Illustrating Heart of Darkness

                                                                Alison Bryant, UK


The  25 longlisted entries for this year’s Book Illustration Competition run by The House of Illustration have been published as a Gallery on their website here 
They illustrate Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 
The winner and five runners up will be announced in September. The winner will be asked to provide a total of 9 illustrations for the final Folio Society book, as well as a binding design, and must agree to complete the commission within the given deadline


There is a  a gallery of past winners of the Book Illustration Competition here

Reel to Real

'Reel to Real' is a sound curating project, funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, designed to catalogue, digitise and  make available online, in gallery spaces and beyond, the Pitt Rivers Museum's unique archival field recordings. The content of the recordings ranges from spirits singing in the rainforests of the Central African Republic to children's songs and games in playgrounds throughout Europe.

The project website includes information about and playlists from all of the Museum's original ethnographic recordings, video and interview resources, ethnomusicology seminars, their SoundCloud account and much more. 

Reel to Real Project Website here.

Visualiser combining Bayaka sound waves and images

The related  SoundCloud account can be found here, and customised playlists and sets can be found here.

new resource for African art and its influence on Modern Art

The James J. Ross Archive of African Images, 1590-1920 (RAAI), has been launched at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. This unique archive, accessible at  http://raai.library.yale.edu/, contains approximately 5,000 illustrations of African art published before 1921.  RAAI is a work in progress, aspiring to include every African object that has appeared in a book, periodical, catalogue, newspaper, or other source published in or before 1920. The majority of entries date between 1800 and 1920, a period of heightened international presence in Africa. As trade increased between Africa and the West in the early 19th century, voyagers from the West began intensively recording and collecting the material culture of the African coastline. After 1920, an enormous profusion of collecting, exhibiting, and publishing created a flood of images and a whole new regard for African art. 

RAAI is a collection of rich historical data and extensively catalogued and annotated images. Images include prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs of objects from a range of contexts: in situ in the original performance context, in exhibitions, in casual snapshots, and in studio photography. Its historical sources afford exceptional insight into early European and American views-both literal and figurative-of Africa's art.