Art & Design

Academic, peer reviewed texts published Open Access.

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Tens of thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime.

A collection of peer-reviewed, open textbooks available online or for download.

Browse our directory of over 5,000 books. Use Pressbooks Create to clone content from the directory and adapt it for your course.

Reframing Art History, an open-access multimedia art history "textbook," gives you a guided journey through the living, breathing, meaningful side of art history. We’re less concerned with names and dates than with meaning and movement. With chapters developed by a group of more than 40 experts, it showcases art and history from the bottom up.

This course will introduce students to the international Art Nouveau movement of the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century. This period is marked by acceleration in the global exchange and circulation of ideas, materials, forms, techniques, and individuals. Starting with the principles of the design reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century, this course will look at the development of new ideas about relationships between art, design, technology, and culture as part of the search for “a new style for a new age.” This search for new solutions laid the foundations for the modern movements of the twentieth century, as designers grappled with the challenges of rapid social, political, and technological change. We will look at voices from the period and a range of case studies to explore the complex impulses, anxieties, and hopes for the future that shaped design around 1900.

With high-res, downloadable images of iconic works of art, as well as rich editorial content, Artsy is your educational gateway to the world of art.

The Digital Art History Directory (DAHD) is an open-access publication containing a database of digital art history projects and information on data sources, best practices in Digital Art History project construction, preservation, and web archiving. Intended to be the largest, most comprehensive, and inclusive collection of information on Digital Art History and to function as a tool and living resource, rather than a static publication, the DAHD provides a platform for discovery, sharing, and research of Digital Art History.

The Duchamp Research Portal is an online platform that aggregates a selection of digitized archival holdings and museum collections at three partner institutions to make a significant portion of primary source materials related to Marcel Duchamp accessible and discoverable through a single interface.

A pluralist, pro bono, and purely positive web-archive of examples of, links to, and comment on, online, Open Access, film and moving image studies resources of note.

A critical component of the work of the Getty Conservation Institute is making available to conservation professionals a variety of publications and other resources that can assist them in their work.

The Open Content Program makes high-resolution images of public domain artwork from the Getty collections freely available, without restrictions, to advance the research, teaching, and practice of art and art history. The initiative also aims to support and promote the open-access movement among museums and cultural heritage institutions in removing barriers to the use of cultural heritage images. Since 2013 images of over 150,000 images of public-domain art and archives in the Getty collections have been made freely available. Cataloging, digitization, rights review, and publishing of the collections are ongoing, adding more images to the Program monthly. Images in the Open Content Program regularly appear in academic and commercial publications, products and merchandise, and movies and TV.

A freely available resource, this site features eight units, each of which explores a different theme in Italian Renaissance art. Researchers and students can explore thematic essays, more than 300 images, 300 glossary items and 42 primary source texts. This resource is a collaboration between the National Gallery of Art, Washington and Grove Art Online, made possible by the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Smarthistory at Khan Academy offers more than one thousand videos and articles on art from around the world and across time.

This website was created to collect, host and display images made by travelers, mapmakers, historians, architects and artists of medieval and early modern monuments and cities of Southern Italy. It includes prints, drawings, ground plans and elevations, paintings, photographs, and any other type of image of sites from roughly 1100 to 1450. The image sources include public and private collections, museums, libraries and archives, print books, and online resources.

"This site gives a history of art, worldwide. It contains biographical and societal information on the artists. It has examples of the art pieces with time and place of origin, the owners’ name, and the fabric/material it is made of. It separates topics by country/empires."

MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies is a robust digital collection of classic and previously out-of-print architecture and urban studies books on our dedicated eBook platform, MIT Press Direct. The collection was funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Humanities Open Book Program, which they co-sponsored with the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The ARLIS/NA Multimedia & Technology Reviews target projects, products, events, and issues within the broad realm of multimedia and technology related to arts scholarship, research, and librarianship. While assessing current products and projects, these reviews are also designed to engage the membership in a conversation about how technologies and multimedia are being or can be deployed within our profession and by our constituents.

An open online community for sharing art, design and media practice based learning, teaching and research.

Video, syllabi, essays, images, books, and more open source art history content for teaching and learning. Smarthistory offers art history content by more than five hundred leading scholars (art historians, archaeologists, and museum curators). Almost all contributors hold an earned Ph.D. All Smarthistory content has undergone an open peer-review process where it is vetted by multiple scholars including those with applicable area expertise. Every essay on Smarthistory lists the author and links to their academic credentials.

The Learning Lab gives everyone with a desire to learn the opportunity to explore the Smithsonian's rich resources anytime, anywhere.

The internet’s source of freely-usable images.

The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

Journal of the International Asso­ciation of Research Institutes in the History of Art is a peer-reviewed Open Access journal for the history of art and visual culture, featuring outstanding research articles that offer significant contributions to current scholarship.

The Open Arts Journal addresses the demand for a rigorously compiled, peer-reviewed platform for arts scholarship open to diverse participants.

The aim of this Journal is to become a focal point for research, debate and publication on all aspects of the study of audiences for cultural and media products and practices.

This database represents the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s diverse collection spanning thirty centuries of historic and contemporary design

Online resources for visual arts. Over 100,000 images that are freely available and copyright cleared for use in learning, teaching and research.

The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.