Whaling Museum » Prints

From Our Walls to Yours

michaellapides — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:42:01 +0000

Thanks to our new partners at 1000museums for helping us improve our print on demand offerings and for providing this introduction to the service and product.

Freshen up your walls with custom archival print reproductions of artwork that you fell in love with while at the museum. We invite you to visit the museum store or to browse through the expansive gallery online at 1000Museums.

It’s a familiar story – you visit a museum and you’re so taken with one of the many works of art on display that you want a reproduction to hang in your home. You search in the museum store and on the Internet, but all you can find (if you are lucky) is a reproduction that is either printed as a poster or in a size that just won’t work for the “the spot” selected in your home or office. Until now.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum has chosen 1000Museums as a partner to supply custom archival print reproductions of the museum’s permanent collection of artworks and historic photographs. The new program offers several options to art and history lovers that weren’t available in the past.

Beginning with a modest 21 images, 1000Museums has established a page on their website that not only displays pertinent information about the museum but also a gallery of the images available for print. From there, the art lover can select an archival print of his or her favorite artwork or photograph. The prints are offered in 4 standard sizes: unframed or framed, starting as low as $19. Custom Archival Print means that the artwork is produced by an 11-color digital inkjet machine on 100% cotton rag paper that work in concert to produce color that is stunning. Further adding to the uniqueness of the print, no print is offered until a proof has been approved by the museum’s curatorial staff. Once it has been approved, the final product is watermarked in the lower white space with the museum’s logo as a reminder of the artwork’s home collection.

As this program matures, the plan is to grow the initial offering of 21 images into a much larger virtual print gallery containing a significant percentage of the permanent collection. The prints are offered on an “on-demand” basis, meaning that the print is only produced when an order is placed. This ensures that the customer gets a fresh print with every order.

Conservation and Identification

michaellapides — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:06:42 +0000

When New Bedford Whaling Museum conservator Robert Hauser pays a visit to the Photo and Digital Archive one hopes it is to share information. A conservator’s visit is like a visit to the doctor, more pleasant when healthy then sick. In this case Robert’s visit was triggered by his need for some imaging assistance, which we gladly supplied. In exchange, he gratefully answered a few questions about how to improve storage for our collection of cased daguerreotypes and ambrotypes. Photo Archivist Kate Mello will be incorporating a few of Robert’s suggestions in her plan to re-house these precious objects so they are less likely to be damaged when removed for exhibit or inspection.

At the same time Robert shared an interesting online tool he had discovered through his subscription to the AIC News (July 2009, Douglas Nishimura, Image Permanence Institute). Listed under “New Publications” is a website called Graphic Atlas . This is an online resource that offers print identification and characteristic exploration tools. It also contains additional pages dedicated to the history of printing technologies. The Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology began initial development of this resource in 2006.

The Birth of an Exhibit: “Classic Whaling Prints”

whaleblog — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:46:50 +0000

“Classic Whaling Prints” opens at the Whaling Museum on February 27, 2009, and runs through the end of the year. The exhibition, organized and written by Dr. Stuart M. Frank, traces the most important and most influential pictorial images of whaling through four centuries, from one highlight to the next.

Members Preview and Curator’s Tour: Thursday, February 26, 200, 6PM

Here’s a sneak peak at what’s going on in the Gratia Houghton Rinehart Gallery:

gallery model (constructed by intern Evan Price)

Preparator Scott Benson, (photo by volunteer Herb Andrew)

Preparator Scott Benson (photo by volunteer Herb Andrew)

Stay tuned for more!