Art
Chimney Rags Revealed to Be a Rare 17th-Century Map
The National Library of Scotland received a bundle found in a chimney, and six months of conservation revealed the rags to be a rare 17th-century map.
Allison Meier
Allison C. Meier is a former staff writer for Hyperallergic. Originally from Oklahoma, she has been covering visual culture and overlooked history for print and online media since 2006. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide.
News
Library of Congress and Digital Public Library of America Launch Partnership with Maps
The Library of Congress has joined the Digital Public Library of America as a content hub and is sharing around 5,000 objects from its map collections.
Art
An Affordable Microscope that Folds Like Origami
The Foldscope is a $1 microscope made from waterproof paper that's designed to decrease the barrier of entry to scientific exploration.
Art
Spotlighting the Contributions of Women to Modern Interior Design
The Museum of Modern Art explores modern interiors from the 1920s to '50s and the contributions of women to their architecture and design.
News
Harvard Adds the Blackest Black to Its Historical Pigment Collection
Harvard Art Museums acquired a sample of Vantablack, a material that absorbs almost 100% of light.
Art
The First Photographs of Snowflakes
In 1885, Wilson Bentley, a farmer in Vermont, became the first known person to photograph a snowflake. He would document 5,000 of them in his lifetime.
Books
Rare Photographs of the US Civil Rights Struggle Beyond the South
A new book by Mark Speltz brings together over 100 rarely or never-before-published photographs from the Civil Rights era that show its grassroots actions beyond the South.
Books
Architectural Histories of New Yorks that Never Were
From a Dodger Stadium by Buckminster Fuller to an Ellis Island by Frank Lloyd Wright, a new book gathers hundreds of alternate realities proposed for New York City.
Art
Digitized Artist Talks from the 20th Century, from Alice Neel to Gordon Parks
The Maryland Institute College of Art's Decker Library is digitizing rare audio from their cultural lecture archives, and offering them to stream on the Internet Archive.
Art
Urban Sprawl and Its Perfect Palm Trees Haunt This Eerie Game
Carl Burton's "Islands: Non-Places" is an interactive exploration into the strangeness of the mass-produced modern world.
Books
The Long Shadow of Artificial Darkness on Modern Culture
The emergence of artificial darkness in the 19th century, from the darkroom to the theater, radically influenced our experiences with art.
Books
Facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript Now Available to Citizen Cryptographers
Yale University released a book that recreates through photographs the enigmatic medieval Voynich Manuscript in its full form.