LibGuides: Art and Art History: Image & Open Access Repositories

Select Image Databases

Met Collection
All images of public-domain works in The Met collection are available under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). So whether you're an artist or a designer, an educator or a student, a professional or a hobbyist, you now have more than 375,000 images of artworks from our collection to use, share, and remix—without restriction.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
Explore well over a half a million items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections. Spanning a wide range of historical eras, geography, and media, NYPL Digital Collections offers drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, videos, audio, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of The Library, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences.

Open Access at the Met
Resource provides data about The Met collection, including over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks, available for free and unrestricted use.

Select Open Access Repositories

Archives of American Art
The Archives of American Art is the world’s preeminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America.
CORE: Open Access for the Humanities
Part of the Modern Language Association's Humanities Commons, CORE hosts articles, monographs, course materials, white papers, conference papers, code, and digital projects for and by humanities scholars and practitioners.
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
Largest repository of O’Keeffe’s artwork, personal effects, and related archives, including important oral histories, correspondence, ephemera, and photographs, as well as a fine art collection of her work, two historic homes, and other accumulated resources that provide rich context for understanding her art, life, and times.
Getty Publications Virtual Library
Publisher of materials that cover art, photography, archaeology, architecture, conservation, and the humanities for both the general public and specialists. The Virtual Library contains over 250 free and downloadable titles.
Getty Research Portal
Getty Research Institute's collection of digitized art history texts.
Guggenheim Library Collection
Resource contains published resources that reflect and inform museum collections and exhibitions, with particular focus on modern and contemporary art, architecture, and photography.
Index of Medieval Art
The Index of Medieval Art is a unique repository that is of considerable value to students of art history and related disciplines. The largest and most important archive of medieval art in the world, the Index offers unrivalled iconographic documentation, in both text and image, of art from the Early Christian period to the middle of the 16th century. There is a particular emphasis on art of the Western world, but this has been augmented in recent years by the addition of significant documentation of art from Coptic Egypt, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Syria, Armenia, and the Near East.
MoMA Exhibition History
Digital catalog of exhibitions held by the Museum of Modern Art from 1929 to present.
Paris Musees Collections Portal
From Smithsonian Magazine:
Now, in a sign of the changing times, the public institution that oversees 14 major museums in Paris is helping audiences around the world easily access and enjoy Courbet’s notorious painting—along with a trove of other important artworks. As Valentina Di Liscia reports for Hyperallergic, Paris Musées has made 100,000 digital reproductions of works held by the city’s museums available free of charge.
World Digital Library
Collaboration project between Library of Congress, UNESCO, United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization