Related Guides
Images & Museum Collections (selected)
- ARTstor This link opens in a new window ARTstor is a database of images from museums, artists, libraries, colleges and universities, scholars, private collections, and photo archives available for teaching, education, and scholarship, with all images cleared for educational use.
- AskART Academic This link opens in a new window AskART Academic is a database of information about artists, including names, birth and death dates, state or local affiliation, fields in which artist worked, book and periodical references to artist, dealers and museums where works may be viewed, auction prices of works, and some biographical details.
- Boston Athenaeum Digital Collections - Boston MA This searchable image repository offers over 13,000 partial and fully digitized items from the Boston Athenæum's collections of rare books, prints, photographs, maps, archives, etc. It is a dynamic database with new materials added frequently.
- Harvard Art Museums - Cambridge MA Ever since their founding, the Harvard Art Museums—the Fogg Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, and Arthur M. Sackler Museum—have been dedicated to advancing and supporting learning at Harvard University, in the local community, and around the world.
- Butler Institute of American Art The Butler is unique among museums. It exists to collect and preserve works of art in all media created by citizens of this country. From the crowning pieces of its permanent collection to the temporary exhibits, a walk through the Butler is a walk through American history.
- de Young Museum - San Francisco CA The de Young’s American art collection, spanning from the 17th century to the present day, is the most comprehensive survey collection of American art in the American West, and is among the top 10 collections nationally that encompass the entire history of non-indigenous American art.
- Heard Museum (Native American art) - Phoenix AZ The Heard Museum art collection concentrates on the lives of Native peoples and consists of more than 40,000 objects. The two focal areas of the collection are comprehensive cultural collections from the Greater Southwest and contemporary native fine art from North America. Key collections include Hopi katsina dolls; Navajo and Zuni jewelry, Navajo textiles, Southwestern ceramics from prehistory to the present and baskets from the Southwest, California, the Great Basin and the Northwest.
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA The Art of the Americas department studies, presents, and cares for the paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts made throughout North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean by artists from many cultures and nations. Spanning 3,000 years, from the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica to the modern art capitals of Mexico City and New York, these objects embody the essential human desire to create meaning and beauty through art and craft, a drive shared by artists free and enslaved, trained and self-taught, immigrant and indigenous.
- PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts - Philadelphia PA With over 16,000 works, PAFA's ever-evolving and internationally renowned permanent collection ranges from 18th- and 19th-century masters Benjamin West, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Mary Cassatt, to modern and contemporary artists including Charles Demuth, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Mickalene Thomas, Andy Warhol, and Kehinde Wiley.
- National Portrait Gallery The mission of the National Portrait Gallery is to tell the story of America by portraying the people who shape the nation’s history, development and culture. Our collections present people of remarkable character and achievement. These Americans—artists, politicians, scientists, inventors, activists, and performers—form our national identity.
- SAAM (Smithsonian American Art Museum) - Washington DC The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the nation’s first collection of American art, is an unparalleled record of the American experience. The collection captures the aspirations, character, and imagination of the American people throughout three centuries. The museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world. Its artworks reveal key aspects of America’s rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today.
- Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections (Smithsonian) Welcome to the Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections, a virtual repository of a substantial cross-section of the Archives' most significant collections. Since 2005, over 240 archival collections have been digitized and posted online comprising 2.9 million images. In addition, nearly 18,000 documents have been individually cataloged and are accessible through the Search and Browse interface. We invite you to browse and to visit again: content is continuously added.
- Smithsonian Collections Search Center - Washington DC The Smithsonian Collections Search Center is an online catalog containing most of Smithsonian major collections from our museums, archives, libraries, and research units. There are 17.5 million catalog records relating to areas for Art & Design, History & Culture, and Science & Technology with over 7.5 million images, videos, audio files, podcasts, blog posts and electronic journals.
- Archives of American Gardens (Smithsonian) The Archives of American Gardens, part of the Smithsonian Gardens, includes a collection of approximately 60,000 photographic images and records that document historic and contemporary gardens throughout the United States. The images, which depict views from colonial times to the present, include a considerable range of garden features such as furniture and ornamentation, as well as all manner of design styles.
