Subject Guides: Art & Art History: Other Resources

Digital Art History Projects

Digital Art History Directory The Digital Art History Directory (DAHD) is an open-access publication containing a database of digital art history projects and information on data sources, best practices in Digital Art History project construction, preservation, and web archiving. Intended to be the largest, most comprehensive, and inclusive collection of information on Digital Art History and to function as a tool and living resource, rather than a static publication, the DAHD provides a platform for discovery, sharing, and research of Digital Art History.
Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project The Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project (PALP) is an online resource that supports site-wide discovery, mapping, analysis, and sharing of information about Pompeian artworks in their architectural and urban contexts.
Shadow Plays Shadow Plays explores popular forms of entertainment used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to transport viewers to a new world, foreshadowing present-day virtual, augmented, and extended reality experiences (VR, AR, and XR).
Digital Florentine Codex The Digital Florentine Codex gives access to a singular manuscript created by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a group of Nahua elders, authors, and artists. Written in parallel columns of Nahuatl and Spanish texts and hand painted with nearly 2,500 images, the encyclopedic codex is widely regarded as the most reliable source of information about Mexica culture, the Aztec Empire, and the conquest of Mexico. Upon completion in 1577 at the Imperial Colegio de la Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco (today Mexico City), the manuscript was sent to Europe where it entered the Medici family’s library in Florence—thus, the Florentine Codex. This digital edition unlocks the manuscript’s content by making the texts and images searchable.
BASIRA BASIRA (Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art) is a new, open-access online database of representations of books and other textual documents in the figurative arts between approximately 1300 and 1600 CE, the period encompassing the advent of print culture in Europe and its neighboring regions. Users anywhere can browse and query thousands of images of books from a constantly expanding dataset. Dozens of aspects of a book’s depiction can be searched, including details of its binding, bookmarks, contents, and position. In addition, users may search for the particulars of who or what is interacting with the book, and how that action is taking place.
12 Sunsets Originally captured as the medium for Ed Ruscha’s creative work, the more than 65,000 photographs selected from this archive present a unique view of one of Los Angeles’ quintessential streets, Sunset Boulevard, and how it has changed over the past 50 years. Ed Ruscha, with help from Getty and Stamen Design, is making this amazing collection accessible to you: explore his images of Sunset and discover your own story of Los Angeles.
Real Virtual: Representing Architectural Time & Space Project from Columbia University and the NEH on ancient architecture.
The Quilt Index The Quilt Index is an open access, digital repository of thousands of images, stories and information about quilts and their makers drawn from hundreds of public and private collections around the world. The Quilt Index is a digital humanities research and education project of the Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University.
The Drawings of the Florentine Painters Bernard Berenson’s Drawings of the Florentine Painters is a digital resource based on Berenson’s publication of the same name. This research tool allows you to search for any of the drawings listed in the three editions (1903, 1938 in English; 1961, in Italian).
Rhizome ArtBase The ArtBase is an archive with over 2,200 artworks to date, primarily hosting works of net art, but also including works that employ media such as software, code, websites, moving images, games, and browsers.

Color Resources

Color Lisa Color Lisa is a curated list of color palettes based on masterpieces of the worlds greatest artists. Each palette was painstakingly created by color obsessed designers, artists, museum curators, and masters of color theory. Palettes are constantly being added to help keep your designs colorful and fresh.
Color Leap Examine how colors were used over time/when they were popular on this interactive platform.
Pigments Through the Ages Pigments Through the Ages is an interactive web exhibit that includes the most important pigments used through the early 20th century.

