Follow-up to the Walk...

I posted a couple of weeks ago about participating in the 2014 NYC Walk to End Alzheimer's. The photo you see here is "Team Ferrari and Friends"--AA, PO, bklynbiblio, and JG! We had more people, but a few had to drop out last-minute for personal reasons. It was a brisk morning in Riverside Park overlooking the Hudson, and unfortunately I woke up with a sore throat, but I'm thrilled to say that we accomplished an amazing feat. Our team raised $1,815 in donations to help fight the battle against Alzheimer's disease! I'm very proud of what we've done, and I'm hopeful that all of the donations brought in that day will continue to support more research to eventually find a cure or better way of surviving this disease with dignity, and supporting the caregivers who must suffer through the ordeal with their loved ones. Here's to ending Alzheimer's! Thank you, everyone, who supported our team.

Walk to End Alzheimer's 2014

Back in 2008, two years after my mother passed away, I decided to participate in the Alzheimer's Association's annual memory walk. You can read about that special day by going here. Having now lost my father to the effects to Alzheimer's as well, I decided to participate in the walk once again. 

Team "Ferrari & Friends" will be doing the 2014 NYC Walk to End Alzheimer's on Sunday, October 19th. Although we are doing this in memory of my mother and father, we are also walking in support of all those who suffer from this horrible disease and their caretakers & families who must endure the pain of this disease with them. My team currently consists of me, AA, MS, JG, and the FF-POs, but we are looking for more people to join us. Our team goal is $2500 and so far we've already raised $375. Will you help us work toward eradicating Alzheimer's disease and make a donation? You can visit our team page and make a donation online by going to http://act.alz.org/site/TR/Walk2014/NY-NewYorkCity?pg=team&fr_id=5304&team_id=231105. Thanks in advance for your help and generosity.

Helping Animals after Sandy

Hurricane Sandy (plus the annoying Nor'easter that whipped through the other day) has impacted so many people in the NYC area, that it's a challenge in some ways to determine what is the best way to help out. Although I feel terribly about families who still are without power and who lost everything, I also am concerned about those for whom We Are Their Voice: the animals affected by the storm. I've made a donation to the ASPCA (bklynbiblio readers know I actively support them), as they are working hard to provide shelter and food for pets as their families deal with the aftermath of the storm on their lives. I've also now made a donation to support the New York Aquarium (part of the Wildlife Conservation Society, located on Coney Island), which suffered horrific damage from the storm. They are now closed with no idea when they will reopen. I've not had an opportunity to visit yet, but I can guarantee that once they are back up and running I will be going for the first time. I was very happy to hear that, despite the setbacks to the facilities, almost all of the animals survived and are doing well. Watch this heart-warming video segment from yesterday's Today show so you can learn more about how they are all coping, and see how one baby walrus provided the staff with hope that the New York Aquarium will recover and be better than ever. If you want to help these organizations, follow the links above to donate.

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Keighley and Perry

Although I talk about libraries and museums on this blog, I haven't said much about my job at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I work part time as an Associate Museum Librarian in the Image Library, which for over a century has been the repository and archive for the collection and dissemination of visual images in all media for educational and commercial uses. The collection holdings include stereoscopes, negatives, and 35mm slides, although not surprisingly we work almost exclusively with digital images now. I do a variety of tasks, including reference, instruction, and cataloging, but I'm also project manager for a few digitization projects. For instance, I'm currently working on selecting and cataloging historic views of the Met's galleries from the 1900s through the 1950s, which will be scanned from our lantern slide collection. This is a project being done in partnership with NYU's Institute of Fine Arts Visual Resources Center. But another project on which I was working for more than 5 years (with IFA and ARTstor, in particular a large number of individuals deserving lots of credit for all their hard work over the years) has been the digitization of selected images from the William Keighley Collection, a set of about 35,000 slides donated to the Met from 1958 through the 1970s by Keighley, a well-known film director. He had a second career as an amateur art and architectural historian and with his directorial eye took beautiful images of exterior and interior spaces throughout Europe, including private estates closed to the public at the time. We've been working to make about 10% of these images available for educational uses in digital format, including the image you see here showing the library of Saint Florian Abbey in northern Austria, which ARTstor is using to promote the collection. In order to see and download the images, you must belong to a university/museum that subscribes to ARTstor, but you can read more about the project here and see the official release here.

