Art Authority Blog
Another Major Art Acquisition
In July of 2016, we here at Art Authority announced our first major art acquisition, which was 1000Museums worth of art. Our success with that company has led to another similar acquisition.
1000Museums specializes in creating the highest quality archival reproductions for museum stores, as well as for art lovers worldwide. (It is also the basis of the “1000Museums Gift Shop” in the app line.) Over the past 6+ years, we have greatly expanded the set of museums we support, but our product line has remained solely focused on printed items.
We are excited to announce that, effective immediately, Art Authority LLC is now in joint ownership with the leading provider of all types of products for museum stores, Museum Store Products, Inc. The two will still operate as separate sister companies, but with the same owners, same mission to help museums thrive, and same commitment to quality and USA manufacturing (MSP is in New Jersey, Art Authority in Oregon). So now we are not just the leading manufacturer of print products for museum stores, but of all products for museum stores!
Welcome Jamie Wyeth!
As a user of our award-winning Art Authority app line, or a customer of our 1000Museums brand of top-quality reproductions (available through museum gift shops and 1000Museums.com), you’re probably familiar with those parts of Art Authority LLC. Until today, you may have been unfamiliar with the third part of our business: Fine Art Custom Printing.
FACP, spearheaded by digital printmaking pioneer R. Mac Holbert, is our brand for fine art printing services for artists and photographers. Many FACP clients are renowned artists in their own right, but rely on Mac to hone their vision into the best prints possible.
Today we are proud to announce that we have worked with celebrated contemporary realist painter and third-generation artist Jamie Wyeth to make his works directly available through our FACP program and the new web site FocusOnJamieWyeth.com. Mr. Wyeth played an integral role in designing and developing his FACP offerings, from choosing and proofing the initial set of works available to the selection of the special high-quality paper to be used.
We look forward to additional work with Mr. Wyeth and with other artists of his renown. So expect to hear a lot more about Art Authority Fine Art Custom Printing in the near future!
Focusing on the Genius of Picasso
Next up in our Focus series: FocusOnPicasso.com, a site designed to help art lovers explore and obtain reproductions from the different periods and styles of the artist often called the most influential of the 20th century. The site opening is timed to link with the start of the new National Geographic Channel’s “Genius” series, entitled simply “Picasso.” FocusOnPicasso.com lets TV watchers and art lovers everywhere view, learn about and purchase archival reproductions of key works from each of Picasso’s highly varied creative periods.
As with other Art Authority Focus sites, FocusOnPicasso.com provides a succinct overview of major aspects of the subject and makes available museum-approved archival prints of key works of art involved. In addition to exploring by period, users can also browse through Picasso’s works by subject matter as well.
Portions of purchases from Focus sites go back directly to the institutions involved. All Focus sites feature our 1000Museums brand, known for the latest in print-on-demand technology, top-quality archival reproductions, and a broad set of museum and cultural institution relationships. The full 1000Museums print-on-demand line is available at 1000Museums.com.
Helping the helpers
Art Authority, through our 1000Museums brand, has been helping museums expand the reach of their collections by providing curator-approved archival reproductions from those collections for a decade now. The museums receive increased exposure along with much-needed revenue through royalties on sales, and art lovers get increased access to the art they love. Many others have been helping the art world in similar ways. Today we’re proud to announce that we’re going to be helping one of those helpers.
I Require Art is a “Digital Arts Platform” consisting of a long-established FaceBook page, blog and set of online galleries. Plus as of today, an online store. That’s where we come in. We have been selected by I Require Art to provide archival reproductions for that store. As you’ll see, I Require Art chooses only a few works for which to offer prints, and makes available only the highest quality reproductions of those works. So it was natural that they would look toward 1000Museums’ proven quality record and set of museum relationships.
We are honored that I Require Art chose us to help them help the art world, and we look forward to a long and expanding relationship.
Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series: the whole story
In 1941, at the high point of the Great African-American Migration, Jacob Lawrence created and captioned a sequence of 60 small paintings visually and poignantly portraying that migration. Viewed in its entirety, the series creates a narrative, in pictures and words, which tells the story of that exodus.
