Power Builders 03.13.15

This is Week #6 of my Power Builders creative links. If you’d like to see last week’s, you can find it here.

I call this series “Power Builders” because that’s what these little items do for me. They make me more powerful in my art and in my life. I hope they do the same for you. Some of the links will be about how other creative people use their time, structure their work, find inspiration. Some may be videos, music, or podcasts to inspire you. Some of it will be directly quilt-related but much of it will not. What you see in Power Builders will depend on what I find. Feel free to link great things in comments, too.

Last week I gave you the link to J.J. Audubon’s free, high-quality downloadable art. This week there’s even more free stuff! Via Quilter’s Newsletter, here are links giving free access to some amazing resources.

1) First, openculture.com. They bill themselves as “The best free cultural & educational media on the web”. Just for starters, there are free online courses, movies, language lessons, and textbooks. I can’t begin to describe the posts there, as they cover such a wide range of cultural issues. Logical fallacies, Albert Einstein at the Grand Canyon, and the rules governing the conflict between the coyote and the road runner are just a few things you can find with a quick scroll through recent posts.

2) The American Folk Art Museum has made back issues of magazines available and searchable. “Nearly forty years or 118 issues of Folk Art (formerly The Clarion) have been fully digitized and are available online. Each issue is text-searchable and accessible at the links below. The magazine, published between winter 1971 and fall 2008, was one of the most important publications in the field of folk and self-taught artists, each issue containing scholarly essays written by leading experts, news, and illustrated advertisements from dealers and auction houses. It is an essential chronicle of the development of the field.”

The link isn’t especially intuitive to navigate, but be patient and you may be rewarded with the article “Talking Quilts”, beginning on page 32 of Spring/Summer 2004 issue.

3) The Guggenheim Museum has digitized more than 100 catalogs and made them available for free online reading. You can search by subject and date, among other features. For example, you can find the Kandinsky in Munich, 1896-1914 catalog.

4) The J. Paul Getty Trust is offering multiple publications free online. Be inspired by the colors of Cézanne, examine the interrelationship between history and art history, or take a new look at the Renaissance, for just a few options.

5) Need public domain artwork for non-commercial purposes? The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is offering more than 400,000 high-quality digital images. No other permissions or fees are required. Quilters may find some of Paul Klee’s works especially interesting. 

Thanks to Quilter’s Newsletter for providing the links to these wonderful resources.

What has inspired you this week? Let us know in comments.

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