So you had a Behind the Scenes peek in the Archives last month. Curious about what’s actually in some of those boxes? The Archives’ Exhibition Catalogs Online (ECO) project will allow you to see some of the most interesting things from the DMA’s exhibition archive online.
The ECO project is generously funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Access to Artistic Excellence program. Through the project, we are digitizing DMA-published exhibition catalogues and related unpublished material for exhibitions held between 1903 and 1983. The archives have partnered with the University of North Texas’s Digital Projects Unit to scan the published items and make them available on the Portal to Texas History. They will begin appearing in the Portal later this fall. The unpublished material is being scanned in-house and will also be added to the Portal.
All of the exhibition material digitized through the ECO project will be available on the DMA website beginning Fall 2012 via an interface that is being developed through another NEA grant-funded project, Access to Archival Exhibition Resources Online (AAERO). There will be more on AAERO to come, but you can read the press release now.
Below is just a sample of the kinds of things that will soon be available digitally.
Checklist – Texas Panorama, October 10–November 28, 1943
Advertisement – Famous American Paintings, October 9–November 7, 1948
Catalog Cover – Signposts of Twentieth Century Art, October 28–December 7, 1959 (DMCA)
Entry Requirements – 11th Southwestern Exhibition of Prints and Drawings, January 22–February 19, 1961
Poster – The Arts of Man, October 6–January 1, 1963
Invitation – Art of the Congo, October 5–November 3, 1968
Press release – Dallas Collects: Impressionist and Early Modern Masters, January 25–February 26, 1978
Installation diagram – Visions: James Surls, 1974–1984, December 2, 1984–January 13, 1985
Hillary Bober is the Digital Archivist at the Dallas Museum of Art.
