Faculty of Arts
Department of Art and Art History
Art and Art History
Archives of American Art: Smithsonian Institution
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, is an excellent image collection containing over 8,000 photographs, sketches, letters, and other documents that have been scanned and individually described.
Licence: Please refer to the licence applied to each individual resource as some are within the Public Domain and free to use, while others continue to be restricted use.
Art Canada
The Canadian Online Art Book Project is a growing digital library of original books commissioned by the Art Canada Institute, on artists who have made a critical contribution to the evolution of the nation’s art history. Each year the ACI releases new titles in this program.
Licence: Please note that while this resource is free to use, it is not licensed for reuse.
Art History Archive
The Art History Archive is a learning object repository and an Educational Database Library (EDL) providing educators and students with more comprehensive information about artistic movements, art groups, and specific artists.
Licence: Please note that, though free, this resource is not licensed for reuse.
Art History (Boundless) (LibreTexts)
Available through LibreTexts, this textbook and associated course content offer an introduction to art history.
Includes: Lecture slides, quiz questions
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Art History I (Lumen Learning)
This course is from Lumen Learning, and offered through SUNY.
Licence: Various CC licences applied
Art History II (Lumen Learning))
This course is from Lumen Learning, and offered through SUNY.
Licence: Various CC licences applied
Art History Teaching Resources
AHTR is home to a constantly evolving and collectively authored online repository of art history teaching content including, but not limited to, lesson plans, video introductions to museums, book reviews, image clusters, and classroom and museum activities.
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0 for website content, unless otherwise noted.
ArtxHistory
A space facilitated by institutions, historians, curators, artists, faculty, and students who are committed to delivering quality scholarship that is accessible, inclusive, and open.
Includes: Timeline, videos, and sound recordings
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
The Book of Small by Emily Carr [New]
The Book of Small (1942) is a novel by Canadian author and painter Emily Carr. It is an early childhood memoir consisting of thirty-six word sketches in which the author relates anecdotes about her life as a young girl living in Victoria, BC [Description from resource].
Licence: CC 0 (Public Domain)
The Bright Continent: African Art History
This textbook offers an introduction to African art history and provides tools for discussing and analysing African art.
Includes: Further reading
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library
CanadARThistories
CanadARThistories, a new online course and its associated open learning objects, addresses growing concerns around inclusion, regionalism, Indigenization, and internationalization in art history curricula, and is conceived as a response to these ideas. The course highlights the rich visual and material culture of this land through a series of entries, written by subject experts, that focus on the artistic contributions of Indigenous and settler makers. It can be further shaped and reshaped to challenge and redistribute the traditional, chronological, and rigid narratives of Canadian art and to encourage learners to be co-constructors of knowledge. The course supports a second-year undergraduate survey of art in Canada (Description from resource).
Includes: thematic modules, teacher resources
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access
The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA)’s Open Access Project, launched Jan. 23, 2019, and provides everyone with free, Open Access to 30,000+ high definition images of artworks in CMA’s collection. In addition, CMA provides metadata behind 90,000+ artworks allowing for scholarly research.
Licence: Please review the licensing applied to individual resources to ensure appropriate use.
Discover Art & Artists | Open Access at The Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago has adopted an Open Access Policy on Oct. 23 2018 making 44,300+ public domain works in their collection accessible openly, making these images freely accessible and available for use, sharing, and remixing without restriction by the general public worldwide.
Licence: CC0 Public Domain, unless otherwise noted (Note: Make sure available image has CC0 Public Domain Designation.)
