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This guide provides information on resources in the Fine Art and History of Art subject areas.
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Image: Jitterbugs (II), William H. Johnson, ca. 1941. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Douglas E. Younger
A vibrant contemporary art anthology that explores the complex ties between race, climate crisis and colonialism by 100 leading artists of African diasporic, Latin American and Native American identity. Black Earth Rising presents works by artists of African diasporic, Latin American and Native American identity that address vital questions of land, presence, climate crisis, and social and environmental justice against the historical backdrop of European settlement of the New World. Supported by an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art curated by the author, this timely publication invites us to trace and make the connections between race, the climate crisis and colonialism. Works by 100 contemporary artists are presented in three thematic sections.
How practices that enact the art of constructing open secrets in markets can be mobilized to unfold magic making. What is magic? And what can it do? In this book, Jessica Backsell interrogates the magic of the art world and culture's stubborn habit of foregrounding art as representative of an alternative value system. Through the empirical example of the freeport-luxury warehouses where valuable art is stored for preservation and taxation purposes-Backsell explores the implications of understanding the art world through contingent entanglements and practices.
The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant. Marc Camille Chaimowicz (1946-2024) was an acclaimed visual artist known for his performances, installations and curatorial flair. He was also a writer. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of writings by the artist, includes seminal interviews, chitchats, jokes, performance reports, insightful statements and letters in essay form, as well as rare documents, such as early surviving leaflets, typewriter handouts and hard-to-find articles. Spanning 1971-2023, the book unlocks the work of an artist considered to be a refreshing role model for a new generation of culture mavens and style savants.
An essay-length argument for the autonomy of art in the present. Over recent decades, a post-critical theoretical and methodological paradigm has become increasingly dominant in the human sciences. Proponents of this approach have come to dismiss the idea-central to all modern aesthetics-of the autonomy of art. Written by critic and researcher Kim West, this book is a defence of art's autonomy and addresses some of the major arguments against it in recent post-critical writings. West critiques three key positions- first, that the concept of art's autonomy equals a myth of objective independence; second, that it is inextricably tied to traditions of formalist elitism; and third, that the ideal of autonomy reinforces the illusion of the inherently free and rational subject.
The most comprehensive survey to date of contemporary video and moving-image art from the last decade Video has never been more prevalent in contemporary art than it is today. At a time when moving images have saturated daily life, artists continue to draw new possibilities from the medium. From live-action documentation to hand-drawn animation, participatory video-game technologies, and computer-generated imagery,Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art presents over 850 images from more than 100 artists. Discover recent work by established names as well as rising stars in the contemporary art world, all nominated by a global panel of high-profile art-world figures. Richly illustrated with multiple examples of works by each artist, including stills and installation views,Vitamin V is the first book in Phaidon's celebrated Vitamin series to focus on the moving image. An insightful essay by renowned scholar Erika Balsom surveys the history of video art from the 1960s until today.
This fascinating catalogue explores the work of Franco-Belgian poet and visual artist Henri Michaux and an experience that transformed his artistic life: trying the psychedelic drug mescaline. In 1955 the Franco-Belgian poet and visual artist Henri Michaux (1899--1984) tried the psychedelic drug mescaline, an experience that transformed his artistic life and provoked an outpouring of writings and distinctive drawings. Accompanying an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, this fascinating catalogue celebrates these unique drawings. This catalogue and exhibition celebrate the unique Mescaline Drawings by the Franco- Belgian poet and visual artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984). In January 1955, as part of an experiment prompted by his publisher, Michaux, who was then 56 years old, tried the psychedelic drug mescaline, a product derived from the Mexican peyote cactus. The aim of the experiment was to investigate the effect of this type of non-addictive drug on the creative act. Michaux considered these experiences to be a portal into the inner workings of the mind. The investigation transformed Michaux's artistic life and provoked an outpouring of writings and distinctive drawings during the 1950s and 1960s, the latter being at the centre of this exhibition.
A landmark work charting how acts of resistance have shaped Britain and the powerful role of photography as a catalyst for change, across the twentieth century, curated by acclaimed artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. Resistance presents a century of activism, from the radical suffrage movement in 1903 through key moments including the Battle of Cable Street, the Black People’s Day of Action, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and the Miners’ Strike; onto protests against environmental destruction, struggles for LGBTQ+ and disability rights; culminating with the largest protest in Britain’s history: the march against the War in Iraq in 2003.
Straddling her native Iran and her adopted Germany, Shahroudi weaves the language of dissent and exile through her politically charged installations Artist Farkhondeh Shahroudi (born 1962) sees each of her works as a three-dimensional poem. From deconstructed "Oriental" rugs to guns made of string, her sculptures, installations and performances allude to her revolutionary activities in Iran and her life as an exile in Germany.
