| University Libraries
Artist and gallery websites often link to exhibition reviews or books & catalogs that review their work, which can be a good source of information.
If your artwork is at the National Gallery of Art:
If your artwork is at the Hirshhorn or another Smithsonian Library:
Encyclopedias and other reference sources are excellent starting points to get background information on a topic. They can help you to understand the main ideas of a movement or period, see which artists were involved or worked together, and connect this to larger social, historical, and cultural events.
Important note: Reference sources usually provide general information and usually should not be your main source for research: they are good for establishing known/established facts but not presenting original research or scholarship.
In addition to writings by or about an individual artist, look for the original essays or manifestos that described ideas and theories around a time, place, or movement.
Below are some examples from Mason Libraries, but this is not a complete list! Search in the Libraries catalog with keywords like a place and movement name to find books specific to your artist's context.
Art in Theory, 1900-2000
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This popular anthology of twentieth-century art theoretical texts has now been expanded to take account of new research, and to include significant contributions to art theory from the 1990s. New edition of this popular anthology of twentieth-century art-theoretical texts. Now updated to include the results of new research, together with significant contributions from the 1990s. Includes writings by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures.
Contemporary Chinese Art
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Despite the liveliness and creativity of avant-garde Chinese art in the post-Mao era and its prominence in the world of international contemporary art, until now there has been no systematic introduction to this important work in any Western language. Moreover, most of the relevant primary documents have existed only in Chinese, scattered in hard-to-find publications. Contemporary Chinese Art remedies this situation by bringing together carefully selected primary texts in English translation. Arranged in chronological order, the texts guide readers through the development of avant-garde Chinese art from 1976 until 2006. Because experimental Chinese art emerged as a domestic phenomenon in the 1970s and 1980s and its subsequent development has been closely related to China's social and economical transformation, this volume focuses on art from mainland China. At the same time, it encompasses the activities of mainland artists residing overseas, since artists who emigrated in the 1980s and 1990s were often key participants in the early avant-garde movements and have continued to interact with the mainland art world. The primary documents include the manifestos of avant-garde groups, prefaces to important exhibitions, writings by representative artists, important critical and analytical essays, and even some official documents. Each chapter and section begins with a concise preface explaining the significance of the texts and providing the necessary historical background; the volume includes a timeline summarizing important art phenomena and related political events. Publication of the Museum of Modern Art
Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s
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A sourcebook of primary documents on Eastern and Central European art from the second half of the twentieth century. Although a number of books have told the story of modern and contemporary art in Eastern and Central Europe, missing from these accounts have been the sources themselves. This book, the result of years of research by an international team of artists, curators, editors, translators, and scholars working with the Museum of Modern Art, presents primary documents drawn from the artistic archives of Eastern and Central Europe during the second half of the twentieth century. Because the practice of criticism in this region was for many years almost completely suppressed, the writings of the artists themselves often fulfill a critical as well as an aesthetic and ideological function. The manifestoes, photo essays, proposals, scripts, and other writings assembled here comprise the first anthology of this material in any language. The source materials presented--almost all of them previously untranslated into English--are from Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The book is introduced by Ilya Kabakov. Each chapter is preceded by a brief introduction and is followed by a case study that chronicles an event or the creation or reception of an artwork, illustrating the issues raised in that chapter.
Manifestos and Polemics in Latin American Modern Art
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Bringing together sixty-five primary documents vital to understanding the history of art in Latin America since 1900, Patrick Frank shows how modern art developed in Latin America in this important new work complementing his previous book, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America, Revised and Expanded Edition. Besides autobiographies, manifestos, interviews, and artists' statements, the editor has assembled material from videos, blogs, handwritten notebooks, flyers, lectures, and even an after-dinner speech. As the title suggests, many of the texts have a polemical or argumentative cast. In these documents, many of which appear in English for the first time, the artists themselves describe what they hope to accomplish and what they see as obstacles. Designed to show how modern art developed in Latin America, the documents begin with early modern expressions in the early twentieth century, then proceed through the avant-garde of the 1920s, the architectural boom of midcentury, and the Cold War years, and finally conclude with the postmodern artists in the new century.
American Art, 1700-1960
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