flavin.pulitzerarts.org

Take a look at the following:

- Interview conducted by Matthias Waschek (Director of the Pulitzer) with Tiffany Bell (exhibition curator) and Steve Morse (exhibition coordinator).

- Interview conducted by Tiffany Bell with Emily Rauh Pulitzer (founder of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and curator of the 1973 Flavin exhibition at SLAM).

- Interview with Dan Flavin himself - from the ‘73 exhibition with photo of him working on the installation.

- Exploration of the galleries and Flavin’s work through an interactive map. View still photographs, videos moving you through the space, and one incredible timelapse.

ENJOY.

All afternoon, I’ve been going over the development site for our Flavin web catalogue….we’re hoping for a Friday launch — I’ll keep you posted and let you know as soon as it’s live (along with a brass band, ticker tape parade, and a huge web catalogue-inspired cake…ok, not really, but that’s what it will feel like).

So Tyler Green’s link today to MoMA’s catalogue for their exhibition Color Chart came at a perfect time.  I really like it - it seems to fit the spirit of the exhibition, I like the different types of content, and I’m a fan of how the information is organized.  But mostly, it’s just fun to navigate through.  Take a look at it here.

The archives of the Saint Louis Art Museum have been a major resource as we’ve prepared Dan Flavin: Constructed Light, largely because they have so much material related to Flavin’s exhibition at SLAM in 1973. Soon you can find the best of the best “from the vault” on our Flavin web catalogue, notably the recording of a radio interview Flavin gave when he was promoting the St. Louis show. Most of this interview hasn’t been heard since it was broadcast on KFUO in ‘73, and some of it was never broadcast at all.

In addition to the SLAM exhibition, Flavin discusses his responsibilities as an artist, the motivation behind his use of fluorescent light, his opinion of the term “minimalist,” and the extent to which he welcomed the “religious associations” sometimes prompted by his work.

Until now, to hear the whole recording you had to have a reel-to-reel. In the web catalogue you’ll find — what else? — clear, accessible digital audio. So stay tuned. In a couple of weeks: Dan Flavin in his own words.

More along the theme of “web advice” I’ve been writing about lately - I can’t believe I haven’t linked to Museums and the Web yet!  It’s a conference that takes place annually and they’re great about posting the papers online.  Most of the papers for the 2008 conference are already up - take a look at them here.  It seems like they’ll be adding to this too, so keep checking back.  Lisa (who will be using the web in her community engagement projects) and I have a standing meeting to go over a few of the papers each week.  Kind of like our own little book club.  I’ll write some posts (and I’m sure she will too) about our discussions and how they inspire our web planning for the year.

As you know, I’ve been taking an HTML/CSS class and am interested in getting as much help as I can with both.  Well I’ve found it.  Two months of classes summed up in about 3 minutes.  Amazing.

As Camran mentioned in his last post (and one of the reasons why my posts have been fewer the last few weeks), we’re busy with the production of our print and online catalogues for Flavin. Right now we’re in the thick of the editing stages which means a lot of back and forth and a lot of eyes to make sure that everything is cited correctly and there are no typos. We’re aiming for the first half of April to have everything up and running.  In the meantime, Camran will be writing soon about some exciting source material he found at the Saint Louis Art Museum. This will be appearing on our web catalogue and will be available for the first time since 1973…

So I’ve been taking an HTML class for the past few weeks, and in last night’s class we started to delve into CSS.  I’m not gonna lie - it’s a little bit scary, but I think I’m up for it.   There are some great websites that we’ve been using as resources (they also have tutorials and practice sections - which I’ll need to do a lot of to help me remember everything). If you’re interested (and want to learn a little on your own), we’ve been using w3schools.com and ilovejackdaniels.com (great name).

Last night we talked a bit about favicons -what they are and how you embed them in your site. Favicons are the little icon you see next to the URL in your location bar.  And what perfect timing - the Walker just had a post about this.  Which got me thinking about our own favicons.   The one for our blog is great, but I think the one for pulitzerarts.org could use a little oomph, what do you think? Though I might just be in the mood for spring and bright colors this week. Any suggestions?

A bit off topic, but speaking of websites - I’ve been meaning to link to this for awhile.  The Indianapolis Museum of Art’s Dashboard is fantastic - what a great idea.

Today, we had a meeting with our website company for the unveiling of comps for the Flavin online catalogue. Since the placement of art within the architecture is such a major component to our exhibitions, the catalogues - both online and in print - use photos of the installed galleries to convey the experience of the exhibition.

One of the nice things about the web is that you can provide an even greater idea of what it’s like to be within the space. We’re playing with this even more with the Flavin catalogue - in addition to still photography, we’ll have a timelapse (click here to see a past example of one of our timelapses), and we’re talking about also including video for yet another way to view the space. We discussed what videos might work - either pans, or traveling down a hallway, etc. Any suggestions for views you would like to see us include? Today they showed us some amazing comps that I’m excited to show you - maybe I can post a preview soon…

Oh wow…This morning I was reading the Walker’s New Media Initiatives blog, and they linked to this new site: MuseTechCentral.  It’s a place for museums to share their technology-related projects, and looking through it so far, it seems like it will not only be a huge resource to web coordinators like me, but also to anyone interested in museum topics and projects in general.  Actually, the New Media Initiatives blog is a huge resource for me too.  Do you have any must-read resources that you use for your job?

A web update I meant to post about last week - RSS feeds have now been added to our site.

It’s been on our blog for as long as it’s been in existence (and hopefully many of you have been using it), and now it’s on key pages of our website - the “what’s new” section of our homepage, and the press page - for journalists and interested parties to stay informed of our latest exhibition and programming details.  Click here for our feeds page.  There’s also a place to send suggestions for additional feeds if you have any - we unfortunately can’t add it to every page of our site right now, but if there’s a section that you’d really like to see included, let us know!