BOOKS
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Types of Books for Research in Art History
As with any specialized discipline, art history bears its own literature. You may have heard the term "artist monograph" or "edited volume", but in the scholarship of art history, there are also other kinds of books that provide critical viewpoints and comprehensive information, such as exhibition catalogs, and catalogues raisonnes. It can be helpful to understand the nature and scope of how these publications inform your learning & research. Also note that while most books are considered secondary sources, primary texts that you read in the methods course (such as Heinrich Wolfflin's Principles of Art History") is considered a primary source. Exhibition catalogs sometimes contain primary source materials within them (such as an artist interview) as well as secondary source material (critical essays and interpretation).
Monographs and Edited Volumes/Anthologies: Monographs & Edited Volumes: Academic publications such as monographs & edited volumes that have undergone the peer-review process are authoritative and reliable sources of information. While the language might feel esoteric & scholarly, these books are written by experts and thus can help with deeper learning as you research your work of art because the writing is less descriptive (as an art history textbook might be), and more analytical/critical.
Exhibition Catalogs: Publications produced to compliment small or large-scale museum/gallery exhibitions. They contain a list of all works exhibited, and often include introductory and contextual essays written by scholars and/or curators. All reliable, authoritative books, such as these, should contain footnotes as well as detailed bibliographies (that list of other sources!), to lead to demonstrate evidence of solid research, and to give credit to other experts in the area you are reading about.
Catalogue Raisonnés: Scholarly compilation of an artist's body of work which will include annotated listings of all known artworks by an artist, or all works they have created in a particular media (i.e, prints or photographs). They are essential research tools for provenance and attribution of artwork; many are comprehensive and take years to publish.
Scholarly Books & Exhibition Catalogs for this course:
Dawoud Bey : Portraits 1975-1995. Minneapolis , MN: Walker Art Center, 1995.
Langson Library ; TR680 .B48 1995
Dawoud Bey : Two American Projects. San Francisco, CA : New Haven, Connecticut : San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2020.
Langson Library ; TR681.T44 D39 2003
Dawoud Bey : Seeing Deeply. First edition. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2018.
Langson Library ; TR650 .B485 2018
Dawoud Bey : Harlem, U.S.A. First edition. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012. Print.
Langson Library ; TR680 .D35 2012
Carrie Mae Weems : the Louisiana Project. Newcomb Art Gallery, Tulane University. New Orleans: Newcomb Art Gallery, 2004.
Langson Library ; TR645.W54 W384 2004
Carrie Mae Weems. Washington, D.C: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1993.
Langson Library ; TR647.W383 K57 1993
Carrie Mae Weems : “a Great Turn in the Possible”. Barcelona, Spain: Fundación MAPFRE, 2022.
Langson Library ; TR647.W383 A4 2022b
Weems, Carrie Mae. Then What? : Photographs and Folklore . Buffalo, N.Y: CEPA Gallery, 1990.
Langson Library ; TR647 .W415 1990
Search Tools to Find Books
Library Search is the easiest way to find and discover eBooks. To make it a bit easier, when you enter keywords into Library Search, use the filters on the left-hand side and select "books" and "book chapters" as the format, and also pay attention to publication year.
A broad collection of journals and ebooks with emphasis on humanities and social sciences. Publishers include numerous university presses and scholarly societies.
Google Books contains millions of digitized books beyond UCI Library. You can use it as a "discovery tool" . For example, you can keyword search an artist's name to see where they appear in various chapters of books. Only public domain (out of copyright) books are available as full-text in this tool, so check the library for the full-text copy.
Browsing the Stacks for Books
Note for Spring 2023 Quarter!! Unfortunately, the 4th floor of Langson Library where all the visual arts books are located (or most of them), so you'll need to request materials in advance and pick them up at the Langson Library Check-Out Desk. Steps on doing that are available here: www.tinyurl.com/how-to-request-books.
Before You Browse: Search for a book!
Browsing the library shelves can be fun and you'll often come across books that you didn't see in the search results, but it's helpful as a starting point to have a call number written down to bring you to a relevant section. This short video gives you some excellent tips on how to utilize UC Library Search to look for material, narrow your results, and access many different resources at UCI Libraries!
Finding Books on the Library Shelf:
Once you have a call number for a book, you can come to Langson Library and start browsing! All the books are organized by a certain system used by many North American academic libraries called the Library of Congress Call Number system. In this organization, you'll find that most visual art and cultural books in the N (Visual Art) section of the library, and sometimes T (technology). Here is a break-down of various categories within the arts, which you'll find on the 4th floor of Langson Library:
N Visual arts
NA Architecture
NB Sculpture
NC Drawing
ND Painting
NE Print media
NK Decorative Arts
NX General Arts
TP Ceramics/Pottery
TR Photography
TT Crafts & Textile
Keywords VS Subject Searches (Controlled Vocabulary)
A keyword search will search fields of information about books such as: author, title, subject, and other descriptors such as the book's table of contents. You also perform a keyword search every time you search in Google! Keyword searches are intuitive, easy, and you usually get plenty of results. The frustrating aspect of keyword searching is that often too many results appear, or some of the results aren't always relevant to your search.
A Subject Heading search functions very much like a #hashtag does on Instagram - it's a specific term used to describe the main concept of a book, article, or other resource so that you can discover other books on that same tag/topic. But the difference is that they are not user-generated, they are controlled terms used by libraries that are part of a published vocabulary so that all libraries remain consistent. But once you explore and discover subject terms for your research topic or artist, you can better locate relevant resources by doing a "subject" search.