- Archives of American Art (Smithsonian) The Archives of American Art is the world’s preeminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America.
- Art Inventories Catalog (Smithsonian) The Smithsonian American Art Museum's research databases -- the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture -- provide descriptive data on over 400,000 artworks in public and private collections worldwide.
- Whitney Museum of American Art - New York NY As the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists.
- Winterthur Museum Collections - Winterthur, DE Winterthur is the premier museum of American decorative arts, with an unparalleled collection of nearly 90,000 objects made or used in America since 1640. The collection is displayed in the magnificent 175-room house, much as it was when the family of founder Henry Francis du Pont called it home.
Exhibition catalogues (selected)
The Modern West : American landscapes, 1890-1950 by
A fascinating and novel exploration of the transformative role played by the American West in the development of modernism in the United States Drawing extensively from various disciplines including ethnology, geography, geology, and environmental studies, this groundbreaking book addresses shifting concepts of time, history, and landscape in relation to the work of pioneering American artists during the first half of the 20th century. Paintings, watercolors, and photographs by renowned artists such as Frederic Remington, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, Dorothea Lange, and Jackson Pollock are considered alongside American Indian ledger drawings, tempuras, and Dineh sandpaintings. Taken together, these works document the quest to create a specifically American art in the decades prior to World War II. The Modern West begins with a captivating meditation on the relationship between human culture and the physical landscape by Barry Lopez, who traveled the West in the artists' footsteps. Emily Ballew Neff then describes the evolving importance of the West for American artists working out a radically new aesthetic response to space and place, from artist-explorers on the turn-of-the-century frontier, to visionaries of a Californian arcadia, to desert luminaries who found in its stark topography a natural equivalent to abstraction. Beautifully illustrated and handsomely designed, this book is essential to anyone interested in the West and the history of modernism in American art.
Location: Mugar Folio N8214.5.U6 N44 2006
Youth and Beauty by
Accompanying a nationally touring exhibition, this critical history of American art of the 1920s provides a fresh perspective on the strikingly original modernist imagery of the Jazz Age. Youth and Beauty is the first wide-ranging look at American art during the period following the Great War and before the onset of the Great Depression. This richly illustrated volume captures a glimpse into American life during a decade when urbanization, industrialization, and mechanization were revolutionizing the United States. With more than 200 illustrations, the book brings together an array of artists and mediums, featuring iconic and surprising works by Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Aaron Douglas, Alfred Stieglitz, Isamu Noguchi, Charles Sheeler, Man Ray, Walker Evans, and others. The book is arranged by theme: figurative art, landscape, still life and poetry, regional artists, and photography. Teresa A. Carbone addresses figurative types, including portraits, heroic bodies, and erotic forms. Sarah M. Lowe explores photography of the period. Bonnie Costello considers still life in the context of the seminal lyric poetry of the 1920s, and Randall Griffey discusses the Stieglitz School and the Regionalists. Published in association with the Brooklyn Museum
Location: Mugar Stacks N6512 .Y688 2011
A Passion for American Art : selections from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch collection by
A Passion for American Art celebrates the outstanding examples of American painting, furniture and decorative arts, and Native American art from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch collection. Peter Lynch, described in the popular press as a "financial wizard" and "stock-picker extraordinaire," is more soundly characterized as a beloved family man, devout Catholic, effective philanthropist, and passionate collector. This luxuriously illustrated book traces the couple's growth as collectors, their cultural and aesthetic affinities, and their relationships with artists and fellow collectors. Writer Jeanne Schinto offers a profile of the Lynches and a view into how the collection expresses the couple's distinctly American sensibility. Curator Dean Lahikainen shares an introduction to the collection and a series of short essays exploring how the Lynches combined diverse works in the living spaces of their homes. The catalog honors the couple's credo: a reverence for humanity, a love of history, and an appreciation for the beauty and mystery of the natural world.
Location: Mugar Folio N6505.P33 A4 2019
Art in America Guide
Librarian
Museum collection
American Paintings and Sculpture at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute by
68 treasures of Massachusetts museum: Homer, Sargent, Cassatt, Inness, Remington in depth.
Location: Mugar Folio N6505 .C645 1990