Guide to Ancient Aegean Art
This book from Smarthistory covers Ancient Aegean art, including Cycladic, Minoan, and Mycenaean art.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library
Guide to Ancient Egyptian Art
This book from Smarthistory covers ancient Egyptian art.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library
Guide to Ancient Etruscan Art
This book from Smarthistory covers ancient Etruscan art.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library
This book from Smarthistory covers ancient Greek art.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library
Guide to Ancient Near Eastern Art
This book from Smarthistory covers Sumerian, Akkadian, Neo-Sumerian / Ur III, Babylonian, Assyrian and Persian art.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Guide to Ancient Roman Art
This book from Smarthistory covers ancient Roman art.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library
Guide to Byzantine Art
This book from Smarthistory covers Byzantine art.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library
Guide to Italian Art in the 1300s
This book contains all of Smarthistory’s content for Italian art in the 1300s.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Guide to Italian Art in the 1400s
This book contains all of Smarthistory’s content for Italian art in the 1400s.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library
Indianapolis Museum of Art: Image Collection
Many images of public domain artworks are available for free download from the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields’ collection pages.
Licence: Please note that most resources on this website are free to use but not licensed for reuse, so each must be checked individually.
Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning
Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning offers a comprehensive introduction to the world of Art. Authored by four USG faculty members with advance degrees in the arts, this textbooks offers up-to-date original scholarship. It includes over 400 high-quality images illustrating the history of art, its technical applications, and its many uses. Combining the best elements of both a traditional textbook and a reader, it introduces such issues in art as its meaning and purpose; its meaning and purpose; its structure, material, and form; and its diverse effects on our lives. Its digital nature allows students to follow links to applicable sources and videos, expanding the students’ educational experiences beyond the textbook. Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning provides a new and free alternative to traditional textbooks, making it an invaluable resource in our modern age of technology and advancement (Description from resource).
Includes: Key terms, reflection questions
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0
Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library
Jacob Lawrence in Seattle
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is widely recognized as one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. He is best known for epic multi-panel narratives like the Migration Series (1940-1941) and Struggle: from the History of the American People (1954-56), which he created as a young artist living and working in in New York City. The second half of Lawrence’s career, which he spent in Seattle as a Professor of Art at the University of Washington, has received far less attention. The essays in this volume, researched and written by the participants in the Spring 2021 art history seminar “Art and Seattle: Jacob Lawrence” at the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design, fill in this gap. In so doing, we take our lead from the artist’s own framing of the Seattle period as a critical stage in his artistic development, in which conceptual and formal concerns explored across his long career converged and became more of the sum of their parts (Description from resource).
Includes: course syllabus
Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Images are licensed separately as indicated
Making and Being
This hands-on guide includes activities, worksheets, and assignments and is a critical resource for artists and art educators today. Making and Being is a book, a series of videos, a deck of cards, and an interactive website with freely downloadable content (click on links below to download worksheets, activities, and chapters as PDFs and editable Google Docs).
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0
Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives
Licence: CC BY 4.0
Moving Pictures: An Introduction to Cinema
A free and open-source introduction to the art and science of moving pictures, offering in-depth exploration of how cinema communicates, and what, exactly, it is trying to say (Description from resource). This textbook is designed for an introductory film studies course.
Includes: Embedded videos
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Reviews: Available through the Open Textbook Library
19th Century European Art History: Short Histories of Major Art Movements and Select Artists from ART 305 [New]
What happens when a class shares their collective knowledge about their subject, rather than hiding it away and stuffing it down in individual memory? A textbook that is formed by the meeting of the minds! As part of the ART 305 19th Century European Art History move to online during the pandemic, a collective project was born: creating a digital open-education resource, free to any who choose to access it, and a way for the individuals in class to be part of a greater community in an online learning environment. With some chapters authored by the instructor of the class and others created by the students as a result of their term’s research, this text is a growing document that will encompass past, present, and future learners as their collective body of knowledge grows. Within the parameters of 19th Century European Art History this text begins with the influence and beginnings of change during the Rococo era in France and progresses through time until the beginning of the 20th century. Each chapter marks a specific era or a specific artist and chapters are individually authored [Description from resource].