Lawrence’s Migration Series was quickly recognized, not just as a representation, but as an essential piece of the ongoing movement. Not just documentation of history, but part of history. Both the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection competed to purchase the works, which were ultimately split between the two museums, with odd-numbered panels going to the Phillips and even-numbered to MoMA. The split broadened access but made it just about impossible to “read” the whole “story” in order, let alone in its entirety.
On rare occasions, all 60 panels have been exhibited together, most recently in Seattle. But we’ve been unaware of any place in cyberspace where you could acquire the whole story and hang it on your wall. Until now. Art Authority is proud to announce that, as part of Black History Month, we have worked with the Phillips, MoMA and the Lawrence Foundation to make available 1000Museums-brand archival prints of all 60 panels.
We’re so proud that we’ve taken things beyond just these foundational panels and created an entire web site devoted to celebrating related works of art by a number of major African-American artists. The site, FocusOnAfricanAmericanArtists.com adds context to Lawrence’s panels not just through other important works by him, but also by others who came both before and after. Works by early artists Henry Ossawa Tanner and Horace Pippin, later artists Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold, and many more. All available through the museum-approved quality of 1000Museums archival reproductions.
Another small piece of an ongoing story.
Visit 1000 museums this Sunday
Through our 1000Museums brand, Art Authority is proud to be a Charter Sponsor of Museum Store Sunday, which is tomorrow! MSS is the museum equivalent of Black Friday, and we’re kicking off our holiday campaign with some serious specials to highlight the day:
- The award-winning Art Authority apps for iPad and iPhone, with their own museum store through the new 1000Museums Gift Shop, will be only 99 cents through Apple’s App Store (normally $9.99 and $4.99 respectively)
- Every archival reproduction from every museum at 1000Museums.com will be 25% off, custom framing included
- The brand’s newly-introduced archival Note Card line will be 25% off at FocusOnFineArtGifts.com
- Newly-introduced items and specials will be available on 1000Museums partner sites, including those with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, US Library of Congress and National Gallery in London
So please go visit your local museum(s) and then please come back and visit a thousand more through our apps and the 1000Museums.com web sites.
The Art Authority Gift Shop
If you’ve been a fan of Art Authority apps, you probably know that we’ve pioneered a number of new features since debuting our award-winning virtual museum app along with the iPad in 2010 (and even earlier as iEnvision with the iPhone in 2008). SmArt Resolution, Art Near Me, Art Real Size, and Art Like This to name a few.
Today we’re happy to announce another one: the Art Authority virtual museum (100,000 works and counting) now includes a real Gift Shop. As we hinted out when we acquired 1000Museums.com we have integrated that site’s museum-approved archival reproduction capabilities directly into the iPad and iPhone versions of Art Authority.
Now Open: The 1000Museums Gift Shop! Real-world, physical prints in five sizes with custom framing options. Top quality. Museum-approved. 1000Museums has been providing these products through their (now our) web site for a decade, and now you can get them through our apps too.
The Gift Shop can be easily accessed from within the Art Authority museum in three different ways:
- From the lobby of the museum, just tap the Gift Shop sign. Going in through the lobby gives you access to the full 1000Museums Gift Shop, which includes tens of thousands of works. On the iPad, you can even browse some of the 1000Museums all-time favorites before entering the full Gift Shop.
- By viewing the “Art you can buy” show in the main directory, and each period room’s directory (on the iPad). These shows include all works in the Art Authority museum (or the specific room) that are available in the Gift Shop too.
- When viewing individual museum works, just tap the “Available at 1000Museums” or “BUY” button to view and purchase reproductions of the work within the Gift Shop.
One of the main reasons we acquired 1000Museums is because our missions were so closely aligned: bringing all the world’s art to all the world. Now our apps and web sites are closely aligned too. And just in time for the holidays!
Going National
Art Authority LLC and the National Gallery UK today announced a major new relationship to make museum-quality archival prints of key National Gallery artwork available to US customers through Art Authority’s 1000Museums print-on-demand technologies. The center point of the relationship is the site FocusOnNationalGalleryUK.com. The site, available today, makes dozens of all-time favorite National Gallery works available in five print sizes, with multiple framing options.
