Special Projects for Content Development

(above:  Albertus Del Orient Browere, The Lone Prospector, 1853, oil on canvas, Oakland Museum of California.  Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*)

The purpose of TFAO special projects is to provide content to its publication Resource Library, the TFAO Free Online Digital Library, and oher websites. The methods used in special projects differ from those used by TFAO in obtaining content relating to museum exhibitions, as explained in How TFAO updates calendars and How TFAO uses the National Calendar of Exhibitions.

(above:  Edmund Ashe, Hunter with Mule, c. 1920, oil on  masonite, 24 x 20 in. Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina.  Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Special projects focusing on texts

A TFAO emphasis is building an archive of material, authored by scholars and other informed individuals, beneficial for the study of art history in the United States. As a public service, without charge to readers, Resource Library annually publishes a number of scholarly texts relating to American representational art. Resource Library's indexes direct visitors to thousands of its articles and essays published for the public's benefit. TFAO has identified many more texts as candidates for online publishing.

Goals of TFAO include encouraging owners of scholarly catalogue and derivative texts to provide free public access to them on their websites and also for TFAO to provide -- through certain special projects -- access to texts from rare exhibition catalogues and others not easily available elsewhere on its own website. Text-based special projects include the Institutional Sources Study Project, the Collections-Centric Scholarly Texts Project, the American Art Review Study Project: Volumes V through X, and the American Art Review Study Project: Volumes XI through XVI.

About the Institutional Sources Study Project

The Institutional Sources Study Project used as its key source Resource Library's Art Museum, Gallery and Art Center index, containing names of over 600 institutional sources that have provided texts to TFAO since 1997. This project compliments the American Art Review Study Projects and the Collections-Centric Scholarly Texts Project by identifying texts for potential online publishing that are not likely to be identified through those projects. It also enables independent contractors qualified to provide service in instances where working on other study projects is impractical

For more information about this project please click here.

Also see the Online Museum Catalogues, Brochures and Gallery Guides Research Project.

About the Collections-Centric Scholarly Texts Project

The Collections-Centric Scholarly Texts Project matches the geographic location of an independent contractor with a collection of books related to American representational art.

This project compliments the American Art Review Study Projects by identifying texts for potential online publishing that are not likely to be identified through that project. It also enables independent contractors qualified to provide service in instances where the necessary American Art Review volumes are not available to them.

For more information about this project please click here.

About the American Art Review Study Project: Volumes V through X

The American Art Review Study Project: Volumes V through X studied issues of American Art Review to find articles from that magazine and related catalogue essays that enhanced knowledge within Resource Library for individual artists and topics. TFAO volunteers and contractors located copyright owners of American Art Review articles, or catalogue essays from which those articles were derived, and secured permission to reprint the texts online, usually without illustrations. The paper-printed texts were converted to digital files by TFAO's volunteers and contractors, and then published in Resource Library.

The American Art Review Study Project: Volumes V through X was started in 2004 and completed in 2009.

For more information about this project please click here.

About the American Art Review Study Project: Volumes XI through XVI

Since the 2009 completion date of the American Art Review Study Project: Volumes V through X, much additional knowledge has been published in Resource Library concerning artists and topics. The Volumes XI through XVI project is more discerning than the previous project, seeking to help fill in remaining gaps in knowledge within Resource Library. In this project TFAO volunteers locate copyright owners of American Art Review articles, or catalogue essays from which those articles were derived, secure permission to reprint the texts online, obtain the texts already in digital format and then publish them in Resource Library.

For more information about this project please click here.

Other Potential Scholarly Text Projects

TFAO is studying other approaches towards identifying texts for potential online publishing.

Independent databases are being researched to find other ways of identifying catalogues' scholarly texts relating to American representational art and their essays. One such database is the Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue Index described on the Smithsonian American Art Museum web site as follows:

The Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue Index (AECI) contains more than 136,000 records describing fine art works exhibited in the United States through 1876 (the Centennial year). The AECI includes artists of all nationalities who exhibited works from 1773 to 1877-including Old Masters.

 

The database indexes more than 1,500 exhibition catalogues, broadsides, newspaper articles, and gallery notices. A separate entry appears for each time an artwork was exhibited. Transcribers made every attempt to remain faithful to the source materials, thus misspellings and inconsistencies reflect the original documents.

 

Users can search the database by artist, title, subject, media, type of object (painting, drawing, photograph, graphics, sculpture, silhouette, etc.), provenance (owner at time of exhibition), catalogue titles, or exhibition venue. You can also search by keyword or browse records alphabetically.

David Dearinger of the Boston Athenaeum advises TFAO that the Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue database does not include the separately indexed exhibitions of the National Academy of Design (published variously from the 1960s to the 1990s and that cover Academy shows from 1826 to 1950), the Brooklyn Art Association, the Boston Athenaeum, the American Academy of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and several others (including unpublished indices of the shows at the Century Association in NYC, done by Jonathan Harding, and the Society of American Artists, compiled by David Dearinger).

Also for investigation:

• Archives of American Art list of catalogues on microfilm.
• Mrs. Abby Gerdts's project of compiling a list of all catalogues produced before 1865 and William Gerdts's project with University of Michigan Press on a series of bibliographies of American art by state.
• At CaliforniaArt.com Nancy Moure's Index to Reproductions of American Paintings in books listing about 400 catalogues produced in the 1960s and 1970s; Publications in Southern California Art, Volume 6 (out of print) which includes Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, Index to Catalogues on California Art and Artists Published before 1955 and found on the Microfilm of the Archives of American Art
• Northern California Art Exhibition Catalogues compiled by Ellen Halteman Schwartz (1878-1915)
• Ellen Halteman Schwartz's indexes in Publications in Southern California Art, Volume 7 (out of print): Index to the Art Exhibition Catalogues of the San Francisco Art Association 1872-1915; Index to the Art Exhibitions of the Mechanics' Institute, San Francisco, 1857-1897; Index to the Annual Art Exhibitions of the California State Fair, Sacramento, 1856-1902.
• Peter Falk's Sound View Press publication Artists' Works - The Exhibition Record Series, documenting the details on hundreds of thousands of works exhibited by artists at the major Salon-type exhibitions in America.
• The Getty Provenance Database Index
• Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition catalogues (1886-1923)
• The Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited) online catalogue raisonné
• Catalogues of the National Academy's annual exhibitions (1826-present) and their published indices (1826-1860, 1861-1900, 1901-1950), which are available in many major libraries and through interlibrary loan. These indexes are: National Academy of Design Exhibition Record 1826-1860. 2 vols. New York: The New-York Historical Society, 1943; Maria Naylor. The National Academy of Design Exhibition Record 1861-1900. 2 vols. New York: Kennedy Galleries, Inc., 1973.; Peter Hastings Falk. The Annual Exhibition Record of the National Academy of Design 1901-1950. Madison, Connecticut: Sound View Press, 1990.

- TFAO also thanks Nancy Moure and Paul Manoguerra for information on compilations.

(above: Joseph Kleitsch (1882-1931), The Oriental Shop, 1922, oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in., Crocker Art Museum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Special projects focusing on other media or texts in combination with other media

About the Art History of Each State within the United States of America project

The primary goal of this project, started in 2008, was to organize and make available online articles and essays surveying the representational art history of each state. All texts are available for free reading. A secondary goal of the project was to gather for each state related resources including online audio, video and texts from other websites, plus lists of related museums, books and magazine articles. In 2015 the project converted to a TFAO catalogue.

For more information please click here.

About the Independent Videographer Project

TFAO seeks to both encourage and reward videographers who create and post online videos which serve to educate the public and further appreciation of American representational art. Topics are based on thematic ideas from TFAO's Topics in American Representational Art.

For more information about this project please click here.

(above: Lew E. Davis, Early Spanish Caballeros, Los Banos, CA Post Office,

Further content development opportunities

In TFAO's section covering volunteering opportunities, please see content development for other ways to provide knowledge of American representational art to people worldwide.

Return to Research Projects, Reports and Studies

Links to sources of information outside of our web site are provided only as referrals for your further consideration. Please use due diligence in judging the quality of information contained in these and all other web sites. Information from linked sources may be inaccurate or out of date. TFAO neither recommends or endorses these referenced organizations. Although TFAO includes links to other web sites, it takes no responsibility for the content or information contained on those other sites, nor exerts any editorial or other control over them. For more information on evaluating web pages see TFAO's General Resources section in Online Resources for Collectors and Students of Art History.

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