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Art

The study of Art involves the theory and practice of visual communication for personal expression and public interaction within the contexts of critical thinking and broad-based social perspectives.

Find Background Information || Find Articles || Core Journals || Find Books || Find Images || Find Web Sites || Style Guides

Find Background Information — Reference Materials

Dictionaries, encyclopedias, guides, and handbooks are excellent resources for gaining an overview of an unfamiliar subject. Entries in these sources explain concepts, terminology, points of view, and offer historical perspective. Annotated bibliographies and indexes offer a comprehensive listing of works about the subject, with a short description of each, as a guide for further research. The library holds many more relevant titles than those listed here, so browsing the shelves near these resources can be very helpful. Databases are also valuable resources for finding background information.

Art in the Modern Era (McH Ref) N6490.D416 2002
A guide to styles, schools, and movements from 1860 to the present.

Dictionary of Art (McH Ref) N31.D5 1996

Grove Dictionary of Art Online
A dictionary of art, art terms, and artists including biographical references. Articles with external image links cover all aspects of the visual arts. Also includes a searchable index to the Bridgeman Art Library of online images. Subject areas: art and art history. Covers: prehistory - present.

Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists (McH Ref) N33.L353 2000
Covers all aspects of Western art from 1300 to the present, with descriptions of artistic styles and individual artists; cross-referenced entries describe and explain technical processes, theory, schools, movements, patrons and collecting.

Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms
Available online to eligible UC library patrons, and is also available in print at (McH Ref) N33.C575 2001.

Dictionary of Art Titles (McH Ref) N33.R56 2000

Dictionary of Women Artists (McH Ref) N8354.D53 1997

Encyclopedia of Artists (McH Ref) N31.E53 2000

Feminist Art Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography (McH Ref) N72.F45L36 1993

Index to Artistic Biography (2nd supplement) (McH Ref) N40.H38 2002

Oxford Dictionary of Art (McH Ref) N33.O93 2004

Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts (McH Ref) N72.H64Q44 2004

St. James Guide to Black Artists (McH Ref) N40.S78 1997

Find Journal Articles

Search the following article indexes and databases by art topic (artist, genre, style, medium, or other art topics). All online resources are available by connecting to the Library Research Web page (http://library.ucsc.edu/research.html) and searching for the resource by title.

The UC-eLinks icon in most online databases will lead you to the text of journal articles when available, the call numbers for print copies of journals, and forms for requesting items through Interlibrary Loan (ILL) if USCC doesn't own the journal. See the UC-eLinks Guide at http://library.ucsc.edu/ref/howto/elinks.html for more information. Eligible patrons can connect to article databases from off campus using Off Campus Access (oca.ucsc.edu).

ARTbibliographies Modern (ABM) provides full abstracts of journal articles, books, exhibition catalogs, and exhibition reviews on all forms of modern and contemporary art. Entries date back as far as the late 1960s. Subject areas: art and art history. Available online to UC students, faculty, and staff.

Art Full Text is a searchable database that indexes and abstracts articles from art periodicals published throughout the world. Indexing coverage begins with 1984; abstracting coverage begins with January 1994. Selected full-text coverage begins with 1997. Topics include: advertising art, architecture and architectural history, art history, computers in art, fashion design, folk art, graphic arts, industrial design, interior design, landscape architecture, motion pictures, non-western art, painting, photography, pottery, sculpture, television, textiles, and video. Subject areas: art and art history. Available online to UCSC students, faculty, and staff.

Art Index Retrospective is a searchable database of article citations listed in Art Index volumes 1-32. This resource cites articles from periodicals published throughout the world covering archaeology, architecture, art history, folk art, film, motion pictures, painting, photography, pottery, sculpture, television, and textiles. Subject areas: art and art history, humanities. Covers: 1929 -1984. Available online to UC faculty, students, and staff.

Arts and Humanities Citation Index, via the Web of Science / Web of Knowledge database, contains citations to 1,100 arts and humanities journals. Search by subject, author, and journal title. Cited Reference Search finds articles that cite an author or article specified by the searcher. Subject areas: art and art history, humanities. Covers: 1975 – present. Available online to UC faculty, students, and staff.

Bibliography of the History of Art database indexes and abstracts art-related books, conference proceedings, dissertations, exhibition and dealers' catalogs, and articles from more than 2,500 periodicals. Subject areas: art and art history. Covers: 1973 – present. Available online to UC faculty, students, and staff.

Chicano Database is a comprehensive bibliographic index representing all types of material about the Chicano experience. Coverage is from the 1960s to the present, with selective coverage dating back to the early 1900s. Records added since 1992 have expanded in scope to include the broader Latino experience, including Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Central American immigrants. Available online to UC faculty, students, and staff.

Academic Search Complete (EBSCOhost) is a searchable database with citations and abstracts for journal articles covering all academic disciplines. Full text is available for more than 50% of the articles in this database. Subject areas: art and art history, general subjects, humanities, science and engineering, social sciences. Available online to UCSC students, faculty, and staff.

Ingenta is a journal publisher's Web site containing the full text of over 300 journals. Browseable by journal title and searchable by topic. Subject areas: art and art history, general subjects, social sciences. Available to UCSC students, faculty, and staff.

Core Journals

Periodicals at McHenry Library are shelved by call number; back issues are bound by volume/year and are shelved in the stacks next to current issues. Many journals are also available online via article databases and can be accessed by journal title in CRUZCAT.

Art in America provides commentary and criticism on art and art history in the United States and worldwide. Partial holdings from 1913 to present in varied format (microform, journal, and electronic). (McH) N1.A43. Selected text available online in the Infotrac Expanded Academic ASAP and Art Full Text databases. Available online to UCSC students, faculty, and staff.

International Review of African American Art examines the visual expression of African-descended people in the Americas, the history of that expression, and its various meanings and functions. (McH) NX164.N4 B5.  Selected text also available in the Art Full Text database. Available online to UCSC students, faculty, and staff.

Oriental Art is a journal devoted to the study of all forms of oriental art, from Asia to the Middle East. Covers: 1955 – present. (McH) N8.O75.

Oxford Art Journal provides analysis of visual art and material representation from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Includes extended reviews of major contributions to the fields of art and art history. (McH) N1.O85. Selected text also available covering 1978 - 1999 in the JSTOR database and from 2004 forward in the Oxford University Press Journals database. Available online to UCSC students, faculty, and staff.

Find Books

CRUZCAT (http://cruzcat.ucsc.edu) is UCSC's online library catalog. It includes books, periodicals, maps, videos, government publications, CDs, music scores, and more materials located in both McHenry and the Science & Engineering Library. CRUZCAT does not include citations to or the text of journal articles. The Melvyl Union Catalog (http://www.melvyl.cdlib.org) contains the holdings of all UC libraries. It also has links to request items UCSC does not own through interlibrary loan.

Try the following Library of Congress subject headings to find books on Art:

Find Images

ARTstor is a searchable database providing curated collections of art images and associated catalog data of more than 300,000 digital images, including the AMICO (Art Museum Image Consortium) collection. Available online to UC students, faculty, and staff.

MOAC (Museums and the Online Archive of California) offers more than 35,000 images from eleven California museums, UC and non-UC. Available online to UC students, faculty, and staff.

SASKIA is one of the largest image archives for the teaching of art history. The collection includes important works from over 100 museums, including the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Uffizi, the Prado, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the national museums in Athens, Rome, and Stockholm, museums in Berlin, and American museums in San Francisco, Cleveland, and New York. Available online to UC students, faculty, and staff.

SlideCat, the UCSC Slide Collection’s database, provides Internet access to the Collection’s content of over 200,000 images from all disciplines, time periods, and most cultural groups. Available online to all Web users. http://library.ucsc.edu/slides

Find Websites

Infomine is a comprehensive virtual library and reference tool for academic and scholarly Internet resources. Search Visual & Performing Arts at http://infomine.ucr.edu.

Internet Public Library is a public-service organization and learning/teaching environment from the University of Michigan School of Information that evaluates, selects, organizes, describes, and creates electronic information resources. Search Arts & Humanities at http://www.ipl.org.

Librarians' Index to the Internet provides a well-organized point of access for reliable, trustworthy, librarian-selected Internet resources. Search Arts & Humanities at http://lii.org.

Voice of the Shuttle is a Web portal of hyperlinks to scholarly resources. Produced by UCSB. Search Art (Modern and Contemporary), Art history, and Architecture at http://vos.ucsb.edu.

Not all information on the Web has been evaluated by librarians or scholars. If you are using a Web page as a possible research citation, apply the criteria in the Web Evaluation Guide (http://library.ucsc.edu/ref/howto/evaluate.html) to determine the quality of your source.

Style Guides

How to Use the APA Style Guide  http://library.ucsc.edu/ref/howto/apa_citations.html

How to Use the MLA Style Guide  http://library.ucsc.edu/ref/howto/mla_citations.html