CHAPEL HILL, NC.- The Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has launched a new website on the leading edge of the digital humanities, peck.ackland.org. The website hosts an evolving body of scholarly content related to the Peck Collection, and it is designed to be a living resource, with ongoing research and new entries slated to be added.
Peck.ackland.org is the only website of its kind devoted to a collection of drawings. It houses ultra-high-resolution images, giving visitors the ability to zoom in to examine the drawings and the structure of the paper on which they were made. Visitors can also see the verso, or reverse side, of each drawing, sometimes revealing sketches or notes by the artist long hidden behind the frame. The website allows viewers to examine the drawings in infrared light, revealing watermarks and other elements not visible to the naked eye.
While there are a number of sites that have some of this functionality, none of them are focused exclusively on drawings, and peck.ackland.org, which is designed to grow over time, is the first site the Museum is aware of that is devoted to an entire evolving collection. The website replicates and greatly enhances the experience of viewing these works in person, combining art and technology to allow for in-depth study. These fragile works are very sensitive to light and can only be on public view for a limited number of weeks each decade. During the times when the drawings are tucked away in storage to conserve them for future generations, peck.ackland.org makes them available for everyone to enjoy.
In 2017, UNC alumnus Dr. Sheldon Peck and his wife Dr. Leena Peck gave the Ackland Art Museum their collection of 17th and 18th century Dutch and Flemish drawings, along with an endowment to support a new curatorial position, future art acquisitions, exhibitions, educational materials, and public programs. This $25 million gift, which included drawings by Rembrandt, was the largest in the Ackland’s history, and it immediately placed the Museum alongside the handful of other important repositories of Dutch and Flemish drawings in the United States such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Central to the Pecks’ vision was a robust website on the leading edge of the digital humanities, the primary Peck Collection destination for students, scholars, and aficionados of master drawings that would make possible a deep and significant virtual experience of the art in the collection. They envisioned a site that would encourage discovery, allow multivalent exploration, and be fully accessible to all visitors.
Dana Cowen, the Ackland's Sheldon Peck Curator for European and American Art before 1950, realized Sheldon and Leena Peck's vision for this valuable virtual resource by producing peck.ackland.org in collaboration with UK digital agency Cogapp. The project took nearly two years and was entirely funded by the Peck endowment. The site launched in conjunction with the first major exhibition of the Peck Collection, Drawn to Life: Master Drawings from the Age of Rembrandt in the Peck Collection at the Ackland Art Museum, which will be shown at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam March 18 - June 11, 2023, following a record-breaking run in Chapel Hill that drew more than 12,000 visitors.