Includes: student authored content, self-reflection questions
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
Obelisk Art History
Obelisk can be used as a textbook for art history or as a resource to support one. More than 100 universities and colleges around the world send students here to dig into the timeline of art and tackle basics like composition and history methodologies.
Includes: Timeline, world map
Licence: Please note that while the website is free to use, it is not licensed for reuse as an OER.
Open Arts Objects
Open Arts Objects (OAO) is an open access platform which provides over 50 free films to support the teaching of Art History. This platform is available through the Open Arts Archive hosted by the Art History Department at the Open University (Descriptions from resource).
A Quick and Dirty Guide to Art, Music, and Culture
An open textbook by The Ohio State University that discusses art and music in the context of popular culture. It is meant to work with the open course Art and Music Since 1945.
Includes: Assignments, supplementary course materials.
Licence: CC BY 4.0
A World Perspective of Art Appreciation (LibreTexts)
Available through LibreTexts, Art appreciation is centered on the ability to view art throughout history, focusing on the cultures and the people, and how art developed in the specific periods. You cannot understand art without understanding the culture, their use of materials and sense of beauty. Art is also conveyed by the simple act of creating art for art’s sake. Every person is born with the innate desire to create art and similar to other professions, training is essential in honing skills to produce art.
Includes: Glossary, images, and videos
Licence: CC BY 4.0
Visual Studies
Art Appreciation (Lumen Learning)
This course from Lumen Learning investigates how quality is determined and created by artists in order to evaluate and appreciate art on a deeper level, and emphasizes why each topic contributes to valuing a piece of art and provides the necessary knowledge to do so. Students are first introduced to the elements and principles of art and the importance of artists’ context and perspective. The course then covers different periods in art history, different techniques in art, and how to research and evaluate art.
Licence: Various CC licences
Art Appreciation Open Educational Resources
From East Tennessee State University, this course explores the world’s visual arts, focusing on the development of visual awareness, assessment, and appreciation by examining a variety of styles from various periods and cultures while emphasizing the development of a common visual language. The materials are meant to foster a broader understanding of the role of visual art in human culture and experience from the prehistoric through the contemporary.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
Art History I (Lumen Learning)
This course is from Lumen Learning, and offered through SUNY.
Licence: Various CC licences
Art History Teaching Resources
AHTR is a peer-populated platform for art history teachers and home to a constantly evolving and collectively authored online repository of art history teaching content including, but not limited to, lesson plans, video introductions to museums, book reviews, image clusters, and classroom and museum activities. The site promotes discussion and reflection around new ways of teaching and learning in the art history classroom through a peer-populated blog, and fosters a collaborative virtual community for art history instructors at all career stages.
Licence: CC BY-NC
ARTH 101: Art Appreciation
This course from Saylor, is an exploration of visual art forms and their cultural connections across historical periods, designed for the student with little experience in the visual arts. It includes brief studies in art history, and in-depth inquiry into the elements, media and methods used in a wide range of creative processes.
Licence: CC BY
ArtxHistory
An educational resource of commonly available images, videos, mini-lectures and scholarship of the decades which influenced or defined the mid-century through contemporary art. Most links are concise in content, of prevalent works of art in the early or mature stage of an artist’s career, sourced from museum, academic, journalistic and for profit institutions. The core intent is to offer an art history that replaces the dominant white, male, heteronormative, advantaged, celebrity narratives for a more inclusive history balanced with the work of women, artists of color, LGBTQIA+ persons, intersectional makers, and the self-taught.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
The Bright Continent: African Art History
This book aims to act as your map through the world of African art. As such, it will help you define the competencies you need to develop–visual analysis, research, noting what information is critical, asking questions, and writing down your observations–and provide opportunities for you to practice these skills until you are proficient. It will also expose you to new art forms and the worlds that produced them, enriching your understanding and appreciation.
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
WISC-Online Visual Arts Learning Objects
A collection of learning objects on topics related to visual arts.
Licence: CC BY-NC
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