Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Today's new edition of Saturday Sharing is all art-related, featuring links to sites that encompass literature, poetry, photography, film, painting, and performance art.

✦ You can now strike out On the Road on your own with the latest "amplified" version of Jack Kerouac's novel, courtesy of Penguin, which recently released an iPad app. According to the description at iTunes, the digital version includes the complete text of the 1957 novel as well as "rare and never-before seen" material, including family photographs, audio clips of Kerouac reading from an early draft, journal pages, original reviews, and cover art from international editions of the book. The app also comes with an interactive map of road trips from 1947, 1949, and 1950. A video and additional information about the app are here.

✦ Ever wonder where to find all the publicly owned oil paintings in the United Kingdom? Your Paintings sets out to identify every one by the end of 2012. The project is a collaboration of the Public Catalogue Foundation (a charity), the BBC, and more than 850 participating collections and museums across the UK that are publicly funded. The estimated number of such artworks is 200,000. Those oils already documented (more than 62,000 as of late June) may be viewed on the site (currently in Beta); more are added monthly. You may browse or search the Your Paintings site by paintings, artists, or galleries and collections. A collection of slideshow guides is here. Already a tremendous resource, the online project, once fully published, will present work by nearly 40,000 artists.

✦ Take a few minutes to check out the San Diego-based Museum of Photographic Arts on Flickr Commons. Included in the initial 500+ images uploaded are portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, architecture, and photojournalism produced by such famous photographers as Fox Talbot, Julia Cameron, and Dorothea Lange. (My thanks to the Smithsonian's The Bigger Picture blog for this link.)

✦ Another marvelous resource: LittleFilm, dedicated to restoration and preservation of 16mm, 8mm, Super 8, and 9.5mm movies.

✦ Comprising a collective of five graduate students from Sotheby's Institute of Art, Underwrite Art features the work solely of artists not represented by galleries and places them, through critical and scholarly examination, in the context of contemporary art. A resource for artists, Underwrite Art also seeks to promote to the community-at-large. Painters, photographers, sculptors, performers, and other artists are featured in profiles, interviews, and articles. The collective's stated hope is "to become a generating point to recognition and press that will eventually culminate in gallery representation, commissions, and more." Artists interested in submitting work should include name, Website, and a brief artist statement to underwrite at gmail dot com.

Underwrite Art on FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, Tumblr

✦ Having kicked off in Kansas City, Missouri, the national art project America: Now and Here, conceived by artist Eric Fischl, will begin making its way around the United States in 2012 via custom-designed tailer trucks. Fifty-four poets collaborated in writing a renga ("linked" or shared poem) and more than 50 visual artists contributed work organized into three themes: America as Place, America as People, and America as Icon. Musicians, filmmakers, playwrights, and an Artist Corps (for artists in undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate programs) will get in on the act wherever the convoy appears. 

America: Now and Here Blog

America: Now and Here on FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr

Crossing State Lines: An American Renga