Walters Art Museum

The Walters Art Museum is donating more than 19,000 images of artworks from its collection to the organization running Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that is created and edited by users. The images will be available for Wikipedia articles in any language, and can be downloaded free of charge. A spokeswoman for the museum said Tuesday that the Walters is just one of several libraries, archives and museums participating in the collaborative effort to provide public access to their collections.

Walters Museum: Jane Meyerhoff's floral still lifes collection will be donated to the Walters Art Museum by philanthropist Robert Meyerhoff. Jane Meyerhoff loved flowers, but she was allergic to their fragrance and couldn't have them in the house. In 1991, she hit upon a substitute that fed her love for beauty without making her ill. She bought nearly two dozen blooms created by some of history's greatest artists and hung them on her dining room walls. It's a solution that will benefit Baltimore residents for decades after real-life blossoms would have dropped.

Baltimore's Walters Art Museum has received a $265,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to put toward digitizing its collection of medieval manuscripts and making it available, via computer, to the general public. The three-year project, "Imaging the Hours: Creating a Digital Resource of Flemish Manuscripts," includes 113 illustrated manuscripts, encompassing 45,000 pages of text with over 3,000 pages of illumination — elaborate illustrations, such as stylized letters or border decorations.

The average tenure of an American museum director is about six years. It's a tough job, requiring the gifts of a scholar-historian, expert business manager, public relations genius and civic booster all rolled into one, and it's definitely not for the faint of heart. Yet Gary Vikan, who announced this week that he is stepping down as director of the Walters Art Museum after 18 years in the post, not only made it look easy but seemed to enjoy every minute of it. Mr. Vikan's long tenure at the Walters saw a significant expansion of the museum's collections and programs as well as its presence in the community and online.

Gary Vikan, who has been a dynamic force at the helm of the Walters Art Museum for 18 years, will leave the post of director in June 2013, or when his successor is in place. "I really made the decision in November 2008, when I was 62," Vikan said, "but that's when the stock market was plummeting. So I picked 65. " The museum weathered the economic downturn successfully, thanks to Vikan's leadership, said Walters board chairman Douglas Hamilton Jr. "Gary has carried us through the economic downturn," he said.

Tony Aveni blames it on the Pilgrims. If it hadn't been for our prim and quarrelsome ancestors, their descendants might not now be making forecasts that the world will end in 313 days based on a blatant misreading of the so-called Mayan calendar, according to Aveni, a professor at New York's Colgate University. If our fanatical forebears hadn't separated from the Church of England and climbed aboard the Mayflower, there might not be widespread doomsday forecasts for Dec. 21, 2012 — a mere 14 months after the Rapture failed to materialize as predicted.

Except for the spout sticking up from its backbone, the reddish-brown clay dog bears a striking resemblance to the Chihauhau curled up in front of your fireplace. There's the whiplike tail that's been temporarily stilled, the ears cocked sleepily in the direction of a faraway sound. An observer would almost expect that pup's nose to be moist and its tongue warm. Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? This drowsy canine just leaped over 18 centuries. One of the delights of "Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas," the new exhibit opening Sunday at the Walters Art Museum , is that it creates common ground between contemporary humans and the ancestors from whom we are separated by four millennia.

Baltimore's Walters Art Museum is looking for a few good doodlers. And Googlers. As part of a nationwide competition called "Doodle for Google 2012," the museum is encouraging Maryland students in kindergarten through 12th grade to redesign Googles's homepage banner around the theme "If I could travel in time, I'd visit…" The 10 best state submissions will be exhibited at the Walters from May 23 to June 24. Walters director Gary Vikan...

The Baltimore Sun Though the small statue with the greenish hue is nicknamed "The Modest Venus," she is anything but. It's true that the 10-inch figurine from the Italian Renaissance has one hand demurely covering her fig-leaf area, and the other held up as if to fend off unwanted advances. But around 1500, an anonymous metalworker crafted the Venus from bronze, which is naturally cool and pleasing to the touch. He gave her rounded limbs and an abundance of undulating curves; her buttocks might have been expressly designed to fill an adult's cupped palm.

The first immigrants to this hemisphere arrived between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. As time progressed many unique and advanced cultures developed, particularly in Mesoamerica. Luckily for Baltimore and its environs, the Walters Art Museum will soon open a new special exhibition, "Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas," focusing on artifacts from Mesoamerica. The show, which opens Feb. 12, will provide all of us with an opportunity to learn more about the cultural history of our hemisphere, a history that our schools have long neglected.