The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018 wins a Webby

The Paul Mellon Centre is delighted to announce that its landmark digital publication The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018 has won a 2019 People's Voice Webby Award.

The Webby Awards are the leading international awards recognising the “best of the internet” and are presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The Chronicle was chosen as the winner in the General Websites – Art category by popular vote.

The PMC’s Director of Studies, Mark Hallett notes that “it is especially exciting to see a scholarly and non-profit publication win the popular vote, given that so many of the projects nominated for Webby Awards are commercial ventures. We are really delighted by this clear public interest in accessible platforms that put art history online.”

Sarah Victoria Turner, Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre added, “for us, it epitomises the most exciting and transformative aspects of open-access publishing on the internet. It’s an honour to win this prestigious award and see the brilliant work of the Chronicle’s designers Strick & Williams recognised in this way.”

The Chronicle is a completely free, open access digital publication launched by the PMC in May 2018 that sheds new light on the entwined histories of British art and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The Chronicle provides a unique resource to study the world’s longest running annual display of contemporary art through 250 essays looking at each year of the Summer Exhibition, a complete set of digitised and fully searchable exhibition catalogues and data visualisations that chart the changing shape of the exhibition across its history.

With design by Strick&Williams, development by Digirati and user experience by Unaffiliated, the Chronicle also brings together contributions by over 90 experts – including artists, critics, curators and art historians – and is intended to be a permanent research resource for anyone interested the history of British art.

A full list of Webby winners can be found here.