The Art Institute has been online since the early days of the web. We’ve gone through about six different versions since our first website in 1995, and while the web has changed dramatically, our mission and values have remained steady.
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One of the phrases that inspired the new website—“a museum of living thought”—was coined over a century ago by the museum’s third president and has been advanced, most recently, by President and Eloise W. Martin Director James Rondeau. This idea of “living thought” helped drive the conceptual thinking of our digital strategy.
Thousands of public domain images are now available for download. Students, educators, and just regular art lovers might be interested to learn that we’ve released thousands of images in the public domain on the new website in an open-access format (52,438 to be exact, and growing regularly). Made available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, these images can be downloaded for free on the artwork pages.
We’ve also enhanced the image viewing capabilities on object pages, which means that you can see much greater detail on objects than before. Check out the paint strokes in Van Gogh’s The Bedroom, the charcoal details on Charles White’s Harvest Talk, or the synaesthetic richness of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Blue and Green Music. If you are doing research, you’ll appreciate how our collections search tool makes it easier to drill down and find exactly what you’re looking for. (dal sito dell'editore)