Fun Friday Resources

Let’s visit some museums.

Playing Card, from the Cooper-Hewitt

First up, the Guggenheim Collection Online, which includes works from the Solomon R. Guggenheim (NYC), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. You can search by artist, dates, mediums, and movements. Great way to browse. I like the Recent Acquisitions page; it shows that museums are not just shoeboxes of stuff crammed into the back of a closet—they’re ongoing collectors of art.

The Cooper-Hewitt is the Smithsonian’s Design Museum (NYC). Its collection page is quirky, more given to serendipity than the Guggenheim, although the site will let you search by the usual topics. One cool thing about this collection is that you can search for objects that match colors you’re interested in. (I also like the Random button. Stuck for ideas? Click on Random and STEAL FROM THE BEST.)

The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles) has a high-powered search page. Of special interest is the Open Content Collection, free downloadable images.

Similarly, the Cleveland Museum of Art has its Open Access collection. From their site: “The Cleveland Museum of Art announced on January 23, 2019, that it is an Open Access institution, using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation for high-resolution images and data as related to its collection. At the Cleveland Museum of Art, Open Access means the public now has the ability to  share, collaborate, remix, and reuse images of many as 30,000 public- domain artworks from the CMA’s world-renowned collection of art for commercial and non-commercial purposes. In addition, portions of collections information (metadata) for more than 61,000 artworks, both in the public domain and those works with copyright or other restrictions, works are now available. “

And finally, here’s the Art Institute of Chicago’s Public Domain page.

There you go. STEAL FROM THE BEST. Do it.