LibGuides: AH 101 Introduction to Art History & Visual Culture: Home

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Stephanie Frontz

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Art/Music Library
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
585-275-4476

Subjects: Art & Art History, Dance, Film & Media Studies, Music, Visual & Cultural Studies

Resources for Intro to Art History & Visual Culture

Articles, Books & More
Articles, Books & More searches much of the library's content in a single search. It's a good place to start looking for books, articles and films, etc. on a topic.

Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
Full text encyclopedia of visual arts from prehistory to present. Includes many links to images.
Create a personal profile to save content and annotations.

Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art by James Hall; Kenneth Clark
Call Number: Art/Music Library -- Reserves N7560 .H34 2008
ISBN: 9780813343938
Publication Date: 2014-03-01
The understanding and enjoyment of a work of art depends as much on the story it depicts as on the artist's execution of it. But what were once biblical or classical commonplaces are not so readily recognizable today. This book relates in a succinct and readable way the themes, sacred and secular, on which the repertoire of Western art is based.
Magnum opus : the story of the Memorial Art Gallery : 1913-1988 by Elizabeth Brayer
Call Number: Art Stacks - Art/Music Library Call Number: N719 .B73 1988
ISBN: 0918098025
Publication Date: 1988
Memorial Art Gallery by Susan D. Peters (Editor); Grant Holcomb (Foreword by)
Call Number: Art Stacks - Art/Music Library Call Number: N719 .A58 1988 On Reserve
ISBN: 1555950191
Publication Date: 1989-01-01
Seeing America by University of Rochester Staff (Created by); Marjorie B. Searl (Editor)
Call Number: Art Stacks - Art/Music Library Call Number: N719 .A67 2006 On Reserve
ISBN: 1580462448
Publication Date: 2006-08-15
Seeing America is the first-ever catalog of the University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery's American collection. Founded in 1913, the Memorial Art Gallery was created in conjunction with the University of Rochester so that it would function within a scholarly milieu, yet at the same time perform service as a community museum.
Art and Visual Culture
Call Number: Art Stacks - Art/Music Library Call Number: N5300 .A78 2012
ISBN: 9781849760485
Publication Date: 2013-02-12
This collection of primary texts is organized in three parts, including extracts from Vasari, Panofsky, Ruskin, and more, on topics from sacred art to landscape design and the birth of modernity.
Art and Visual Culture 1850-2010 by Steve Edwards (Editor); Paul Wood (Editor)
Call Number: Art Stacks - Art/Music Library Call Number: N6450 .A768 2012
ISBN: 9781849760973
Publication Date: 2013-02-12
The essays in this volume engage directly with topical issues around art and gender, globalization, cultural difference, and curating, as well as explorations of key artists and movements and some less well-documented work by contemporary artists.
Black Visual Culture by Gen Doy
Call Number: Art Stacks - Art/Music Library Call Number: N6768 .D69 2000
ISBN: 1860643825
Publication Date: 2000-01-15
This book presents a critical introduction to the work of contemporary black American and British artists, including Chris Ofili, Isaac Julien, Keith Piper, Rasheed Areen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Roshini Kempadoo, and Anish Kapoor. One important element is its discussion of cultural criticism of the foremost writers in the field, such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer and Homi K. Bhaba.
Cultural Theory by Peter Sedgwick (Editor); Andrew Edgar (Editor)
Call Number: Art Reference HM621 .K49 2002
ISBN: 0415284260
Publication Date: 2002-07-05
This comprehensive volume allows students to quickly and accurately come to grips with the key terms encountered in cultural theory today. In addition to the suggestions for further reading which accompany all major entries, this work also features a useful bibliography of essential texts in cultural theory.
Digital Visual Culture by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel (Editor); Trish Cashen (Editor); Hazel Gardiner (Editor)
Call Number: Art Stacks - Art/Music Library Call Number: N7433.8 .D535 2009
ISBN: 9781841502489
Publication Date: 2009-04-15
Digital Visual Culture presents the latest research into the relationship between theory and practice across digital media and technology in the visual arts and investigates the challenges of contemporary research and art curation, particularly in regard to new media artworks. The contributors to this volume discuss the impact of technological advances on visual art and the new art practices that are developing as a result.
Visual Culture by Marquardt Smith (Editor); Joanne Morra (Editor)
Call Number: Art Stacks - Art/Music Library Call Number: P93.5 .V54 2006
ISBN: 0415326419
Publication Date: 2006-03-21
Incorporates a number of different visual practices including art, design, performance, architecture, film and photography. This study of visual culture is interdisciplinary, deriving in part from the art history that emerged in the 1980s, the studies of design and material culture, and film.

