Artinfo.com : Keeping up with the art world

One website that I enjoy reading is artinfo.com. I particularly enjoy the AI Interviews with contemporary artists, the most recent of which is with Olafur Eliasson, the Icelandic-Danish artist best known for his installations. Eliasson's first major US exhibition, "Take Your Time" just opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is scheduled to be up until February 24, 2008. We have a few books on the artist, including Madeleine Grynsztejn's monograph Olafur Eliasson from Phaidon Press' contemporary artists series, and A sculpture reader : contemporary sculpture since 1980, edited by Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer. More are on the way.

In the AI Interview with Eliasson, the artist cites Robert Irwin, who was associated with California Light and Space movement, as an important influence (the exhibition catalog for the SFMOMA exhibition includes a dialog between the two artists).

Mid-Manhattan Art has several books on Irwin, including the catalog for Robert Irwin's exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1993, Lawrence Weschler's biography Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees : a life of contemporary artist Robert Irwin, and a book about Irwin's design of the Central Garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

If you're interested in mid-century California art, look at Sunshine muse: contemporary art on the west coast and other books in call number 709.794.

Dover Clip Art = Fun

Dover publishes a series of Clip Art books featuring royalty-free, out-of-copyright designs. Dover says: "You may use them for graphics and crafts applications, free and without special permission, provided that you include no more than ten in the same publication or project." Yay!

The newer clip art books come with CD-ROMs, and we now have a dedicated computer where you can view, download and print the clip art. Here are some examples taken from Dover's Greatest Clips.












Our Dover Clip Art books are located in the Special Collection bookshelves across from the art information desk. Since they are so popular, they are not kept in Dewey decimal order. The books and CDs cannot be borrowed, but feel free to take a bunch to a table to go through them and then make copies of any of the images.

Welcome to our blog!

This is a place where we'll keep you up to date on what's happening here at Mid-Manhattan Art. We'll give you information and advice on how to take advantage of our plethora of materials and services. We don't just have books - we also have magazines and videos that you can bring home. If we don't have what you're looking for, we can tell you where to find it.

Not much of a reader? That's okay. Did you know that we exhibit the work of New York emerging artists here on the third floor of Mid-Manhattan? We also host entertaining and informative programs with accomplished artists and art historians on the sixth floor of the library. And sometimes you'll find us hanging out with our neighbor, the Mid-Manhattan Picture Collection, which lends visual material to artists, costume designers, set designers and all sorts of creative people.

We know that it can be daunting to navigate the New York Public Library. Please feel free to ask us anything about the library's collections and policies, whether it's art related or not.