Urban art, zoomorphic whistles and Hungarian poetry

There are few places (if any) in the world where you could find urban art, zoomorphic whistles* and Hungarian poetry in a single place—except, of course, on the Internet.

Today 30 new partners are joining the Google Art Project, contributing nearly 2,000 diverse works including contemporary art from Latin America, ancient art from China, rare Japanese paintings and Palaeolithic flint heads from Spain.

One highlight of the new collection is a project to capture the growing trend of urban art and graffiti in Brazil. More than 100 works from walls, doors and galleries in São Paulo have been photographed and will be included in the Art Project. The pieces were chosen by a group of journalists, artists and graffiti experts and include artists such as Speto, Kobra and Space Invader, as well as images of São Paulo’s most famous building-size murals. You can see the contrast in styles in the Compare tool and image below.

Photography features strongly in the works our partners are bringing online this time around. The Fundacion MAPFRE in Spain showcases one of the largest collections with more than 300 photos from a number of renowned photographers. For example, you can explore Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s black and white images of indigenous Mexican culture inspired by themes of ritual, death and feminism.

The Art Project is also becoming a home to rare and precious items which move beyond paintings. Petőfi Literary Museum in Hungary has contributed the Nemzeti Dal or “National Song,” a Hungarian poem which is said to have been the inspiration for the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. The original document has rarely been seen in public to prevent humidity and light fading the script further. Online now for the first time, it can be explored by anyone in the world.

With 40,000+ artworks to explore from more than 200 museums in more than 40 countries, we look forward to seeing these new works feature in hundreds of thousands of user galleries you have created to date. Keep an eye on our Google+ page for more details about the new collections.

*ceramic whistles in the shape of animals!

Posted by Shahina Rahman, Google Art Project

Introducing Art Talks on Google+

An excellent guide often best brings an art gallery or museum’s collections to life. Starting this week, we’re hoping to bring this experience online with “Art Talks,” a series of Hangouts on Air on our Google Art Project Google+ page. Each month, curators, museum directors, historians and educators from some of the world’s most renowned cultural institutions will reveal the hidden stories behind particular works, examine the curation process and provide insights into particular masterpieces or artists.

The first guided visit will be held this Wednesday, March 6 at 8pm ET from The Museum of Modern Art. Deborah Howes, Director of Digital Learning, along with a panel of artists and students, will discuss how to teach art online. To post a question, visit the event page. If this talk falls too late for you to tune in live, you can watch afterward on our Google Art Project YouTube channel.

The next talk is from London. On March 20, Caroline Campbell and Arnika Schmidt from the National Gallery will discuss depictions of the female nude. Details are available on the Art Project’s event page. In April we’ll host a panel examining one of the Google Art Project’s popular gigapixel works, Bruegel’s “Tower of Babel,” featuring Peter Parshall, curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.



Additional talks are planned by curators from high-profile institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico and the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar.

Google Art Project aims to make art more accessible to all. We hope that Art Talks is the next step in bringing art to your armchair, wherever you are in the world, with just a click of a button. Stay tuned to the Art Project and Cultural Institute Google+ pages for more information on dates and times of these online lectures.

Posted by Lucy Schwartz, Google Cultural Institute

Explore Spain's Jewish heritage online

You can now discover Spain’s Jewish heritage on a new site powered by comprehensive and accurate Google Maps: www.redjuderias.org/google.

Using the Google Maps API, Red de Juderías de España has built a site where you can explore more than 500 landmarks that shed light on Spain’s Jewish population throughout history. By clicking on a landmark, you can get historical information, pictures or texts, and a 360º view of the location, thanks to Street View technology. You can also use the search panel on the top of the page to filter the locations by category, type, geographic zone or date.

Toledo, Synagogue Santamaría la Blanca

Information is included on each landmark

This project is just one of our efforts to bring important cultural content online. This week, we worked with the Israel Antiquities Authority to launch the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, an online collection of more than 5,000 scroll fragments, and last year we announced a project to digitize and make available the Yad Vashem Museum’s Holocaust archives. With the Google Art Project, people around the world can also view and explore more than 35,000 works of art in 180 museums.

Read more about this project on the Europe Blog. We hope this new site will inspire you to learn more about Spain’s Jewish history, and perhaps to visit these cities in person.

Posted by William Echikson, External Relations, Europe, Middle East and Africa

“In the beginning”...bringing the scrolls of Genesis and the Ten Commandments online

A little over a year ago, we helped put online five manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls—ancient documents that include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. Written more than 2,000 years ago on pieces of parchment and papyrus, they were preserved by the hot, dry desert climate and the darkness of the caves in which they were hidden. The Scrolls are possibly the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century.

Today, we’re helping put more of these ancient treasures online. The Israel Antiquities Authority is launching the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, an online collection of some 5,000 images of scroll fragments, at a quality never seen before. The texts include one of the earliest known copies of the Book of Deuteronomy, which includes the Ten Commandments; part of Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis, which describes the creation of the world; and hundreds more 2,000-year-old texts, shedding light on the time when Jesus lived and preached, and on the history of Judaism.

The Ten Commandments. Photo by Shai Halevi, courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority

Part of the Book of Genesis. Photo by Shai Halevi, courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority

Millions of users and scholars can discover and decipher details invisible to the naked eye, at 1215 dpi resolution. The site displays infrared and color images that are equal in quality to the Scrolls themselves. There’s a database containing information for about 900 of the manuscripts, as well as interactive content pages. We’re thrilled to have been able to help this project through hosting on Google Storage and App Engine, and use of Maps, YouTube and Google image technology.

This partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority is part of our ongoing work to bring important cultural and historical materials online, to make them accessible and help preserve them for future generations. Other examples include the Yad Vashem Holocaust photo collection, Google Art Project, World Wonders and the Google Cultural Institute.

We hope you enjoy visiting the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, or any of these other projects, and interacting with history.

Posted by Eyal Miller, New Business Development, and Yossi Matias, Head of Israel Research and Development Center