In Ecologies of Artistic Practice, Ashley Lee Wong explores the economic relationships of artists working at the nexus of art and technology as they negotiate a means to make art in a neoliberal creative economy. Wong looks at the diverse ways in which artworks circulate, both online and offline, in galleries, on digital platforms, and on media facades, and investigates some of the mechanisms that enable artists to create works, including selling artworks and NFTs, grants, licensing, commissions, and artist residencies. The book also looks at the ways in which artists collaborate with corporations and develop practices as commercial entities themselves.
The overlapping artistic motifs of East Germany and its "sister" countries across the world Assessing the extent of the Soviet Union's "international solidarity," Revolutionary Romances? looks at East Germany's relations with its socialist "sister" countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America through concurrent artistic interventions.
"I WORK BETWEEN THE CRACKS, WHERE THE VOICE STARTS DANCING" To say that Meredith Monk is an outstanding singer, com poser, choreographer and filmmaker says a lot and yet too little. Monk works seamlessly across disciplines-pushing the boundaries of music, theater, dance, video, and installation, and is considered a pioneer of site-specific perfor mance. At the center of her oeuvre is the suggestive power of the human voice: the body becomes a resonating space for a universal language for which there are no words. Monk was the first artist to create a performance for the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, she performed in public car parks and on opera stages. This catalogue presents the first career encompassing, in-depth analysis of her work.
herman de vries' eschenau summer press creates unique artist's books blending art, nature, and collaboration. Featuring objects like gold, leaves and earth. Two essays contextualise their significance. Once described as 'small explosions of intelligence and sensation, the seeds of wonder' by poet Thomas A. Clark, the eschenau summer press publications stretch the definition of 'artist's book' as far as it will go. Since 1974, from his home in Eschenau, Germany, renowned artist herman de vries (1931) sends out leaves of gold, the dust of some roads, the forbidden down of thistles. A longtime key figure in the book-as-art himself, most of these publications are the result of an open invitation from de vries to artist friends like James Lee Byars, Marinus Boezem and Melanie Bonajo, but also to poets and musicians - even to a keeper of bumble bees. This book facilitates our reception of all 77 of these shared objects through full illustrations and written clarification. Two essays connect the series to the international context of the artist's book.
In celebration of the centenary of artist, poet and landscape designer Ian Hamilton Finlay's birth, Fragments draws together 100 of his artworks. With each piece accompanied by a short text, either by the artist or by a noted writer on Finlay's work, this book accompanies a series of eight exhibitions taking place in Basel, Brescia, Edinburgh, Hamburg, Palma de Mallorca, London, New York and Vienna in May 2025. Best known for his Little Sparta - a seven-acre site at Stonypath farm in Scotland that has attained almost-mythical status - and for his installed guillotines, A View to the Temple, at Documenta Kassel 1987, Finlay's large body of work can be found in museums, parks and gardens worldwide. His artistic creations also incorporate short stories, poems and concrete poetry, many of which have been published by his own publishing house Wild Hawthorn Press, and which, with a mixture of wit and beauty, engage with the relationship between violence and civilization.
Essays exploring the intersections of gender and religion in postsecular knowledge production and visual culture. During the last three decades, religious practices have gained increased visibility on a global scale, while the concept of secularity-and its relationship to religion-has become an object of intense interdisciplinary debates internationally. While the secular and the religious previously had marginalized positions within the academic field of gender studies, we can now observe a growing interest in religion and spirituality within this area of study, as well as gender-based activism. This publication features essays by scholars in gender and religious studies that collectively reflect upon and develop interdisciplinary and transregional ideas about the intricate dynamics of secularity, religiosity, and gender.
A first-ever look at a network of Black visual artists in New York City's Manhattan and downtown art worlds in the 1960s and 1970s. This comprehensive account of the six-year history of Acts of Art, a gallery founded by and for Black artists in Greenwich Village in 1969, includes a complete exhibition record, biographies of the gallery's key artists, and entries on important group exhibitions and events. This first in-depth look at Acts of Art, and its role within communities of Black artists in New York City highlights the artists most closely tied to the gallery and its co-founder Nigel Jackson, from the early shows of Benny Andrews and James Denmark to the surveys of Lois Mailou Jones and Hale Woodruff. In addition to an introductory essay and complete exhibition history, the volume includes artists' biographies and entries on important group exhibitions and events.
