Spotlight
Submit mural images here
Mural Artists and Art Organizations Invited to Contribute Images
to National Digital Collection
Heritage Preservation to Document Community Murals
An online record of America’s collection of outdoor murals is being assembled, and artists and art organizations are invited to contribute images. Rescue Public Murals is seeking to expand the mural images available for educational use in the Rescue Public Murals (Heritage Preservation) collection of the ARTstor Digital Library. The images will serve as a valuable record of murals in the United States and place them in the context of other works in the arts, architecture, and humanities.
In 2006, Heritage Preservation launched Rescue Public Murals, an initiative to bring public attention to U.S. murals, document their unique artistic and historic contributions, and secure the expertise and support to save them. While much of the effort is focused on the physical preservation of community murals, it is inevitable that some important murals will not survive. As another means of preserving this distinctive American art form, Rescue Public Murals is collecting photographs and archival documentation related to murals.
To accomplish this goal, Heritage Preservation is collaborating with ARTstor, a nonprofit digital image library with more than a million images that was initiated by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2003. ARTstor’s mission is to provide scholars, curators, teachers, and students with access to digital images for noncommercial, educational use. The Digital Library contains images contributed by outstanding museums, libraries, photo archives, scholars, and photographers and serves more than 1,200 nonprofit educational institutions (museums, libraries, universities, and schools) worldwide. The ARTstor Digital Library already provides more than more than 5,000 cataloged mural photographs contributed by Rescue Public Murals co-chair, Dr. Timothy Drescher.
"Outdoor murals are among the most evanescent forms of visual art," said Lawrence L. Reger, President of Heritage Preservation. "We are pleased to be working with ARTstor to preserve a record of art that might otherwise be lost as buildings and neighborhoods change."
Artists and art organizations with photographs of significant murals are encouraged to make these images part of this important national collection. Rescue Public Murals staff will facilitate their inclusion in ARTstor by providing cataloging and technical assistance.
Images may be submitted online at here and should be high resolution TIFF or JPEG files at 3000 pixels on one side. Assistance is also available to scan slides. The online submission site includes fields to complete with the identifying information about the mural including artist name, title, date, location, medium, dimensions, photographer, and copyright information.
Submissions will be accepted until March 31, 2010. Artists and arts organizations that are considering submissions are invited to contact Kristen Laise at klaise(a)heritagepreservation.org or 202-233-0824 for further information.
Funding for this project comes from the Getty Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. Rescue Public Murals has also received support from the Booth Heritage Foundation, Friends of Heritage Preservation, and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.
The photographs in the top and left bars of this page are of Against Domestic Colonialism by Arnold Belkin, one of the most important 20th century muralists. This mural, painted in New York City in 1972 (left) and measuring approximately 60 by 70 feet, is the only surviving exterior mural by the artist in the United States. It is also significant because it calls attention to the struggle between communities and urban renewal programs, one of the most common mural themes for the first phase (1965-73) of the community mural movement. The detail at the top of this page, taken in 2007, shows the wall's serious drainage and surface flaking problems.