Life is stories.

  • We are defined and motivated by our stories.
  • Whether a piece of art, a map, a movie, a sporting event, a ballet, a book, an article, an excursion, we see the world through stories.
  • At Pixeum, we help people, especially collectors, students and artists, tell stories with their artifacts and artwork.

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Report of the Cruise of the Steamer Corwin in the Arctic Ocean - 1885

I became aware of this book after reading Hampton Side's amazing book, In the Kingdom of Ice, which tells the story of the 1880's De Long expedition of the Jeanette to the North Pole. As a part of the Jeanette story, Sides tells the story of the Corwin, which had a famous crew member, John Muir, who later wrote a book called The Cruise of the Corwin. This exhibit is an official report of one of the cruises of the Corwin, in 1885, led by Michael A. Healy, although it was not the same cruise during which Muir was a crew member, in 1881. However, in that 1881 cruise, whose purpose was to find the De Long expedition, Healy was in command and Muir was one of the crew. keyword: 19thCentury

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Diane Feinstein art at Bonham’s - 9/23/24

9/23/24 - Great exhibit of art and artifacts from the collection of Diane Feinstein. At Bonham’s at 601 California, only through Thursday of this week.…

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Harmony Masks Conflict: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic Imagination - Karen Pinto

Professor Karen Pinto has spent three decades at the forefront of the study of Islamic cartographic history. Her first book, Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration, came out in 2016, and she is currently working on a second, focusing on Islamic maps of the Mediterranean. Today, she is an Associate Scholar in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder."When I was a graduate student at Columbia in 1991, my professor, the late but incredibly great Olivia Remie Constable (1961-2014), suggested that I write a seminar paper on the medieval Muslim geographers. That sent me to the dark recessed of the Islamic history and geography collection on the 11th floor of the Butler Library. There I, literally, tripped over Konrad Miller’s late 1920’s extensive 6 volume: Mappae Arabicae: Arabische Welt und Länderkarten des 9–13. Jahrunderts. (6 vols. Stuttgart, 1926–1931) black and white reprints of hundreds of medieval Islamic maps hidden in Oriental manuscripts hitherto little known in the western history of cartography world.Miller’s dusty, crumbling black-and-white reprints of medieval Islamic maps of the Mediterranean, formed the basis of my first major work on the subject: “Ṣūrat Baḥr al-Rūm: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Muslim Cartographical Imagination,” my MA Essay at Columbia U that went on to win SSRC’s 1992 Ibn Khaldun Prize. That experience led, in turn, to a life-long obsession and hunt for maps scattered in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript libraries worldwide that resulted in her first book on Islamic maps of the world in “Medieval Islamic Maps: An Introduction” (Chicago, 2016) and a collection of some three thousand images of maps, many not reprinted. 

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Eight Interesting Aspects: The Sea Returns to Mission Bay - Fred DeJarlais

Enter the DOT story here.Fred DeJarlais is a retired urban planner with interests in both tech and the arts. He is the past president of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Santa Cruz, on the Board of the Santa Cruz Opera Society, past president of the and current treasurer of Espressivo Chamber Orchestra, past president of the California Map Society, and the current publisher of their cartographic journal, Calafia. As a planner, he worked on the Mission Bay Project in San Francisco from 1982 to 2000. He was his firm’s infrastructure and entitlement manager on the project.

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