Euan Uglow (1932-2000) was one of the finest painters of his generation. For a long time appreciated only by fellow artists and a relatively small band of devoted collectors, his work is now reaching a wider audience, and its innovative nature is finally being recognised and properly understood. He belongs with the best of twentieth-century British artists: Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Leon Kossoff. As a radical modern master, he is not out of place with Ben Nicholson and Bridget Riley. The Uglow Papers is a celebration of Uglow's art, life, and teaching, recounted by those who knew him as friend, colleague, or mentor. His life was a full one, devoted primarily to painting and drawing but also to teaching (mainly at the Slade School of Art) and to spending time with an unexpectedly wide circle of friends. This is the first major monograph on Uglow.
A comprehensive and beautiful survey of South African photography. From colonialism to democracy, Life Itself offers a comprehensive overview of South Africa's photographic history. Featuring images from the heyday of Drum magazine and Black emergence to Peter Magubane's Soweto uprising pictures, David Goldblatt's In Boksburg to the photographers' collective Afrapix and the struggles for freedom, this book concludes with post-apartheid documentary and art photography in the work of Andrew Tshabangu, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, and others. Life Itself helps to fill a gap in our understanding of the role of the camera in South African society.
Open-source tools and ideas for creating, activating and experiencing art Based on an idea by Hélio Oiticica and brought to life by Lieven De Boeck, Breaking Free offers a dynamic fusion of artmaking tools, including stitching, painting and performing, to explore queer identity.
Buhlungu's installation creates a porous space where both water and scientific knowledge can move freely Delving into microbiology through the disciplines of art, science, geography and history, Simnikiwe Buhlungu (born 1995) uses the ubiquitous water puddle as the basis for her mixed-media installation hygrosummons, exploring encounters with scientific knowledge.
Edited by Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger's incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American-, Latinx-, Asian American-, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift celebrates The Face’s most iconic portraits from 1980–2004. It explores the magazine’s role in the evolution of style photography and its international and enduring impact on visual culture. The Face is the original, definitive, style bible – a ground-breaking magazine that has radically disrupted youth culture in Britain and beyond since its launch in 1980. Known for its striking design, bold, inclusive content and innovative photography, the magazine has launched the careers of many leading photographers, writers, designers, stylists and models.
Major survey of the artistic provocateur and trailblazer Linder (b.1954, Liverpool). Offers an illuminating overview of the past 50 years of this iconic artist's career, exploring the full range of Linder's thought-provoking work and underscoring the experimental and feminist impulses of her practice. Linder first emerged in the late 1970s as a prominent figure within the dynamic landscapes of punk and post-punk music; her photomontage on the cover of Buzzcocks' single 'Orgasm Addict' in 1977 became an iconic image of the punk scene. Following her punk period, Linder went on to become an internationally recognised artist renowned for her multifaceted practice. Her journey has been one of relentless exploration, venturing into realms as varied as fashion, music, performance, perfume, textiles, and film.
New monograph on Derek Jarman, due Autumn 2023.Gathering together newly commissioned essays by international art critics and scholars devoted to specific--and sometimes lesser-known--aspects of the artist's life and work and extensive portfolios spanning his successive bodies of works, this monograph offers an accessible overview of Derek Jarman, one of the legendary cultural figures of the second half of the 20th century.Born in London in 1942, Jarman died in 1994, after having been an artist, filmmaker, musician, and gay activist who powerfully marked contemporary British culture, from his first feature film 'Sebastiane' in 1976 to the video clips made for the Pet Shop Boys and Marianne Faithfull in the 1980s, through his public militancy during the AIDS crisis and his testamentary cult film 'Blue' (1993).
Spanning six decades, three continents, and multiple mediums, this exhibition catalog explores one of the most significant and influential artistic movements of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, painting underwent a profound transformation. Artists no longer wanted to depict the visible; they aspired to a new visual language that reduced artistic expression to an interplay of colors, lines, and shapes; reflected the modern world; and transcended national boundaries. A central figure of this art movement was Wassily Kandinsky, who laid the theoretical foundations with his work Point and Line to Plane. This lushly illustrated and highly researched volume showcases how Geometric Abstraction found radical expression in all its variations in Europe, the USA and beyond.
A spectacular overview of Korean art since the 1960s. This book showcases a collection of the most visually captivating, intriguing, and often overlooked examples of Korean art. Mina Kim highlights the artistic output of the 1960s and '70s through today, providing crucial aesthetic and political context for understanding the work. Key ideas that structure the book include performance, gender, identity, internationalism, and the evolution of multimedia. By placing artistic expression at the core of Korean culture and society, this book sheds new light on the role of Korea's contributions to global visual culture.
