Rise Art, the curated art marketplace, recently launched across the UK. The website, which commissions and promotes the work of talented emerging and established artists across the globe, now has thousands of artists portfolios listed across the site, and a growing board of curators who, along with our users help select the artists featured across the site.

The team at Rise Art has announced an open call for submissions. Artists are encouraged to submit their profile and upload works to the site.

Artists and enthusiasts can also take advantage of Rise Art's community tools to connect with one another and promote upcoming events and exhibitions. To get started visit www.riseart.com

Finally, the team is looking for current Leeds students with a keen interest in curatorial and gallery studies to participate in the public discourse on Rise Art and help shortlist artist portfolios across the website for consideration. If you would like to get involved, please email the Rise Art team at info (at) Rise Art (dot) com.

Svalbard Museum

For the last couple of years my dad has been working on a project in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Despite being the largest town in Svalbard, Longyearbyen is tiny with around 2060 inhabitants! In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people came to Svalbard to hunt whales and seals, and the islands teemed with Dutch, British, Russian and Scandinavian whalers. Since the early twentieth century, coal has been Svalbard's gold and a lot of people have made a fortune from this industry (not my dad...) Think of it as the Norwegian equivalent of Jersey...

On his last trip over my dad managed to visit the Svalbard Museum, which just so happens to be the northernmost museum in the world! The museum first opened in 1979, and until December 2005 it was located in the oldest part of Longyearbyen. The new Svalbard Museum opened on 26th April 2006 in the Svalbard Science Centre, together with The University Centre in Svalbard, The Norwegian Polar Institute and The Governor of Svalbard's environalmental information. The main aim of the museum is 'to impart knowledge and understanding of the relations between nature, culture, landscape, human activity, technology and the environment in the Arctic.' The museum also engages in research to discover new ways of life and standard of living through 400 years of human activity in Svalbard. More museum orientated tasks include the coordination of all of the museum collections in Svalbard into a common record, providing access for all to the historical material and records. The photo collection is being uploaded onto the museum website at the moment....

http://karmatrendz.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/svalbard_science_centre_05.jpg Check out the external architecture of the museum....postmodern architect meets curator?

Check out the website and let me know what you think to the museum...there is a virtual tour type thing (not too dissimilar to The Talking Walls application I mentioned in my earlier post!) which allows you to look at the exhibitions more closely...

http://www.svalbardmuseum.no/eindex.php?kategori=1