By Akron Art Museum Staff Creating interesting material to accompany the art object records for the Akron Art Museum’s online collection is one of the most inspiring parts of our project. Since the curatorial staff had already been doing an excellent job keeping basic digital records of the museum’s permanent collection before the Knight Foundation’s generous funding, we’ve been able to spend some time and energy expanding on those records and adding exciting supplementary material.

Lately we’ve been videotaping artists talking about their work whenever we’ve gotten the chance. Last week Janet Macoska stopped by during an exhibition opening and we got a chance to talk to her about her photographs of the rock band DEVO that we have in our collection. A month ago we filmed Andrew Moore discussing his photos of Detroit while his exhibition was still hanging in our galleries. As we comb through our database evaluating records that need expansion, we’ve been keeping notes on living artists who might be willing to donate their time and insight to the project. Over the next year we’ll be recording telephone calls and visits with as many as possible. We really feel like these extra features will make exploring the Akron Art Museum’s collection more exciting and we are looking forward to sharing this new footage.