American Art Resources

General American Art Books

A selection of titles available at Crystal Bridges Library and NWA regional Libraries.

Many items located in the catalog can be found at local libraries: Bentonville Public Library, Fayetteville Public Library, Rogers Public Library and Springdale Public Library, and other community libraries. Researcher and community members not affiliated with University of Arkansas can apply for circulation privileges at UA Libraries.

Adult

Craven, Wayne. 1994. American Art: History and Culture. New York: H.N. Abrams.
Available for circulation at Bentonville Public Library

Davidson, Susan. 2007. Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation. London: Merrell.
Available for circulation at Rogers Public Library, and University of Arkansas Libraries

Lewis, Michael J. 2006. American Art and Architecture. London:Thames & Hudson.

Pohl, Frances K. 2002.Framing America: A Social History of American Art. New York, N.Y.: Thames & Hudson.
Available for circulation at NWACC library

Scheller, William. 2008. America, A History in Art: The American Journey Told by Painters, Sculptors, Photographers, and Architects. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers.

Youth

Click here to download a selection of titles available at Crystal Bridges Library and NWA regional libraries

For Kids - Free Online Art Sites

American Memory
Historical Collections from the National Digital Library - with a special "Learning Page" for teachers.
A. Pintura: Art Detective
Architect Studio 3D, from the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust
Art and Social Issues in American Culture
Cartoon Collection from the Library of Congress
Campfire Stories with George Catlin
A virtual journey to meet American Indians of the 1830s with artist, ethnologist, and showman George Catlin.
Colonial Williamsburg online
Color in MotionDestination: Modern Art
George Washington: A National Treasure
Hall of Presidents from The National Portrait Gallery
Haring Kids
Inside Art
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
An interactive featuring John Trumbull's paintings, the cornerstone of the American Art Collection from the Yale University Art Gallery.
Martin Johnson Heade for Kids from The National Gallery of ART
My Art Gallery
SmART Kids
Smithsonian American Art Museum online
Tall Buildings
The Art of Video Games
The Art Zone from the NGA
The Artist's Toolkit
The Great American Landmarks Adventure
A trip through time and space. You'll see 43 National Historic Landmarks arranged by Heritage Preservation Services, National Park Service
Virtual Field Trip: Over the Line-The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence

Colonial to Early 19th Century Art

Bellion, Wendy. 2011. Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Elliot Bostwick Davis, Fronia E. Wissman, Mark Polizzotti, and Emiko K. Usui. 2010. A New World Imagined : Art of the Americas. Boston: MFA Publications.

Hudson River School

Bell, Adrienne Baxter, and George Inness. 2003.George Inness and the Visionary Landscape. New York: National Academy of Design.

Durand, A. B., Linda S. Ferber, Barbara Dayer Gallati, Marilyn S. Kushner, and Barbara Novak. 2010. The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886). Madrid: Fundación Juan March, in association with.

Howat, John K., and Frederic Edwin Church. 2005. Frederic Church. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lewis, Tom. 2005. The Hudson: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Millhouse, Barbara Babcock. 2007. American Wilderness: The Story of the Hudson River School of Painting. Hensonville, N.Y.: Black Dome.

New-York Historical Society, and Linda S. Ferber. 2009. The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision. New York: Skira Rizzoli.

Late 19th Century Art

McDermott, Paul D., Ronald E. Grim, and Philip Mobley. 2010. Eye of the Explorer : Views of the Northern Pacific Railroad Survey, 1853-54 Missoula, Mont: Mountain Press Pub. Co.

Wardle, Marian. 2012. The Weir Family, 1820-1920: Expanding the Traditions of American Art. Provo [Utah]: Brigham Young University Museum of Art.

Twentieth Century Art to Mid-Century

Barter, Judith A., Sarah E. Kelly, Denise Mahoney, and Ellen E. Roberts. 2011. The Age of American Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago.

Brennan, Marcia. 2001. Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Collins, Amy Fine. 1990. American Impressionism. New York, N.Y.: Gallery Books.

Tottis, James W. 2007. Life's Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists' Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925. London: Merrell.

Connor, Celeste. 2001. Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924-1934. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Twentieth Century Art after Mid-Century

Agee, William C., Irving Sandler, Karen Wilkin, Alicia Grant Longwell, and Emily Schuchardt Navratil. 2011. American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, De Kooning, and Their Circle, 1927-1942. Andover, Mass: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy.

