 'We are proud that the Rijksmuseum is the largest museum in the Google Cultural Institute. The collaboration perfectly reflects our view that the Rijksmuseum is owned by everyone and is for everyone. It means that even more people worldwide can enjoy the collection.'

Click here for the launch video

From today everyone can wander through all the aisles of the nineteenth-century building with Google Street View and look at the renovated interior. With a smartphone and Google Cardboard the Rijksmuseum can be brought to life in Virtual Reality. Coinciding with the recording of the digital collection in Google, five new digital exhibitions are being opened.

The exhibitions:

Jan Steen, a born storyteller, shows how he incorporated many different themes in his paintings

The Night Watch examines the individual details of this iconic work of art

Johannes Vermeer: details of his masterpieces unveiled

Rembrandt van Rijn: an overview

Johannes Lutma: a Dutch goldsmith

Vermeer is particularly well represented in Google Arts & Culture with thirty-five masterpieces in total, including the four that hang in the Rijksmuseum.

More information:
https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/partner/rijksmuseum

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200,000 Rijksmuseum Works of Art to See via Google - Press releases - Press - Rijksmuseum

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Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections at the Rijksmuseum, says 'We are proud that the Rijksmuseum is the largest museum in the Google Cultural Institute. The collaboration perfectly reflects our view that the Rijksmuseum is owned by everyone and is for everyone. It means that even more people worldwide can enjoy the collection.'

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Axiell UK - Bringing culture and knowledge to life

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Bringing culture and knowledge to life The work that you do means that society understands our past, present and future... and that's why we do what we do. Select your areas of interest: We use cookies and collect other personal information on our website. To see how, why and what please read our Online Privacy Policy.

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Articles about the trands that are shaping the future of museums. From tech through to audience expectations, what are the trends that we're seeing in the museum sector today.

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Installations Archives - The Cool Hunter Journal

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Chicago-based Luftwerk is an artistic collaboration of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero founded in 2007. The duo explores light, colour and sound in immersive temporary installations...

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Bauhaus-Archive - Collection Online - Artist - Highlight

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IMMA Archive: 1990s, From the Edge to the Centre celebrates an ambitious IMMA Collection and Archive Digitisation Project initiated in 2017 and made possible by the support of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

In advance of IMMA's 30th anniversary in 2021, the exhibition considers the rich early history of IMMA's programme and Collection and offers a space to reflect on the Museum's formative years through the lens of the archival material it has amassed.

The exhibition presents digitised material from the archive and revisits IMMA in its first years to consider the aims and challenges of the new museum as it sought to bring contemporary art from the edge, to the centre of Irish society and contemporary life, which it continues to serve. The exhibition also showcases the conservation and digitisation of IMMA's Collection of time-based media artworks - these include video, sound, slide, film, software and other digital artworks - allowing new access to a selection of artists' film and video made in the 1990s.

IMMA Archive: 1990s is also a statement of intent, an articulation of the possibilities of the long-term development of the Collection and Programming Archives as a resource for research, presentation and learning, which will be fully realised in IMMA's future Collection & Learning Centre.

Through the exhibition, we hope to encourage our audiences, new and long-standing, to respond and enhance the story of IMMA, allowing the museum to restage, reconsider and represent the legacy of its remit as Ireland's National Museum of Modern and Contemporary art.

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IMMA Archive: 1990s, From the Edge to the Centre celebrates an ambitious IMMA Collection and Archive Digitisation Project initiated in 2017 and made possible by the support of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. In advance of IMMA's 30th anniversary in 2021, the exhibition considers the rich early history of IMMA's programme and [...]

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Virtual access to Letterform Archive’s collection of lettering, typography, and graphic design.

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National Archives of Australia (NAA) – Multi-Screen Interactive Wall

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Medium. Experience Client. National Archives of Australia (NAA) Title. Multi-Screen Interactive Wall

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Baseline International TypoGraphics magazine online site and store. Launched 1979, an authoritative magazine about type and typography, within graphics and the visual arts.

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Build your Pokemon TCG Deck using our online Deck Builder.

Search the Pokemon Card API by Name. Use e: to exclude search terms ( Muk e:Alolan to exclude Alolan Muk)

You must be logged in if you wish to submit a deck you create.

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Pokemon TCG Deck Builder - pokemoncard.io

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Build your Pokemon TCG Deck using our online Deck Builder. Search the Pokemon Card API by Name. Use e: to exclude search terms ( Muk e:Alolan to exclude Alolan Muk) You must be logged in if you wish to submit a deck you create.

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TCG Card Database | Search the Pokémon TCG Card Database

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Browse the Pokémon TCG Card Database to find any card. Search based on card type, Energy type, format, expansion, and much more.

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Gugak Interactive Archives Wall starts from the Gugak archive of the National Gugak Center. Rebel9 has created the media based on the design of the Gugak archive system.

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Gugak Interactive Archive Wall

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Open Stores - Beamish The Living Museum of the North

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Step “behind the scenes” into the Open Stores at the Regional Resource Centre and see fascinating objects in our collections.

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Open Stores

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, i.e. The Met Museum

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Explore The Met using the interactive #MetKids map.

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Saint Heron Community Library; a growing media center dedicated to students, practicing artists and designers, musicians and general literature enthusiasts.

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The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design

"The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design reminds you that when print works well it can work like nothing else"
We're not in the habit of blowing our own trumpets at Phaidon. However, when a magazine we respect and adore in equal measure reviews one of our books in such a thought-provoking, insightful, intelligent - and yes, positive - way we coudn't help but bring it to your attention. So thank you Mark Sinclair and thank you Creative Review for taking the time to assess The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design in such a detailed and careful manner. With courtesy we repost The Creative Review review below.

The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design is a boxed edition of 500 A4 cards detailing some of the world's most important examples of the medium. At 13kg it's an object with some presence, but how will it weigh up with readers? While its considerable size and loose leaf format initially makes you wonder 'isn't this what the iPad is really good at?', handling each of the individual cards - the cover of Eric Gill's Typography (1931), or of an issue of David Carson's Beach Culture (1990), for example - reminds you that when print works well, it can work like nothing else.

In a sense the packaging (the large box comes harnessed in a sturdy carrying handle) is a bit of a distraction: the content is the main event here. It's a pleasure just to sit and look through the range of magazines and newspapers, posters and advertisements, typefaces, logos, symbols, books, album covers and motion graphics, which have been selected by a panel of designers, writers, critics and historians. (In the name of full disclosure both myself and CR's Eliza contributed research to the project but weren't involved in the selection process.)

This is Phaidon's stab at a graphic design canon and judging by the editorial process outlined in the foreword - thousands of entries were whittled down to 500 - it's been a considerable undertaking. The Archive's introductory text also explains the reasoning behind displaying the work across 500 large-format double-sided cards, instead of making a 1,000-plus page book, or an app. Primarily, Phaidon claim, this enables the reader to easily organise the work however they like; to siphon off just the posters, symbols, or book covers, or even to display the images as prints.

And despite the pull of the digital potential for something like this, it doesn't feel like the publisher's explanation is post-rationalising the design approach. It strikes me that being able to simply pull out individual entries will appeal (and be of practical use) to creative professionals, and something the general reader will equally enjoy. Each card boasts a single, well produced image of the particular work on the front, the reverse features a selection of additional related images and a few hundred words of text.

The 500 picture cards also put more emphasis on the reader to act - to compare and contrast, to make connections between works that are perhaps centuries apart. Readers can arrange the cards to any theme they desire, too, and dividers are supplied with the set in order to categorise by format - 'Book Cover', 'Identity', 'Film Graphics' and so on.

The cards are initially arranged in chronological order, with work dating from 1377 to 2012, and it's a treat to dip into the various styles, schools, tastes and production methods bookended on one side by the Gutenberg Bible and the Nuremberg Chronicles, and dot dot dot magazine and Leftloft's Documenta art festival designs on the other. Phaidon plan to issue further batches of cards in the future, so that the Archive can be updated both with historical additions and recent projects.

One point to note, however, is how well the cards will stand up to repeated viewings. Entries of course have to be put back in the correct place in order to be found again later (not a tricky concept, but one likely to go awry when the cards are routinely referenced) and this could make for a less than enjoyable user experience. The emphasis is firmly on interacting with the work, but the down side to this is that once cards are removed from their slot in the system, the system starts to fall apart. And that's something that conventional books, with their fixed pages and indexes housed reliably at the back, don't really have to worry about.

Another issue is the standing Phaidon places on its own printed products within the the centuries of graphic design collected here. As a "client", Phaidon actually has the largest number of projects represented in the Archive - five are listed in the index. Of course, with names like Alan Fletcher and Irma Boom directly associated with the creation of some of the company's most famous books (Fletcher designed both The Art Book and his own The Art of Looking Sideways; Boom the Hella Jongerius monograph) some crossover is perhaps to be expected. But out of 500 pieces, to devote five entries to one's own publications - the Bauhaus is cited twice; Monotype, three times - seems a little surprising.

That said, the sweep of the selection is exciting and impressive and it does feel like the biggest decision - to print each of the entries as a single page, instead of binding them in book form or formatting them for screen - went the right way. The temptation to digitise all the content must have been considerable (and will no doubt happen soon), but it's impressive to see print fighting back like this.

At £140 the Archive is perhaps not quite as accessible as it thinks it is, but it goes some way to suggesting what the most significant and visually arresting moments in the history of graphic design might be. Mark Sinclair, Creative Review

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The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design gets a great review in the influential Creative Review

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"The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design reminds you that when print works well it can work like nothing else" We're not in the habit of blowing our own trumpets at Phaidon. However, when a magazine we respect and adore in equal measure reviews one of our books in such a thought-provoking, insightful, intelligent - and yes, positive - way we coudn't help but bring it to your attention.

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BBC Radio 4 - A History of the World in 100 Objects - Downloads

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Podcast downloads for A History of the World in 100 Objects

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AIGA brings design to the world, and the world to designers.

The AIGA archives and special collections serve to identify, preserve, and make collections of enduring value available to the public. With more than 20,000 selections dating back to 1924, the AIGA Design Archives is a vital record of all disciplines of communication design.

Explore our curated collections. If you're not sure where to start, browse by color, year, or format, etc., or search by keyword.

You can enter in a search above, view AIGA Collections or Browse the archives.

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You are currently viewing this website with Javascript disabled. For an optimal experience and full functionality, please enable Javascript on your browser. AIGA brings design to the world, and the world to designers. The AIGA archives and special collections serve to identify, preserve, and make collections of enduring value available to the public.

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One of the world's most significant new museum projects, V&A East will comprise two sister sites currently under construction in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London.

Opening at Here East in 2024, V&A East Storehouse offers a new immersive experience, taking visitors behind the scenes and providing unprecedented public access to V&A collections. A short walk across the park, opening in 2025, V&A East Museumcelebrates global creativity and making relevant to today's world. Both sites are part of East Bank, the Mayor of London's £1.1 billion Olympic legacy project, which will create a new arts, innovation and education hub in Stratford's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

V&A East builds on the V&A's long-standing heritage in east London and our founding mission to make the arts accessible to all. V&A East is a new champion of creativity for the 21st century. Through the lens of makers and making, we will focus on how artists and designers work to transform our world for the better. We will platform diverse, global stories addressing the most pressing issues of our time and champion the pioneering and radical visionaries of the past and present to inspire future makers and critical thinkers.

As a platform for new kinds of creative excellence, V&A East will strive to shift the canon and celebrate work that truly demonstrates the dynamism and complexity of global creativity. We will showcase excellence wherever it comes from and work to highlight under-represented movements and voices by presenting a diverse range of perspectives to advance cultural conversations.

Exploring global making histories and the myriad motivations to make will unite all our programming: from collection galleries to the blockbuster exhibitions focused on global visionaries; from interdisciplinary partnerships across the East Bank campus and beyond to rich and dynamic public programmes, which will activate V&A East and provide a platform for conversation, collaboration and inspiring encounters with artists, designers and makers from around the world.

