Art and Museums
Libbey Dolls, Fashioning the Story: "They are representative fashion figures, depicting French style from A.D. 493 to 1915"
"They weren't really considered dolls, at least not in our modern sense of the term," said Marissa Stevenson, the art conservation intern tasked with researching the objects for the The Libbey Dolls — 2 exhibition. Inspiration for the figures came from works of art by French artists such as Nicolas Lancret and Louis-Léopold Boilly, drawn from an 1864 publication called "Modes et Costume Historiques..." Doucet could be considered one of the grandfathers of haute couture. more »
The Huntington: Expressionist Landscape Bit of Silvermine, Clivia and a Bronze Art Deco Lachaise Piece and a Passion Flower
The Huntington was founded in 1919 by Henry E. Huntington, an exceptional businessman who built a financial empire that included railroad companies, utilities, and real estate holdings in Southern California. Huntington was also a man of vision – with a special interest in books, art, and gardens. During his lifetime, he amassed the core of one of the finest research libraries in the world, established a splendid art collection, and created an array of botanical gardens with plants from a geographic range spanning the globe. more »
Reuniting the Masters: European Drawings from West Coast Collections, Bringing Together Works of Art Separated Over Centuries and Continents
By coincidence or by design, drawings by the same artist, for the same project, and even from the same sketchbook, have made their way separately into galleries and museums on the West Coast. Bringing these long-estranged drawings together again at the Crocker Art Museum illuminates the work and process of specific artists in the rich history of European draftsmanship and brings forward the history of drawings collectors and scholars in the West. more »
How Many Kinds of Birds Are There and Why Does It Matter? Gifting at the American Museum of Natural History
For the new work, Joel Cracraft, George Barrowclough, and their colleagues at Nebraska University, Lincoln and Washington University examined a random sample of 200 bird species through the lens of morphology — the study of the physical characteristics like plumage pattern and color, which can be used to highlight birds with separate evolutionary histories. This method turned up, on average, nearly two different species for each of the 200 birds studied. This suggests that bird biodiversity is severely underestimated, and is likely closer to 18,000 species worldwide. more »