Siegel, Katy. 2011. Abstract Expressionism. London: Phaidon Press.

Contemporary Art

Birnbaum, Daniel. 2011. Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks. London: Phaidon.

Robertson, Jean, and Craig McDaniel. 2010. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

American Art Periodicals

Available in the Crystal Bridges Library Current Periodicals Section

American Art Periodicals

Subscription Databases

All Museum guests, students, and community members are welcome to use these databases at the Museum Library. Passwords and access available only from Museum Library computers.

University of Arkansas students can access electronic resources using your current UARK user name and password. Non-university users can access selected electronic resources from UA Library public computers.

Arkansas Traveler Databases *Online subscription databases accessible from Museum Library computers and many Arkansas Libraries.

The Arts databases include:

CAMIO (OCLC) 95,000 art images The Catalog of Art Museum Images Online in a separate platform from FirstSearch
Fine Arts and Music Collection (Gale)
Pop Culture Collection (Gale) covers social science, history, art, liberal arts, and
current event

Grove Art Online *A licensed online subscription database only accessible from Museum staff & Library computers. The most comprehensive online reference resource for all aspects of the visual arts worldwide. Grove Art Online features artists' biographies, over 45,000 signed articles, 5,500 images, 40,000 image links, timelines of world art, and MoMA lesson plans.

JSTOR
*A licensed online subscription database only accessible from Museum staff & Library computers. JSTOR is one of the best resources for art publications and includes full-text content of more than 1,300 academic journals, as well as thousands of primary sources in the arts, humanities and other disciplines.

Free Online Resources

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Artgames: Fun activities for kids

American Antiquarian Society Portraits at the American Antiquarian Society
In addition to paintings, miniatures and sculpture, the American Antiquarian Society has a vast collection of portraiture in other forms, including engravings, lithographs, photographs and illustrations.

American Experience PBS
On-air and online, the series brings to life the incredible characters and epic stories that have shaped America’s past and present. American Experience teachers' area allows searching or browsing over 1,500 features from more than 110 American Experience Web sites -- including timelines, primary sources, teacher's guides, maps, galleries, interactives, video, and more -- to find history, civics, and other social studies resources for your classroom.

American Portrait, Princeton University Art Museum

American Realists of the Early 1900s from NGA

American Women through Time  Ken Middleton

American Visions - An eight-part series on American art written and narrated by Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, is both an account of American life and a tribute to American art.

Art 21 A Preeminent chronicler of contemporary art and artists through its Peabody Award-winning biennial television series, Art in the Twenty-First Century. The nonprofit organization has used the power of digital media to introduce millions of people of all ages to contemporary art and artists and has created a new paradigm for teaching and learning about the creative process. Art21 serves educators and their students by providing free materials and programs devoted to the exploration of contemporary art and artists, including the widely distributed Educators' Guides.

Art History through touch and sound online: Art History for the Blind Presents American Art
Accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. Valuable to all. Verbal descriptions and printable tactile diagrams, interpretive sound compositions, art activities, and teaching tips.

ArtCylopedia A fine arts search engine

ArtDaily Today's and last week's art news.

Art Resource A fine art stock photo archive, with more than 450,000 searchable fine art images from the world's leading sources, available for licensing to all media.

Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century: Digitized Highlights from the Libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force
A collaborative project between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. These items allow for a closer look at the movements, artists, and ideas that influenced the founding directors of two of New York City’s most prominent art museums, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Materials include over 60,000 pages of rare and unique American and European art historical texts, art exhibition catalogs, biographies of artists and collectors, philosophical and political treatises, and New York City guides and tourism pamphlets, and range in date from the late 1800s to the 1960s.

The ARTstory, brought to you by The Art Story Foundation
Presents movements, artists, timelines, ideas, and current events in both quick and detailed views.

Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) from the Getty Research Center

Boston College Digital Collections including Becker Collection of American Drawings during the Civil War and The Brooker Collection of American Legal and Land Use Documents 1716-1930

CAMIO from OCLC
CAMIO contains fine art and decorative art from pre-history through contemporary works. All content is rights-cleared for educational use in the classroom or to illustrate papers, Web projects and other assignments.

