Now here's a website for art history teachers and students to salivate over. SmartHistory, funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, is conceived as an interactive Western art history textbook. It is meant to supplement those unwieldy art history textbooks that always seem to be about the size of a major metro phone book, heavy as bricks, and often real snoozers to slog through.
SmartHistory, described as a "multi-media web-book, was founded by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, both art historians at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Harris is also director of digital learning at MoMA. SmartHistory uses a multi-media timeline along with other interactive features -- such as podcasts, YouTube clips, and Flickr -- to integrate 2,600 years of art and architectural history.
Sampling of works designated by time period are used "to demonstrate the changing role of art in the everyday evolution of human political and social structures". For example, the oil painting above, "Strayed Sheep," (1852), by the English Artist William Holman Hunt, is featured on a video podcast lecture about art during the Industrial Revolution from 1848 to 1907. Harris and Zucker use this and other art works to discuss how artists at this time were breaking away from traditional Academy notions of what subject matter was suitable for art and even from traditional ideas of formal composition. They also discuss meaning: do the sheep without a shepherd represent a breaking away from the Church of England?
Harris and Zucker began SmartHistory in 2005 by creating a blog, featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use at MoMa and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They then began embedding audio files on their online survey courses. "The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book," Harris and Zucker note on their website. "We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images."
We're glad they did. As a supplemental teaching tool, SmartHistory is developing into a brilliant resource for the classroom.
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