As with other 1000Museums “Focus On” sites, FocusOnNationalGalleryUK.com offers a unique curated collection of archival reproductions of works by major artists and institutions, in this case National Gallery works by European masters including Canaletto, Monet, Turner and Van Gogh. Art Authority and the National Gallery worked together to design and curate the site. Additional works and products will be added in the near future.
“To make prints of the National Gallery’s paintings more accessible to customers in the United States, we have chosen to partner with Art Authority and their 1000Museums brand, due to the high quality of their reproductions and knowledge of our collection, as well as their long-established relationships with the art world” said Douglas Gilmore, Trading Director at the National Gallery Company. “We look forward to a long and productive collaboration.”
“We are proud and honored that such a venerable institution as the National Gallery chose us to bring their works to the U.S.” said Stanley Smith, Chief Museum Officer for Art Authority. “We are particularly gratified by their recognition of our commitment to quality and our cutting-edge technologies.”
Art Authority has worked with a number of other institutions and artists’ estates on similar “Focus on” sites including:
• Focus on Frank Lloyd Wright – FocusOnFLW.com
• Focus on Mark Rothko – FocusOnRothko.com
• Focus on Henri Matisse – FocusOnMatisse.com
• Focus on Library of Congress – FocusOnLibraryOfCongress.com
• Focus on Latin American Masters – FocusOnLatinAmericanMasters.com
The full 1000Museums line of fine-art reproductions is available at 1000Museums.com.
Focusing on the Future (and Frank Lloyd Wright)
It’s been almost a year since we announced our first major art acquisition, 1000 museums worth of art. Since that time, we’ve been integrating the acquisition with our core collection, and thinking about the future. Today we’re happy to announce that, with the help of “America’s greatest architect” Frank Lloyd Wright, we’ve brought that future into focus.
June 8, 2017 is FLW’s 150th birthday. We’re honored that the FLW Foundation chose our 1000Museums brand to design and make available a series of “Wright across America” commemorative prints for the year-long celebration (much more on those prints later). That honor crystalized our thinking about the future and provided us the first instance of that future as well.
So, without further ado, Art Authority is pleased to announce the first in a series of “Focus On” sites, “Focus on Frank Lloyd Wright.” The site includes a great collection of both time-limited commemorative prints and timeless reproductions of original Wright sketches and drawings. All have been approved by the Foundation, to which a portion of every sale goes. And all are of the museum quality for which the 1000Museums brand is known, printed on acid-free paper with inks rated at 200 years of permanence.
Beyond FLW, we’re also announcing plans for future Focus On sites for a number of other venerable American icons:
- The Library of Congress (founded 1800)
- The Boy Scouts of America (founded 1910), and their quintessential American painter Norman Rockwell (born 1894)
- Popular Russian-American artist Mark Rothko (born 1903)
- American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock (born 1912)
These sites should be available this summer, with many of the works available now directly through 1000Museums.com.
As you can see, with the help of 1000Museums and Frank Lloyd Wright, our focus on the future is clear.
Our Major Art Acquisition
Art Authority is pleased to announce our first major art acquisition. If Art Authority were a traditional art institution, we might well be announcing that we had obtained a rare painting by a renowned artist like Rembrandt or van Gogh. Instead, this being the 21st century, we’re announcing that we have obtained 1000 museums worth of art!
To be specific, Art Authority has acquired the digital portfolio of 1000Museums, Inc. Both Art Authority and 1000Museums have been pioneers in connecting art museums and art communities in new ways. 1000Museums’ particular strengths have been their relationships, their museum partners, and their web-based capability to affordably provide art lovers with high quality reproductions of works from those museums.
1000Museums’ relationships and print capabilities complement our own, combining with our award-wining mobile app line to greatly advance our mission of making the world’s art accessible to all the world. We can now look forward to working with not just one thousand, but many thousands of museums, helping them use Internet-era tools to connect them and their collections with the rapidly expanding community of art lovers, art students, and art creators around the world.
Not that long ago, the only way art lovers could view the art they loved was by traveling to art museums in their local community and around the world, and the only communities art museums could draw on were their local ones and those art travelers. With our 1000Museums art acquisition, we here at Art Authority think we’ve taken a huge step in giving art lovers easy access to way more art, and art museums easy access to way more art lovers. We couldn’t be more pleased if we had acquired a Rembrandt ourselves!