Soft Power celebrates the ability of textiles to store and communicate a multiplicity of (hi)stories that act as a disruptive force against dominant social and cultural narratives. The political entanglements inherent to the medium demonstrate the power of textile art to move people, things, stories, and ideas in and out of visibility. Soft Power does not focus solely on textiles as hand-crafted or industrially-fabricated objects, but understands them as being a part of systems. This includes the webs of production and trade that continue to connect textiles and people across the globe as well as the histories, cartographies, cosmologies and rituals that unfold around fabrics.
Explores the complex relationship between museums, empire, and cultural heritage, using his art to question how historical narratives are constructed and interpreted. Hew Locke is interested in dissecting the messy and complex ways in which museums are implicated in histories of empire. 'This project has enabled me to engage with the museum's collections in a much deeper way than ever before, and in a way few artists have had the privilege of doing. I have always been interested in the way objects are interpreted through display in museums. What story has been distilled and is being told or implied about the past? How does it relate to the present? How can this telling be questioned, disrupted, or complicated?'Throughout his career, Locke has had an intense fascination with objects and the stories they tell.
Tate Modern exhibition: 28 November 2024 - 1 June 2025 Discover how artists used machines and algorithms to create mesmerising and mind-bending art between the 1950s and the early 1990s. From collaged punch cards to early experiments with virtual reality, artists have found inspiration in technology to invent new forms and new ways to engage the senses. Bringing together works by groundbreaking artists from across Asia, Europe and the Americas, Electric Dreams celebrates the innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who imagined the visual languages of the future through immersive, responsive and automatically generated works. Their circuits of connections and creativity, of new thinking and tinkering are illuminated here through the perspectives of artists, curators and art historians.
The definitive monograph on the work of celebrated visual artist, musician and peace activist Yoko Ono Born in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko Ono is one of the most important living artists working today. In a career that spans over six decades, Ono has experimented with a broad variety of media, including music, performance art, and film. Mostly known for her early involvement with the Fluxus art movement in the late 1950s and her professional and personal association with Beatles frontman John Lennon, Ono's ground-breaking work has been influential to generations of artists as well as her incessant campaigning for World peace.
You can access a wide variety of print and electronic books to support your research. Find your module reading list to see what key readings you can access electronically or search Explore to find more books and e-books.
We subscribe to a number of subject focused and interdisciplinary databases that will be relevant when researching the History of Art and Fine Art practice. Use the databases to find a range of material including journal articles, films for streaming and more.
Full-text archive of art and architecture magazines, dating from the late-nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Subjects covered include fine art, decorative arts, architecture, interior design, industrial design, and photography. Accessibility statement for Art & Architecture Archive, 1895-2015.
This collection includes the specialist indexes ARTbibliographies Modern (covering modern and contemporary art), Design and Applied Arts Index (for all aspects of design and crafts) and the International Bibliography of Art (covering scholarship on Western art history), together with a complementary collection of current full-text journals, Arts and Humanities database.
Access for UCL students and staff only. Access to BoB is only permitted within the United Kingdom. Requires login with UCL username and password. BoB is Learning on Screen’s on demand TV and radio service for education allowing users to record programmes from over 75 free-to-air channels, access over 2.2 million broadcasts dating back to the 1970s, create playlists, clips and clip compilations; search programme transcripts and subtitles; embed content in VLEs and share on social media
Archive of important scholarly journals. Core resource. Accessibility statement for JSTOR.
Best streamed on Chrome, Safari, or Edge. Providing video streaming to over 26,000 films including thousands of award-winning documentaries, training films and theatrical releases. The collection includes a number of leading producers, such as the Criterion Collection, PBS, Kino Lorber, New Day Films, The Great Courses, California Newsreel, BBC and hundreds more. Accessibility statement for Kanopy.
For training and support with Library resources and research, book an appointment using my live bookings calendar.
Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly being used as source of information, translation tool, text editor and much more. The information in this box provides links to guidance on using GenAI for academic research, including strengths and limitations.
Other UCL resources include:
Get involved and help us expand the library's Latin American Art collection! Fill in this form to share your ideas.
LAAR (Latin American Art Resources) is an initiative supported by UCL ChangeMakers that aims to promote and expand Latin American Art resources within the print and electronic collections of UCL Libraries.
See the LAAR reading list for an overview of and an introduction to Latin American art via resources in UCL libraries, with sections covering topics such as political resistance, Colonial Latin America, identities and ideologies, and rethinking Modernism(s).
If you have any questions for the LAAR team please contact us:
Júlia Couto (UCL Slade School of Fine Art) julia.ferreira.19@ucl.ac.uk
Daen Palma Huse (UCL History of Art) daen.huse.20@ucl.ac.uk
Manuela Portales Sanfuentes (UCL History of Art) manuela.portales.20@ucl.ac.uk
Elizabeth Lawes (UCL Library Services) e.lawes@ucl.ac.uk
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