In related news, bklynbiblio readers may recall my very positive blog review of the Grayson Perry exhibition currently on at the British Museum. I subsequently revised and expanded this review in its entirety and I am pleased to announce that it has just been published in the Winter 2012 newsletter of the Historians of British Art. (I do hope the teddy bear god Alan Measles is pleased by the news.)

World Alzheimer's Day 2011

Wednesday is World Alzheimer's Day, commemorating those who have died and those who continue to suffer from this dreaded disease that erodes the brain, stripping away the life force that makes each one of us the people who we are. My mother died in 2006 from early onset Alzheimer's, and now my father is in the early stages of the disease. Alzheimer's is the sixth leading cause of death in the US, and the only disease in the top ten that cannot be prevented, cured, or even slowed. For the past three years, I have advocated on this blog to support the Alzheimer's Association in its vision: a world without Alzheimer's disease. The organization not only helps provide support in diagnosing and treating the disease, but their website is an incredible resource of valuable information for caregivers, who often lose themselves in their ongoing efforts to help their loved ones with the disease. In January of this year, President Obama signed into action the National Alzheimer's Project Act (NAPA) to help provide funding and support to help eradicate the disease. His brief public service message is below. Make a donation today to help support the Alzheimer's Association.

World Habitat Day 2010

Monday, October 4th, is World Habitat Day, whose "purpose is to call attention to the current global state of the human habitat and push toward adequate housing for all. We hope that by raising awareness and advocating for universal decent housing we can dismantle and alter the systems that reinforce and entrench poverty housing. In doing so, we can make an affordable, decent place to live a reality for all." The United Nations has declared the first Monday of October to be World Habitat Day. According to Jonathan Reckford, the CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, this day is "an opportunity for us to raise our voices together and speak out against the lack of decent, affordable shelter that challenges so many families here in our country and around the world." Habitat for Humanity is one of the charities I support. After the devastations of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the earthquakes in Haiti, groups like Habitat for Humanity stepped in to assist in establishing basic housing needs for everyone. In their last fiscal year, they helped an estimated 63,000 families worldwide. What I especially like is that they utilize not just volunteers, but also team with local businesses, governments, and individuals so that they too are involved in the rebuilding of their own communities. I believe this instills a sense of pride in individuals to know they had a hand in helping construct their own housing. At some point in the near future, I intend to volunteer and help participate in a housing project somewhere in the world. (Care to join me? Let me know!) For now, though, a donation will do, especially since Habitat for Humanity has secured an anonymous donor who will match any donation made through the end of the day tomorrow.

World Alzheimer's Day 2010

September 21st is World Alzheimer's Day. According to their official website, this is "a day when the Alzheimer's Association joins with organizations and people around the globe to raise awareness about Alzheimer's and its impact on our families, communities and nations. Today, 35 million people worldwide are affected by Alzheimer's and related dementias, and this number is growing rapidly. World Alzheimer's Day is an opportunity to raise awareness about Alzheimer's disease and the need for more education, support and research." bklynbiblio readers will recall last year's post about this and previously when I organized a team for the NYC Alzheimer's Memory Walk (we raised almost $1,200!). This year, Celebrity Champions like Jean Smart (pictured right) are helping to spread the word and to drum up financial support to help find a cure and provide much-needed assistance to those suffering from the disease and their caregivers. This year, the Borman Family Foundation will match dollar-for-dollar every donation made by midnight on September 21st. I just made a $25 donation, and their match will make it $50! Any donation amount will make a difference, so help combat this devastating disease today.

CAA 2011 in NYC

It seems odd to write the year "2011" already, but professional organizations are always thinking way ahead of the current year. The College Art Association (CAA) just had their 2010 conference last month in Chicago (which you may recall I contemplated attending but ultimately decided not to go, letting Sherman Clarke fill me in with his highlights of the conference), and now CAA is ready for next year's conference to be held February 9-12, 2011. They have released the call for papers.

This will be CAA's centennial conference, demonstrating the professional strength of the art history discipline for the past 100 years. Few people realize the rich history of art history. Samuel F.B. Morse (inventor of the telegraph) was also a successful painter. He was appointed the first Professor of Fine Arts at New York University in 1831, where he taught courses on the practice and history of art. The same school was one of the earliest to organize a department of art history in 1922. (I would tell you more about the history of my art history program, but after spending 30 minutes on the school's website, I cannot find out any information about it!)

