We in the Visual Media Center are up to our elbows in clay (or images of it) this fall. In recent weeks, we’ve added 139 new images to DUVAGA to support ceramics studio courses, and we’re presently processing an additional 182 images, so keep an eye out for more!
The area of contemporary ceramics is one that hasn’t been adequately covered by most visual resources collections in the past. That’s changing, thanks to initiative taken by Margo Ballantyne, Visual Resources Curator, and Ted Vogel, Assistant Professor and Program Head in Ceramics at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR! Margo and Ted, with their staff and funding from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)’s Instructional Innovation Fund, have worked to create a new resource, accessCeramics, which provides access to images of and information about contemporary ceramic works.
On the accessCeramics site, you can browse over 400 images (so far) by artist as well as by glazing/surface treatment, materials used, temperature used, and technique (wow!!). Ceramic artists themselves submit their work for inclusion on the site, and submissions are juried by a curatorial board before they are added. Only the person who owns the rights to the works depicted can add images, and most images are available for use with proper attribution. The image resolutions are reasonable for PowerPoint presentations, or for addition to DUVAGA as personal images. Alternatively, you can always just visit the website and use the Firefox plugin PicLens (mentioned on this blog previously) to view the images, or talk to me about tracking down similar images to add to DUVAGA.
