Art Institute of Chicago
Monet Paintings and Drawings
Renoir Paintings and Drawings
The Art Institute of Chicago’s OSCI publications focus on the museum’s renowned collection of Impressionist masterpieces by Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). Organized as two separate catalogues, the volumes foreground conservation documentation using innovative functionality such as interactive image filters that reveal new research on how the artists changed their compositions over time. Another key feature is a customized citation tool for researchers to encourage scholarly use of the catalogues.
AAM Bronze MUSE Award, Interactive Kiosks (2014) for Renoir’s True Colors, which utilized components of the Renoir OSCI catalogue
Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book
The Freer|Sackler catalogue centers on the Gerhard Pulverer Collection of Japanese illustrated books, one of the most important collections of these distinctive hand-made works of art. The scholarly essays focus on artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), whose unique style had a marked influence on European and American modern artists. The catalogue’s special features include a “digital study room” that allows readers to save their annotations, notes, searches, and favorites in their own password protected part of the site. Users can search the catalogue contents in either Roman or Kanji script, and a clickable timeline lets readers see at a glance how many books in the collection were published in any given year.
Bronze “Telly” Award (2015) for the catalogue’s Ukiyo-e technique video
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Southeast Asian Art at LACMA
Detailed object entries and new interpretive essays form the centerpiece of LACMA’S catalogue focused on highlights from its fine collection of Southeast Asian sculpture. The publication features high-resolution, zoomable images, conservation documentation, videos, maps, and photographs that visually connect the museum’s objects to their place of origin. Select objects can be studied in the round with a user-controlled 360-degree image viewer. An online citation tool makes it easy to reference the catalogue for scholarly purposes, while social media plug-ins allow general sharing on a variety of platforms.
National Gallery of Art
Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century
The OSCI publication of the National Gallery of Art (NGA) is an updated and expanded digital version of Arthur Wheelock Jr.’s key reference work. Among the volume’s special features are a sophisticated image comparison tool, a customized reading environment, and new multimedia content, including a series of video tours of the NGA’s Dutch paintings galleries led by Wheelock. The OSCI publication was the first release for NGA Online Editions, an ongoing effort that provides access to the most current in-depth information on the Gallery’s collections along with smart tools for citing, comparing, sharing, exporting, viewing, printing, and storing texts and images.
ARLIS’s George Wittenborn Award (2015) for excellence in art publishing
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The Rauschenberg Research Project
SFMOMA’s OSCI publication, The Rauschenberg Research Project, provides access to the equivalent of 600+ print pages of new research, vibrant illustrations, and multimedia content about the celebrated American artist Robert Rauschenberg. Users can watch video clips of the artist talking about how artworks were created, view annotated images that show how Rauschenberg altered some of his most famous pieces after they were initially exhibited, and read curatorial documents that were previously difficult to access, such as detailed correspondence revealing the artist’s secret “recipe” for tinting collaged fabric.
AAMC Awards for Excellence, Honorable Mention in Exhibition Catalogues category (2013)
Seattle Art Museum
Chinese Painting & Calligraphy
Seattle Art Museum (SAM) houses one of the premier collections of Chinese art in North America, but prior to OSCI the material had not been studied in depth and was largely unpublished. SAM’s online catalogue contains a detailed assessment of each object, new photography, in-depth comparative research, and essays from experts. The works’ inscriptions and seals—both of which are of critical historic and artistic significance—were also fully translated, a feature that is rarely available in traditional print catalogues. The zoom function shows images in great detail, and users can also create their own collections of favorite works, as well as add comments in a discussion thread. Since many of these scrolls are not regularly opened and on public view, the online catalogue provides unprecedented access to these fragile works.
AAM Gold MUSE Award, Online Presence (2014)
Tate
The Camden Town Group in Context
Tate’s OSCI publication is on the British Post-Impressionist circle known as the Camden Town Group, which included artists Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman, and Walter Sickert. In addition to detailed entries for individual works in their collection, Tate’s catalogue includes a wide-ranging selection of research material that elucidates the artists’ relationship to their social and cultural context, as well their individual working methods. Highlights include correspondence, sketches, and two other features that would not be possible in print: historical film clips from the period and audio files of popular music hall songs related to depictions by the Camden Town Group artists.
Walker Art Center
Living Collections Catalogue
The Walker’s Living Collections Catalogue is a series of thematic publications devoted to the museum’s multidisciplinary collections. The two volumes supported through OSCI are On Performativity and Art Expanded, 1958–1978. Both editions feature new essays by leading scholars that integrate video, audio, still images, and archival material into a crisp, responsive-design environment that adapts to different viewing devices. Essays are versioned and citable with the assurances of a permanent address to the information referenced, while links out to entries in the collections database provide information about individual artworks that is updated dynamically.
Museums and the Web, Best of the Web Award for Research/Collections Online (2015)