Below are just a few of the panel sessions that seem like they will be of interest (click here for the official site for the call for papers).
**"Boston and New York, ca. 1910: Issues of Cultural Exchange" celebrates the CAA centennial by considering art historical exchanges between these two cities from 1900-1920.
**"Before the White Box: Museum Murals in the Nineteenth Century" addresses the role of wall paintings in institutions, an art form which was extremely popular in the 19th century but died out by World War II.
** "The Ethnographic Ruse: Early Erotic Photographs of Non-Western Women" considers how seemingly innocent (National Geographic-like?) images in early photography can also be seen as sexual commodities.
** "Through the Lens: Photographers and New York Skyscrapers" looks at the historic tradition of the now ubiquitous skyscraper photograph (hence the 1904 image above by Edward Steichen of the Flatiron Building, from the Met's collection).

CAA 2010: To go, or not to go...

Every February, the College Art Association (CAA) holds its annual conference. It used to be in various cities across the country, but now they rotate between Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. In February, it will be in Chicago, and I'm trying to decide whether or not I should go. CAA is the largest of the professional organizations dedicated to the study of art history and the making of art, offering everything from grants to professional support and publishing opportunities. To deliver a paper at one is seen as an important part of art historical discourse. I've been fortunate to have done so twice already: the first in 2002 in Philadelphia (“The Male Pre-Raphaelite ‘Stunner’: Nudity and Homosexual Identity in the Work of Simeon Solomon"), and another in 2007 in New York (“The Homoerotics of Bacchus: John Gibson and Simeon Solomon in Victorian Rome"). I've never been to Chicago before, and it's an American city I've been wanting to visit, but do I want to go to the "Windy City" in February? How much will I get out of the experience if I'm stuck indoors the whole time? I was hoping a couple of friends were planning to go, but so far no one seems interested. CAA released this week the list of sessions and paper titles that will be presented, so I thought I would highlight just a few that jump out at me for different reasons. Alas, my dilemma remains: To go, or not to go, that is the question.

** The session "Old Women, Witches, and Old Wives" has papers from one on a Baroque portrait by Frans Hals of the painter Judith Leyster, to another on the contemporary artist Louise Nevelson. You have to love the idea of work that focuses on the image of the crone!

** Elizabeth Siegel, Art Institute of Chicago, is doing a paper on Victorian photocollage, the often hilarious, Monty Python-like version of scrapbooks that Victorian women did, merging cut photographs with watercolors and drawings. Her paper probably relates to her exhibition coming to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in February called Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, which I am looking forward to seeing.

** My friend Mark Pompelia, Rice University, is co-moderating a panel session sponsored by the Visual Resources Association entitled "Academic Image Collections in Transition: Saving the Baby while Repurposing the Bath Water" that relates to how universities are morphing their slide collections into digital image collections.

** The Queer Caucus for Art is sponsoring two panel sessions. The first one, "How is 'Queer' Art Relational?", is about...well, to be honest with you, I have no idea what it's about. This is a good example of when queer theory goes to a place that is beyond anything I can understand. The other session, "Desire Is Queer!", interests me more. There are five papers on that session, including one on censorship and Paul Cadmus's provocative 1933 painting The Fleet's In! presented by Anthony J. Morris, Case Western Reserve University.

** Sally Webster, one of my professors who recently retired, is moderating a great panel session entitled "Moguls, Mansions, and Museums: Art and Culture in America’s First 'Gilded Age'." Among the presenters is Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Seton Hall University, whose paper is entitled "Boom (and Bust) of Artistic Reputations: Collecting Contemporary European Art in Gilded Age America."

** I'm fascinated by the area of Otherness, in particular when work juxtaposes race, religion, and sexuality. The sessions "Texting and Imaging the Oriental Body" and "Aesthetic Culture in British India: The Amateur Arts of Brush, Pencil, and Camera in the Colonial Periphery" both have some promising papers.

** Finally, Patricia Mainardi, my advisor, is co-moderating two panel sessions on "Comics in Art History," part of her interest in exploring the history of comics as a new aspect of popular culture in the 19th century.