Art Retrospective This link opens in a new window
Identifies older articles (1929-1984) on the visual arts and architecture.

ARTbibliographies Modern This link opens in a new window
Identifies articles, books, dissertations and exhibition catalogs on art from Impressionism to present.
Arts & Humanities Citation Index This link opens in a new window
Identifies articles and cited references in selected arts and humanities journals.
Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Identifies articles on architecture and design, history of architecture, city planning.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full text articles in many disciplines. To access JSTOR you may need to login with VPN .
Subject areas include African-American studies, anthropology, Asian studies, business, ecology, economics, education, finance, history, literature, mathematics, philosophy, political science, population studies, sociology, statistics. The University of Rochester Libraries currently subscribes to the following multidisciplinary JSTOR Collections: Arts and Sciences I through XV. JSTOR also packages their content in disciplinary collections; however, the only ones of these that we have licensed are the Biological Sciences segment and the first of the Business collections. For alumni access, see also Alumni Library Gateway.
ProQuest Research This link opens in a new window
Identifies articles on all topics, many with links to full text. Includes articles in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals, news, trade journals and more.
Identifies articles on all topics, many with links to full text. Includes articles in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals, news, trade journals and more

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
Over 1,000,000 images covering art, architecture,fashion and archeology. Software tools support teaching and research.
including: viewing and analyzing images through features such as zooming and panning, saving groups of images online for personal or shared uses, and creating and delivering presentations both online and offline.
Visual Resources Collection Database This link opens in a new window
A collection of about 40,000 images of various works of art, created locally by the Visual Resources Collection of the Art & Art History Department.
Requires NetID and password for use on and off campus.

American Memory Project (Library of Congress)
The Library of Congress offers access to a portion of its photography collection and other historical document collections
AP Images
Containing the Associated Press' photos, most since 1995, and a selection of pictures from their image library.
Getty Digital Collections
Digital collections that feature areas of special collections from the Research Library are available online. Digital collections may complement a Research Institute exhibition or focus on a particular artist, subject, collection, or group of collections. In addition to images and other media, they may include contextual and historical information and links to related resources both inside and outside the Getty.
Getty Images
Getty Images, the world's largest photo agency, has made up to 35 million photos free to use, in an effort to combat piracy, through their new "embed tool. Images can also be shared on social media sites Twitter and Tumblr.
Google Advanced Image Search
Allows you to limit your search by size, color, aspect ratio, usage rights and more.
Google Art Project
Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.
Internet Archive Book Images
flickr has partnered with the Internet Archive to display all images from their books scanned in separate image searches. The flickr site allows you to then look at all the images in that one book (where the one image was found) or read the text of that book.
Life Magazine images
An online photo gallery, hosted by Google, that features millions of images from Life magazine's archives.
Metis
Photographs of sites in Greece and Turkey, with plans.
Metropolitan Museum’s Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC)
More than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works in the Museum’s collection may be downloaded directly from the Museum’s website for non-commercial use—including in scholarly publications in any media—without permission from the Museum and without a fee.
Pond5 The Public Domain Project
Thousands of historic media files for your creative projects, completely free.
Rochester Images
Database includes 22,000 historical and contemporary images from Rochester and Monroe County. Images were chosen from the collections of the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County Local History Division, the City of Rochester Municipal Archives and City Hall Photo Lab, the Rochester Museum & Science Center, the Town of Brighton Historian's Office, the Town of Perinton Historian's Office, the Village of East Rochester Historian's Office and the Village of Hilton Historian's Office.
Smithsonian Institution: Open F|S
More than 40,000 works being made available for high-resolution download from the Freer and Sackler Galleries Digitized Collections and the Freer Study Collection.
Wellcome Images
Thousands of years of visual culture made free through Wellcome Images; over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.
Yale Center for British Art
The recent release of more than 22,000 additional high-resolution digital images of works in the public domain have been added to the Yale Center for British Art's collection. This new release contains a treasure trove of images of over 1,700 prints after works by .J. M. W. Turner, as well as masterpieces by William Blake, Thomas Rowlandson, and others. Under Yale University’s Open Access Policy, anyone may use the Center’s digital images of public domain material without any application, authorization, or fees due to the Center or to Yale.

