Art + Design: Primary and Web Sources
This is by no means comprehensive, but we wanted to provide a space to highlight resources and materials that can inform a broad understanding of the field of art and social practice.
Primary Sources
- Portland State Library Special CollectionsSpecial Collections is home to over 5,500 rare, unique or historically significant items dating from the 15th century to the present and encompassing a broad range of formats including books, journals, manuscripts, papers and records, photographs, maps, comic books, audio-visual material, realia and ephemera.
- The Medici Archive ProjectThis evaluation version of MAP's Documentary Sources database currently describes 200 volumes of documents in the Medici Granducal Archive (Archivio Mediceo del Principato), with document records for approximately 10,000 letters and biographical records for approximately 11,000 people.
Organizations
Portland Art Museum: Anne & James F. Crumpacker Family Library at the Portland Art Museum, the region’s most comprehensive visual art resource open to students, researchers, docents, staff, and the public. Noncirculating collection available by appointment. Write to: library@pam.org
- Oregon Arts CommissionThe OAC was established in 1967 to foster the arts in Oregon and ensure their excellence.
Finding Images
- ArtStorThe ARTstor Digital Library, a non-profit resource, consists of images in art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences.
- Open F/S: Smithsonian Freer and Sackler imagesAsian art images from the Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution.
- Public Catalogue FoundationThe PCF has partnered with the BBC to create Your Paintings, a unique website showcasing the entire collection of publicly owned oil paintings across the United Kingdom. Your Paintings Tagger, a pioneering crowd-sourcing exercise, will enable Your Paintings to be fully searchable
- VADS: the online resource for visual artsVisual Arts Data Service (VADS) has been hosted online for over 16 years by the University for the Creative Arts (UCA). It provides online access to a growing collection of visual images contributed by universities, libraries, museums and archives from across the UK, which can be used freely for education.
Museum Links
Museum Links can lead one to online reproductions of paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, ceramics, etc. The following museums provide at least partial online access to their exhibits and/or permanent collections :
Virtual Library Museums Pages
- A distributed directory of online museums, including over 1400 in the U.S.A.Art Institute of Chicago
- Chicago, IllinoisGeorge Eastman House
- Photography collections onlineKunsthistorisches Museum Wien
- Vienna, AustriaThe Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
- Los Angeles, CaliforniaLouvre Museum Official Website
- Paris, FranceThe Metropolitan Museum of Art
- New York, New YorkMOMA, The Museum of Modern Art
- New York, New YorkNational Gallery of Art
- Washington D. CMuseo del Prado
- Madrid, SpainPortland Art Museum
- Portland, Oregon
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
- San Francisco, CaliforniaSeattle Art Museum
- Seattle, WashingtonThe State Hermitage Museum
- St. Petersburg, Russia
Quality Web Resources for Art
- Archives of American ArtA branch of the Smithsonian Institution, world''s largest primary source collection of the visual arts in America.
- Art and Artists Files in the Smithsonial Libraries CollectionsThe Smithsonian Institution Libraries artists' files are an exceptional resource for art historical research. Often these files are the only obtainable sources of information on emerging regional and local artists. Until now, the files were largely unavailable to those who did not travel to Washington DC. In 2004, several efforts were combined to produce a searchable database of artist names as the first step toward universal accessibility to these valuable files.
- Art History: Resources on the WebChris Whitcombe, Sweet Briar College
Covers current links to authoritative sites about world art history. An award-winning site for research, learning, and innovation. - Art21Art21 has established itself as the preeminent chronicler of contemporary art and artists.
- ArtBabbleArtBabble was conceived and built by a cross-departmental team at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It is intended to showcase art video content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives.
- ArtcyclopediaThe Guide to Museum-Quality Art on the Internet.
Explores works by over 8,000 famous artists in art museums and image archives worldwide. - artforumARTFORUM is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. Also publishes a frequent news digest online.
- ArtlexArtlex is "the Original Art Dictionary and Encyclopedia on the Web, founded in 1998". It also contains artist profiles, art tutorials, buying guides, and more.
- ARTnewsARTnews reports on the art, personalities, issues, trends and events shaping the international art world.
- Artsjournal.comThe Daily Digest of Arts and Cultural Journalism.
Provocative, entertaining, constantly updated news stories about what's going on in the arts. - CAMEOCAMEO is a searchable information center developed by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The MATERIALS database contains chemical, physical, visual, and analytical information on over 10,000 historic and contemporary materials used in the production and conservation of artistic, architectural, archaeological, and anthropological materials. - CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS INDEXthe Cleveland Institute of Art's CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS INDEX, which began in 1991 and now lists over 31,000 artists appearing in more than 1,800 exhibition catalogs and art publications.
- e-flux announcementsSelected announcements for art exhibits from all over the world. Archive from 2000
- Google Art ProjectThe Google Art Project is an initiative to provide thousands of high quality, high resolution images from museums across the globe in one place, making art's history, meaning and beauty available in ways never before possible.
- Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: The New Edition.This resources ties essays and works of art with chronology telling the story of art and global culture through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collections.
- HyperallergicSensitive to Art and Its Discontents, Hyperallergic is a forum for playful, serious, and radical perspectives on art and culture in the world today.
- The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road OnlineIDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.
- Le manuscrit medieval - The Medieval ManuscriptThis blog is dedicated to the great manuscript scholar Léopold Delisle (1826-1910), and to François Duine, clericus dolensis (1870-1924), and (almost exclusively!) to medieval manuscripts, up to and including their relationships with early printing.
- Medieval illuminated manuscriptsOnline images and resources from C&RL News, June 2017, vol. 78, no. 6, p.334-337.
- Medieval PortlandMedieval Portland gathers resources that are now in Portland, Oregon for learning about medieval Europe and the Middle East.
The research presented in the database is from both published sources as well as original research by students in the Medieval Portland Capstone taught by Anne McClanan, Professor of Art History at Portland State University. - Open Art Bib: A century of western bibliography on art historyOpenBibArt is a bibliographic database born out of a collaboration between the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), the Getty Research Institute (GRI) and the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique of the CNRS (Inist-CNRS).
- Public Catalogue FoundationThe PCF has partnered with the BBC to create Your Paintings, a unique website showcasing the entire collection of publicly owned oil paintings across the United Kingdom. Your Paintings Tagger, a pioneering crowd-sourcing exercise, will enable Your Paintings to be fully searchable
- Art History: Khan AcademyPresented by Khan Academy Smarthistory.org is a free, not-for-profit, multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook
- Smithsonian Libraries Artists' BooksThe Smithsonian Libraries’ collection of artists’ books spans numerous formats, styles, and countries, and the works are available to researchers for study and inspiration.
- Street art and graffiti: Resources for online studyArticle from College & Research News, April 2014, vol. 75, no. 4, p. 208-211. By Michael DeNotto. Lists crowdsourced archives, an institutional archive, blogs and mobile app.
- TheArtCareerProjectOnline resource on preparing for a career in the arts. Art careers are described. Schools for obtaining art education are profiled.