Visual Arts Research Guide: Websites

Created by South Carolina architect, Jon (Twingi) Sojkowski, this resource has many cultural images from every country in Africa.

Documents the field of digital installation art. The site is a research-oriented overview of immersive, interactive, telematic and genetic art has been developed in cooperation with established media artists, researchers and institutions. The web-based, cost-free instrument - appropriate to the needs of process art - allows individuals to post material themselves. Compiling video documentation, technical data, interfaces, displays, and literature offers a unique answer to the needs of the field. All works can be linked with exhibiting institutions, events and bibliographical references. Interlinked data serves as a predecessor for the crucial systematic preservation of this art.

Staging and posing Barbie dolls in art galleries and museums to draw attention to, and ask questions about, gender representation, inequalities and injustices.

Founded in 2013, the Canadian Online Art Book Project is a growing digital library of books–all original works commissioned by the Art Canada Institute–by the country’s leading art experts on artists who have made a critical contribution to the evolution of the nation’s art history.

AICT is a royalty-free image exchange resource that was developed by Allan T. Kohl at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Use of these images and their related information in a scholarly publication is and appreciated but is not a legal requirement.

Artists In Canada is an independently managed directory and was formed in 2000 to support and better connect Canadian artists and art galleries.

Project was established in 2021 and a majority of content covers the 1960s and subsequent decades. The site is facilitated by institutions, historians, curators, artists, faculty and students who are committed to deliver quality scholarship that is accessible, inclusive and open.

Co-founded in 2014 by Camille Morineau, art historian and specialist in the history of women artists. Its goal is the creation, indexation and distribution of information on women artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Some images are downloadable - see the museum's copyright and permissions at https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permissions.

This work is a free online course with academic essays that address inclusion, regionalism, Indigenization, and internationalization in Canadian art history. Many of these readings are also published on the Smarthistory website

Based in the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, this resource is a collaborative endeavour that fosters and circulates scholarly research into women’s contributions to the cultural and material history of Canada.

This resource documents some of Canada's leading professional artists, designers, art writers and curators, as well as some important Canadian art institutions and organizations that have helped shape the Canadian art scene since the 1960s. The database was established in 1997 and is now permanently housed at Concordia University, under the auspices of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.

This is a free, privately funded biographical dictionary of historians of western art written and maintained by scholars.

This collection is managed by the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago.

The Getty Foundation worked with 8 museums to develop free online art catalogs: Art Institute of Chicago, Freer Gallery of Artand Arthur M Sackler Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Museum of Art, Tate, Walker Art Center

More than 150,000 (free for educational use images ( artists' sketchbooks, photographs of Mayan and Aztec ruins, Italian art and architecture, etc.) from the Getty Research Institute. Content is from various time periods worldwide.

This collection contains more than 300 freely downloadable visual arts books.

This resource is maintained by the Library and Archives at the National Gallery of Canada. It houses the most extensive collection of visual arts literature in Canada, which traces the development of visual arts in the country since the founding of the National Gallery in 1880 to the present

Collection of digitized and digital born materials from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

This resource is a wiki for the arts, media and humanities and contains open education resources. Initially a media art research initiative, Monoskop gradually expanded toward avant-garde media studies. Monoskop was established in 2004 by Dušan Barok as part of the Burundi collective.

Located in Washington, DC, this resource includes online collections of art and artist profiles.

Open Art Histories (OAH) is a platform initially developed by faculty in art, art history, visual art, and museum studies from from five Canadian post secondary institutions. OAH offers a dynamic and collaborative space for Open Education Resources (OERs), and serves as a virtual community and repository for art and art history instructors at all stages of their academic and professional careers.

This was was founded by The Open University and Museums and Archives Council in 2010. It provides free access to a wealth of artistic, cultural and educational resources, including talks, seminars, study days, artists’ podcasts, artist interviews, curators’ talks and exhibitions.

SK Arts (Saskatchewan Arts Board) has a very large collection of provincially based visual art.

Saskatchewan Network for Art Collecting (NAC) launched in 2012 and includes a database of hundreds of Saskatchewan visual artist biographies.

The Center for Public Art History was established in 2005 and it has more than 500 contributors to world art history. There are more than 3000 items and videos.

A list of open education resources (OER) that include textbooks and videos organized by faculty and department at the University of Regina.

VADS is managed by the University for the Creative Arts, UK. This is a growing resource of over 140,000 images from over 300 visual art collections.

Managed by the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities at
Rutgers University, this online collection holds primary source documents of and about women visual artists in the U.S. since 1945.