MagArt search
Online database of selected works in the Memorial Art Gallery collection.

WorldCat This link opens in a new window
Identifies and locates books and other materials owned by libraries in the US and internationally.
Use WorldCat to locate materials outside of UR, in all disciplines and formats, or to locate items in specific libraries and research collections.

tags: firstsearch, first search, world cat

Getty Research Portal
The Getty Research Portal™ is a free online search platform providing worldwide access to an extensive collection of digitized art history texts from a range of institutions. This multilingual and multicultural union catalog affords art historians and other researchers the ability to search and download complete digital copies of publications devoted to art, architecture, material culture, and related fields.

If you don't locate what you need using the Moving Images tab, which restricts the search to those items in the River Campus Libraries and also those streaming via the River Campus Libraries, search for DVDs and videotapes in the Art/Music Library, the Memorial Art Gallery Library and the Sibley Music Library, as well as streaming video titles, using Articles, Books and More from the library homepage. Use the limit feature to restrict to Video- Recordings or Video-Streaming.

Streaming Video Databases
Collection of databases of streaming video on a variety of subjects from Archival film to Dance, Ethnography, Shakespeare and Psychology and beyond.

The Art of Writing about Art by Suzanne Hudson; Nancy Noonan-Morrisey
ISBN: 128544258X
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
THE ART OF WRITING ABOUT ART serves as a quick reference for students writing various types of essays, research papers, exhibition reviews, and even examinations. The premise of the book is that students in all disciplines, not just English, should be required to write well and that their instructors should hold these writing assignments to high standards. THE ART OF WRITING ABOUT ART not only emphasizes skills in college-level composition, but also in verbalizing the experience of art -- the historical, social, economic, and political forces that shape art and artists; art theory; and the interplay between artist and viewer.

Chicago Manual of Style 17th ed.
The Chicago Manual of Style Online is the venerable, time-tested guide to style, usage, and grammar in an accessible online format.

A Short Guide to Writing about Art by Sylvan Barnet
Call Number: N7476 .B37 2015 (currently on Reserve Art/Music Library)
ISBN: 020588699X
Publication Date: 2014-01-15
A Short Guide to Writing About Art guides students through every aspect of writing about art, from . how to analyze pictures (drawings, paintings, photographs), sculptures and architecture, to the tools they need to present their ideas through effective writing. Coverage of essential writing assignments includes formal analysis, comparison, research paper, review of an exhibition, and essay examination. New to the 11th edition is a chapter on "Virtual Exhibitions: Writing Text Panels and Other Materials."
Writing about Art by Henry M. Sayre
Call Number: ArtStack N7476.S29 2009
ISBN: 9780205645787
Publication Date: 2008-07-10
This straightforward guide prepares students to describe, interpret, and write about works of art in meaningful and lasting terms. Designed as a supplement to Art History survey and period texts, this efficient book features a step-by-step approach to writing-from choosing a work to write about, to essay organization, to research techniques, to footnote form, to preparing the final essay. For beginners as well as more advanced students.

Writing and Citing
A list of links, put together by the UR Libraries, to helpful writing and citation tools

Copyright and Fair Use at the University of Rochester
Association of Research Libraries Code of Best Practices in Fair Use
Published in 2012. This document covers all areas of copyright and fair use in academic libraries, including the use of illustrations in dissertations and theses.
CAA Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts
Created by the College Art Association and published in February 2015
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.
From the Center for Social Media, American University.
Copyright Genie
Created with the support of the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology. Answers some questions about a specific work and the tool will give you information regarding its copyright status.