CITY LIFE--Life of the People (Library of Congress Exhibition)

Clara Database of Women Artists, National Museum of Women in the Arts

Dictionary of Art Historians

Comrads in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938
A narrated online exhibition created by Francis Booth; Web Design by Paul Squire.

Electronic Arts Intermix
(EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that is a leading international resource for video and media art. The Artist Index contains a full list of the artists in the EAI collection and archives.

George and Martha Washington Portraits from the Presidential Years

George Maciunas Foundation, Inc.
George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-born American artist best known as the founder and central coordinator of the art collective Fluxus from 1962 until his untimely death in 1978. As much attitude as art movement, Maciunas’s myriad projects and initiatives extended art beyond traditional territories to encompass socio-cultural investigation with the intent of creating a harmonious society. He is considered to be the “father of SoHo” in New York City because of his initiation of cooperative artist housing in the late 1960s, while the area was a dilapidated post-industrial site.

The Getty Research Institute; including:

• Art & Architecture Thesaurus
• Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA)
• Collections Inventories and Finding Aids
• Digital collections
• Getty Provenance Index
• Research Guides and Bibliographies
• Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)

Google Art Project
Explore museums: virtually move around the museum’s galleries, selecting works of art that interest you.
Artwork View: discover featured artworks at high resolution and use the custom viewer to zoom into paintings.
Create your own collection: a feature that allows you to save specific views of any of the 1000+ artworks and build your own personalized collection.

Harvard Map Collection

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated by the Museum's collection. It is an invaluable reference and research tool for students, educators, scholars, and anyone interested in the study of art history and related subjects.

Hudson River School images from Scholar’s Resource
Free browsing and information but a subscription is needed to order images.

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

The Illustrating Traveler: Adventure and Illustration in North American and the Caribbean1760-1895, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

The Library of Congress American Memory
American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

Making of America from Cornell University Library
A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. A significant body of primary sources related to development of the U.S. infrastructure originally funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

MetPublications

MoMA Red Studio
Red Studio, developed by MoMA in collaboration with high school students, explores issues and questions raised by teens about modern art, today's working artists, and what goes on behind the scenes at a museum.

The Mural in America: Wallpainting in the United States from Pre-History to the Present
An online book by Francis V. O'Connor, Ph.D.

NEA Research Notes National Endowment for the Arts Research Notes, or white papers, are specialized analyses of topics of interest primarily to arts and cultural researchers, policy-makers, and administrators.

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture
A scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

A New Deal for the Arts National Archives

Abstract Expressionists New York

"The Pageant of America" Photograph Archive / NYPL Digital Gallery
Collection history, related resources and images from a variety of NYPL digitized collections.

Rare Book Room

RSAP: Resources on American Periodicals
The RSAP is an interdisciplinary organization of scholars interested in American magazines and newspapers. RSAP offers links to full texts of magazines and newspapers, organizations, museums, universities, and digital exhibitions on the web.

Scholar's Resource
A collection of online images, including images from standard art survey textbooks. Free browsing and information but a subscription is needed to order images.

Sister Wendy's American Collection from PBS
In Sister Wendy's American Collection, the engaging art critic moves beyond the world of daVinci and Monet to explore the wider riches of six of America's greatest museums: Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, Forth Worth's Kimbell Art Museum, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Online content includes background information of works of art and artists highlighted in the series and classroom hints.

SmartHistory.org
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. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker began smARThistory in 2005 by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

SIRIS: Smithsonian Institution Research Information System; including:

• Smithsonian American Art Museum Resources and Tours
• Smithsonian Archives of American Art
• Smithsonian Archives of American Gardens
• Smithsonian Art Inventories
• Smithsonian Catalog of American Portraits

Tables for Ladies: Edward Hopper's Women

Terra Foundation for American Art, American Art Resources for Teachers

Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections (Smithsonian Archives of American Art)
Contains digitized collections on many major American artists

WAAND: The Women Artists Archives National Directory
An innovative web directory to U.S. archival collections of primary source materials by and about women visual artists active in the U.S. since 1945.

What is a Print. MoMA
An interactive and engaging online learning object explaining the intricacies of printmaking; including woodcut, etching, lithography and screenprint.

The World’s Fairs and the Landscapes of the Modern Metropolis—Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library