Jessica Johnston's Posts

James Hall Nasmyth (1808-1890), a Scottish inventor and engineer, is best known for his development of the steam hammer. After his success in engineering and industry, Nasmyth retired and spent his later life pursuing the hobby of amateur astronomy. He moved to Kent and built a 20 inch reflecting telescope, made detailed observations of the Moon, and eventually in 1874, he published a book titled  The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite. This wonderful volume is illustrated with photographs (woodburytypes) and a copy is housed in the rare book collection in The Richard and Ronay Menschel Library at George Eastman House. The book was published to demonstrate the origin of certain mountain ranges on the Moon  through erosion and age. Nasmyth and co-author  James Carpenter  believed that Lunar mountains were the result of volcanic activity, a theory that was later disproved. Continue Reading »

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of the day we posted our first set of photographs on the Flickr Commons.  It is has been a great experience; sharing photographs and engaging Flickr users is so much fun it doesn’t even seem like work.  Here are a few stats that Ryan (Manager of Info Systems) pulled out of Flickr for this post:  12 sets, 655 notes, 813 photographs, 3,961 comments, 9,885 tags, 26,008 favorites and 1,971,520 views!  We are almost at 2 million views, which is a heady number for a medium sized museum in Rochester, NY!  We would love to reach 5 million by this time next year and we are excited to see what will come of all these people looking at and thinking about the photographs we care for at Eastman House.   So thanks to all the Flickr users who make the Commons a real community.  I’ve posted some screen shots to show off our photostream, but if you haven’t seen the Commons you take a look.

 

 

Eastman House's 12 sets on the Flickr Commons

Our tag cloud!

Several of the artists featured in Nature as Artifice travelled to Rochester to help us install the  exhibition.  We had a great time hosting our Dutch guests and hope to work with them again. We have some ideas for future projects but in the meantime we asked Cary Markerink & Theo Baart to write something about their project for the blog. They sent a great description of the project and images of their Snelweg series installed in different venues. Enjoy!

Snelweg: Highways in the Netherlands                                 by Cary Markerink & Theo Baart

The Netherlands is a small country with a population of 16 million people. It would easily fit four times into New York State. Space is scarce. Since the 1970s the country has been transformed into a big suburbia, interconnected by a grid of highways and railroad-tracks.  We were looking for a metaphor for this transformation of the Dutch landscape (and in a broader perspective Dutch culture) and we decided the highway could showcase the changed country in it’s frantic rush towards economic progress.

Kunsthal, Rotterdam 1996

Continue Reading »

I gasped this morning when I saw the vibrant blue of these awesome Delphiniums! I promised myself that if Barbara (museum photographer + garden lover) photographed them I would share them on the blog. When I got to my office I looked on her Flickr page and sure enough: Delphiniums.

After I settled into work I was reminded of OTHER Delphiniums at George Eastman House. Edward Steichen, famous for curating the landmark exhibition Family of Man, as well as for making his own  photography, was a  passionate  Delphinium enthusiast. How nice that we have such a lovely display of Delphiniums blooming in the garden, and their ancestors (maybe), immortalized by Edward Steichen, living in boxes in the photo archive. Steichen won many prizes for his cross-breeding of Delphiniums and at one time planted 5 acres of his  Connecticut  home with the flowers. Here  are a couple of his photographs of  these magnificent blue flowers.

Install week is over and the summer shows are up and look fabulous!  It is pretty magical to see an  exhibition  take shape. There are always moments when you are sure it will never be ready in time, but hard work and a dedicated prep team ensure success. After a hectic week we finished cleaning plexi and hanging wall text just in time for a lively and well attended panel discussion and members opening reception for Nature as Artifice.  I don’t have any pictures from those events yet, but I do have some to share from the docent training sessions that took place Friday afternoon. Click here if you are interested in becoming a docent at George Eastman House.

Maarje van den Heuvel talks to docents about Nature as Artifice.

Curator, Alison Nordstrom, talks to Docents about New Topographics.