A couple of weeks ago I suggested that part one of the DallasSITES exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, which maps 50 years of local art activity, was incomplete. It got more complete last weekend with the opening of a multifaceted exhibition organized by Dallas artists in the DMA. And this week the museum released the capstone, an online publication called DallasSITES: A Developing Art Scene, Postwar To Present.
First a note on the nifty technology. This is the DMA’s second ePub (after last summer’s George Grosz in Dallas), and it is the first created using the Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) toolkit. The OSCI is an “open-source suite of tools” developed by the Indianapolis Museum of Art thanks to a grant from the Getty Foundation, and it is specifically designed for enhancing the publication of online art history catalogs. Read between the lines on that one (i.e. the IMA’s involvement), and you realize what we have here is yet another art tech tool that can trace its roots back to Robert Stein, the DMA’s tech savvy deputy director and director Max Anderson’s right hand man in both Dallas and while at the IMA.
The book opens with chapters that chart in depth the history of local art organized into various neighborhoods, like the DMA gallery exhibition. There are also a couple of essays about the history of collecting in Dallas. Finally, the meat and potatoes of the thing (and where the OSCI technology really shines) is in the publication’s appendix. In there you’ll find lots of interactive content, including maps, video interviews, and more.