Online Art Resources

art21 Helpful source to learn about contemporary art from contemporary artists with documentaries, interviews, essays, etc.
Art Resources Art-rich websites of significance to the study of art and art history, especially those at risk of disappearance from the live web.
AWARE AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions is a database brings together women and non-binary artists born between 1664 and 1974 working in the visual arts, with no limitations on medium or country. Research articles and interviews allow for a deeper understanding of these artists’ careers and works by contextualising them within larger artistic movements, societal changes and feminist thinking.
Blue Mountain Project This collection contains fully searchable issues of important periodicals of the European avant-garde. This collection contains 3,747 issues comprising 80,953 pages and 93,148 articles.
Contemporary Art Library The mission of Contemporary Art Library is to organize, preserve, and make accessible the art history of our time. The Library includes more than 775,000 images, documents, and videos representing more than 21,000 exhibitions, performances, and other projects.
Dictionary of Art Historians Written and maintained by scholars, the Dictionary of Art Historians compiles the documented facts of an historian’s life, post-retirement or posthumously, in order to serve as a background for understanding a specific text and the historiography of art
Documents of Latin American and Latino Art Explore over 9,000 Documents of 20th and 21st⁠-⁠century art in Latin America, the Caribbean, and among US Latino communities
Latin American and Caribbean Contemporary Art The Latin American and Caribbean Contemporary Art Web Archive is a collection developed by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation's Art & Architecture Librarians, and is an extension of an existing effort focused on collecting publications in all formats that document contemporary art and artists of Latin America and the Caribbean. The agreement defines contemporary art as it refers to 'developments in the visual arts from 1975 to the present,' with material sought 'for the entire career of artists who have been active at any time since 1975.' This archive aims to preserve for researchers the personal and official websites belonging to notable contemporary Latin American and Caribbean artists, artists’ collectives, artists’ groups, galleries, museums, and related entities in order to assure the continuing availability of the important content they contain.
Medieval Digital Resources The Medieval Digital Resources website (MDR for short) is a project of the Medieval Academy of America, the largest organization in North America promoting excellence in the field of medieval studies. The project aims to provide access to websites that contain content of interest to medievalists and meet the Academy’s scholarly and technical standards of web presentation. Sources are vetted according to the Medieval Academy’s (MAA) Standards for Web Publication and formally recommended by members of the Speculum Review Board and the Medieval Academy of America’s Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Committee, all of whom are subject experts and/or digital experts.
Public Art Archive The Public Art Archive™ (PAA) is a free, continually growing, online and mobile database of completed public artworks throughout the U.S. and abroad.
Secondary Archive Secondary Archive tells the history of non-Western — primarily Central and Eastern European — art through the lens of gender, covering the period after WWII through the present. This archive is composed of artistic statements and unknown pages of the biographies and practices of female artists, where one can see the names of those who have been marginalized, neglected, forgotten, or remain little known to the general public alongside artifacts from key female figures of non-Western art.

BYU Library Special Collections

The BYU Library Special Collections make available unique, rare, and historical collections of enduring value for use by students, faculty, and other interested patrons. These items include manuscripts, rare books, original sketches, personal papers, and more. It is a rich resource for scholarly study! More information about using the collection can be located here.

Auction Houses

Sotheby's Information about items from past auctions at Sotheby's. Can include provenance information, literature references, etc.
Christie's Information about items from past auctions at Christie's. Can include provenance information, literature references, lot essays, etc.
Bonham's Information about items from past auctions at Bonham's.

Museum & Library Resources

MoMA Exhibition Spelunker Information about MoMA exhibition history presented in an interactive format.
post MoMA post is The Museum of Modern Art’s online resource devoted to art and the history of modernism in a global context. It is the public face of Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), a cross-departmental, internal research program at MoMA that fosters the multiyear study of art histories outside North America and Western Europe.
Artist Obituary Scrapbooks Two scrapbook volumes of artist obituaries collected by staff members at the Met Museum from 1906-1929.
Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue Index (AECI) The Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue Index (AECI) contains 136,494 records describing artworks exhibited in the United States and in Canada up through 1876 (the Centennial year). The Catalogue contains information from 1,057 exhibition catalogs, newspaper articles, and gallery notices.
SFMOMA Artist Interviews SFMOMA is committed to partnering with the most forward-thinking artists of our time and bringing their visions to life. Here, in their own words, many of these artists share their creative process and their stories.
Rauschenberg Research Project The Rauschenberg Research Project provides free worldwide access to a wealth of scholarly research and documentation relating to artworks by Robert Rauschenberg in SFMOMA’s permanent collection.
Getty Projects & Initiatives Advancing and supporting art and conservation research, practice, and training. 234 projects to browse.
Calisphere Calisphere provides free access to unique and historically important artifacts for research, teaching, and curious exploration. Discover over two million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more from California's great libraries, archives, and museums.
Monographs on African Artists Compiled by the Smithsonian Libraries, this bibliography is limited to substantive monographs and exhibition catalogs about 20th-21st century African artists.
Met Research Research guides and artist indexes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
NYPL Digital Collections Explore 893,757 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections. New items added every day.
Library of Congress Digital Collections Digital collection items from the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world.
Met Museum Library Digital Collections Digital collection materials from the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including auction catalogs.

Art & Art History: Other Resources

Other Resources