More than just a museum or collections store, it will be a creative campus and social space embedded within its local community, focusing on equipping young people with the interest, knowledge, and skills they need to flourish creatively.

Connecting with communities

Fundamental to V&A East is empowering young people and opening pathways into the creative industries. Highlights of our pre-opening initiatives include the V&A East Youth Collective Programme. This rolling 6-month paid opportunity for locals aged between 16 and 25 plays a key role in shaping strategic decisions in the making of V&A East. As part of an ongoing programme of collaborative research with VARI, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, interdisciplinary design collective has been appointed as V&A East's first Youth Workers in Residence to help shape V&A East's future youth programming. RESOLVE has been working with organisations to run a series of creative workshops exploring young people's connection to their local area as an opportunity for creative practice. Their work will culminate in a series of installations, designed and delivered on locations across the Olympic boroughs in collaboration with the young people.

Creative agency A Vibe Called Tech, whose work explores the intersection of black creativity, culture and innovation, has joined the V&A East project as part of a new creative residency supported by Google Arts and Culture. They will collaborate with young people on a series of digital content experiments that will inform V&A East's evolving creative programme.

Designed by New York architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro with support from UK based architects Austin-Smith:Lord, V&A East Storehouse is a 16,000m2 purpose-built home for over 250,000 objects, 350,000 library books and 1,000 archives. Offering an entirely new museum experience, V&A East Storehouse will take visitors on a journey across time, through self-guided tours and changing displays. The Storehouse's programme will explore why objects are collected, how they are cared for, conserved and displayed and will reveal the latest research emerging from the collections. Further spaces within the centre will host pop-up displays, workshops, performances and screenings alongside live encounters with the museum's work - from conservation and research to exhibition preparation. This new model builds on the continued success of The Clothworkers' Centre for the Study and Conservation of Textiles and Fashion, which will be relocated to the new centre from Blythe House in west London, where a significant proportion of our collection is currently stored.

From the oldest objects in the V&A's collection, including a pair of ancient Egyptian woven shoes to the smallest, such as 17th century dress pins and exquisite buttons made by celebrated 20th century studio potter, Lucie Rie, the Storehouse will be interspersed with colossal architectural fragments and room sets. Visitors can see the only complete Frank Lloyd Wright interior outside of the US - his 1930s office for American businessman, Edgar J. Kaufmann, revel in an exquisite 15th century carved and gilded wooden ceiling from the now lost Torrijos Palace near Toledo in Spain, and enjoy an original example of the 'Frankfurt Kitchen' designed by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, an ingenious innovation in domestic design developed in Frankfurt during the 1920s.

Alongside displays of collection objects the Storehouse will also be a place to encounter treasures from the V&A's Archives of Art and Design and Theatre and Performance Archive collections, which offer great insights into artists, designers and performers' working practices. These include the archives ofGlastonbury Festival and Talawa Theatre Company, the newly acquiredSirKenneth Grange Archive, charting the extraordinary 60-year career of the designer who has designed everything from Kodak cameras to Kenwood Mixers and the TX1 Black Cab, as well as items from singer-songwriter PJ Harvey's Archive, including her first electric guitar, originally stolen and only recently returned to her and gifted to the V&A.

Designed by Dublin-based architects O'Donnell + Tuomey, the five-storey V&A East Museum spans about 7,000 sqm and will offer welcoming spaces to socialise, as well as major exhibitions, festivals, commissions, installations, live performances, pop-ups and late-night events.

The main exhibition hall will present major shows celebrating the leading artists, designers and performers of our time. Two collection galleries will explore global making with new acquisitions, commissions and live activations presented alongside collection displays. The galleries will also include stories of east London's creative and manufacturing heritage, spotlighting local makers past and present alongside a creative studio for both drop-in and pre-booked activities. An installation and events space on the top floor will be the focal point for V&A East's global partnerships programme, hosting interdisciplinary collaborations, new commissions and events.