World Alzheimer's Day

World Alzheimer's Day is almost over, but it's not too late to make a donation to the Alzheimer's Association to help the 5.3 million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer's disease. As you may recall from last fall, team "Ferrari & Friends" participated in the NYC Alzheimer's Walk in honor of my mother, for which we raised nearly $1200. Since I can't participate in the walk this year, the least I can do is help promote today's fundraising efforts. Early this morning, Vice President Angela Geiger sent out a mass email to everyone on their mailing list asking for donations to reach $3500. Celebrity spokespeople like David Hyde Pierce (pictured left in one of the organization's purple-themed outfits) were on programs like Today promoting the need for ongoing research in combatting this horrific disease. The response was so great that by midday Geiger was able to up the call for donations to $5300. As of tonight, the thank you email coming from her notes that they managed to raise a whopping $22,000 in donations today alone! It's an incredible accomplishment, but they could always use more. I just donated online $10 in honor of the 10 million caregivers who help victims of the disease. They have some other reasonable amounts that match some statistics, like $5.30 for the 5.3 million Americans with Alzheimer's, $35.00 for the 35 million people around the world with Alzheimer's, $148.00 for the $148 billion annual cost to our nation, and so on. But a donation in any amount will help, so click here to donate now, and let's help combat this dreadful disease.

Library Bytes: www.ilovelibraries.org

I confess that I have not renewed my membership in ALA (American Library Association) for a few years now. It's not that I don't support the organization, but that I already belong to other library and academic organizations, and all those memberships take money which I don't have right now. The best I can do on occasion is help promote libraries, and I thought a post today on ALA and libraries might be an interesting way to do so. Did you know, for instance, that the ALA Store sells posters with celebrities holding books as part of their READ campaign? The image you see here is one of them, showing off my fantasy boyfriend Ewan McGregor with a book of tales by Beatrix Potter, which presumably was released about the time he co-starred in Miss Potter with Renée Zellweger (which, by the way, is a surprisingly fantastic movie that I highly recommend). While reading a news story on The New York Times online, I followed an ad for another of ALA's campaigns, ilovelibraries.org. The site advertises itself as a way to keep people informed about the state of libraries and to promote what libraries can do for Americans of every race, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender/sexual orientation. According to the site's Get Informed page, "If you’re looking for the heart of any community, look no further than the local library. It’s the one place in America where the doors are open to everyone ... providing everyone the same access to information and opportunities for success." (Note that for some of the webpages, there's a weird design flaw where you have to scroll down past the white emptiness to read the text.) The website even has a special feature right now called "Nominate Your Librarian," with monetary prizes for some of the best librarians in the country.

So there's no doubt about it. Libraries rock, as I've commented about before on this blog. Not all types of libraries are the same. They are usually divided into four broad categories: public, school, academic, and special. Public is self-explanatory, but can range from small-town establishments like the adorable Provincetown Public Library to large city systems like the Brooklyn Public Library. School refers to elementary through high school, while academic is colleges and universities. Special Libraries encompass everything from corporate to museum environments. From this breakdown then, you can see that the types of environments are very different, and you can imagine that the types of services and clientele are worlds apart in many ways.

I admit that I've always enjoyed what I've seen as the luxury of working in academic and museum libraries. I would never work in an elementary school (my migraines couldn't handle the screaming children). I would probably also quit working in a public library within the first week. When I answer a reference question, I need them to be intellectually stimulating questions, not smelly homeless people demanding the newspaper or crazy people masturbating in public (these are actual incidents I've heard about). I know I'm being judgmental, but I'm being completely honest as it applies to my idea of work satisfaction. That said, I have an incredible amount of respect for my friends and colleagues who do work in public libraries and can handle this type of clientele with such aplomb. They have to take on the role of social workers and psychologists without any professional training, and as my friend SVH has pointed out, the instances in which one genuinely helps an individual desperate for real information, like health news on a medical condition, legal information to fight a corrupt landlord, or simply useful books on Martin Luther King, Jr. for a high school research project, makes being a librarian in this environment one of the most rewarding careers ever.

So get online and nominate your librarian for the I Love My Librarian Award to thank him or her for everything they've done for you, and remember to support your libraries!

Pilots N Paws

After the disturbing pet story I posted the other day, in particular commenting about the many dogs stuck in shelters that need homes, I thought it would be fun to post a good story and video about Pilots N Paws. I heard about it watching the Today show while eating breakfast this morning. The organization is a group of pilots who work with animal shelters to fly dogs and cats to different areas of the country where they are wanted. Many animals are euthanized after a while because the shelters are so overcrowded and there aren't enough homes locally for the dogs. With this program, pilots help by transporting pets to new owners in different parts of the country. It's just another example of what animal lovers will do for one another and for their furry, four-legged friends. For more about the organization click here, or watch the great video below (it begins after a 30-second commercial). If you're getting this post via email and the video hasn't come through, click here to go to the full entry for this post where you'll see the video.

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