In the galleries, objects drawn from across time and space will come together in a thematic framework exploring attitudes and agendas for making in the twenty-first century. Collection highlights include artist Leigh Bowery's subversive costumes for Michael Clark's 1987 ballet Because We Must and experiments in portraiture from photographers Maud Sulter and Shadi Ghadirian to surrealist artist Claude Cahun and Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola. Large-scale textiles by makers from Eileen Gray to Cairo Tentmaker Hany 'Abd al-Kader to inmates at HMP Wandsworth, will be on display, as well as work by ground-breaking textile designers past and present, from botanical prints by the British-Trinidadian textile designer Althea McNish, to silk designs by 18th-century Spitalfields pioneer Anna Maria Garthwaite. Visitors will see garments by fashion designers Asha Sarabhai, Dame Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, contemporary streetwear, and future-facing product and architectural design, from the Fairphone and Open Desk to bamboo architecture by Bali-based Ibuku, champions of sustainable, indigenous practice.

Reflecting V&A East's approach to collecting, new acquisitions destined for V&A East tell stories about contemporary creativity and motivations for making - whether as self-expression, creative experimentation or ways in which art, design and performance responds to broader social, cultural and environmental issues.

Portrait of Melissa Thompson by Nigerian-American artist Kehinde Wiley
Part of Wiley's The Yellow Wallpaper series, this painting represents his ongoing practice, which subverts historic European portraiture traditions, to elevate sitters he encounters on the street. His work aims to challenge perceptions of blackness and raise important questions about race, identity and the politics of representation. This acquisition was made possible thanks to generous support from Art Fund and a legacy donation from Dr Philip da Costa.

Molly Goddard's hot pink Daria dress from her Autumn Winter 2019 collection - a design worn by Beyoncé in her 2020 visual album Black is King. The full-length dress is made of 61 metres of tulle net fabric and was the largest dress that Goddard had ever made at the time of creation. The dress is inspired by baby doll dresses and is exaggerated in scale, celebrating the power of femininity.

Ten photographic prints by British fashion photographer Jamie Hawkesworth from his 2011 - 2018 series, Preston Bus Station
The series, which builds on Hawkesworth's work as part of the Preston is my Paris collective, consists of portraits of passengers passing through the Grade II listed 1960s Brutalist station in Lancashire, which was threatened for demolition but later saved, with Hawkesworth's photographic series forming part of local campaigns. The V&A is the first UK institution to acquire Hawkesworth's work.

A glazed ceramic frieze made up of 48 individual tiles, Aunty, Mum and Me Talking About My Fabric Collection (2016) created by London-based artist MawuenaKattah made this Frieze, her first using clay, during a Ceramics Residency at the V&A. Her work draws upon her extensive personal archive of family photographs taken in Ghana, alongside more recent studio photographs of her family taken in London.

A visceral terracotta vessel, Itari by British-Nigerian artist Ranti Bam
Bam's organic and sculptural vessels push clay to its limits, with surfaces embellished with colours, patterns, and textures, as developed intuitively and inspired by the written word.

Go behind-the-scenes of our new spaces, find out about the objects and stories we are researching and gathering for display, and meet the people from east London and around the world who are helping to shape V&A East.

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One of the world's most significant new museum projects, V&A East will comprise two sister sites currently under construction in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. Opening at Here East in 2024, V&A East Storehouse offers a new immersive experience, taking visitors behind the scenes and providing unprecedented public access to V&A collections.

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A new way of visualising information. Working with Google the British Museum has captured their collection is this unique interactive way, allowing the user to explore the collection, hear audio descriptions and see where in the world the object is from. This gives the viewer the chance to experience the object in multiple ways and the opportunity to discover further.

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The British Museum's remarkable collection spans over two million years of human history and culture. Over 6 million visitors every year experience the collection, including world-famous objects such as the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures, and Egyptian mummies.
Discover our interactive experience The Museum of the World

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British Museum, London, United Kingdom - Google Arts & Culture

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The British Museum's remarkable collection spans over two million years of human history and culture. Over 6 million visitors every year experience the col...