Digital Image Databases
VRC Image Collection - The Visual Resource Center Image Collection database supports teaching and research in art, design, and art history. The Digital Image Database contains images from prehistory through the twenty-first century in a wide range of topic categories covering all Art & Design majors.
Oxford Art Online - An online encyclopedia of the visual arts with over 45,000 articles and over 130,000 images.
Open Access Image Database
Europeana- Digital objects from European institutions that provide open access to more than 15 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers from more than 1500 European institutions.
LUNA Commons- Source for “finding valuable, educational content from digital collections“.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)- Discover 29,472,622 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States
NGA Images (National Gallery of Art): More than 45,000 open access digital images up to 4000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use.
Shared Shelf Commons- Shared Shelf Commons is a free, open-access library of images from libraries, archives, and museums around the world.
L'Agence Photo - More than 100,000 color transparencies and 500,000 black-and-white negatives relating to works of art in France's national museums: paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, drawings and photographs.
African & Asian Visual Artists Archive - Aavaa had grown to become the most comprehensive slide archive of contemporary visual art by artists of African and Asian descent working in the UK since the post-war period. The archive houses over 6,000 slides of artworks and exhibitions, as well as publications and videos about and by artists. There are over 200 individual artist folders, as well as curators, art historians, cultural critics and arts organization files.
Google Arts & Culture - Google partners with museums and cultural heritage institutions from around the world, and provides high-resolution images and 360-views.
Books and Articles
Generally speaking, books are not written on works of art, but on artists.
Catalogues Raisonnés (IFAR) - A searchable database listing of all the known works of an artist, either in a particular medium or all media.
Oxford Art Online - Includes peer-reviewed articles contributed by nearly 7,000 scholars from around the world, accompanied by images, bibliographies, and links to additional resources.
Art Index (H.W. Wilson) - Art Index is an art research database providing high-quality indexing for hundreds of national and international art journals, plus thousands of art dissertations. The index covers fine, decorative and commercial art, as well as photography, film and architecture.
Calisphere - Gateway to digitized images from the libraries and museums of 10 University of California campuses and more than 100 cultural heritage organizations. Includes more than 150,000 photographs, diaries, documents, oral histories and other resources. Serves as a single point of access for more than 300 UC-created websites and collections.
Contemporary Art
Searching for the artist in the ArtNet Artists A-Z list. Artist information will often include a link to a list of dealers representing the artist. Browse over 340,000 artists
Modern and Contemporary Artist Names: Pronunciation Guide
Moving Images
Moving Image Archive - Free resource indexing over 2.5 million public domain creations; includes short, silent and art films, animations and cartoons -- all documenting our social and cultural history.
Harvard Film Archive - One of the largest and most significant university-based motion picture collections in the United States, with a collection of well over 25,000 audio visual items from around the world and from almost every period in film history." --from website
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Film Collection - Founded in 1935 as the Film Library, this department’s collection now includes more than 30,000 films and 1.5 million film stills; the strongest international film collection in the United States, it incorporates all periods and genres
UbuWeb (Film and Video) is independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts."-- from website.
Early Video Art is a collection of titles that are central to an understanding of the historical development of video art. This collection includes, but is not limited to, many titles from the original Castelli-Sonnabend collection, the first and most prominent collection of video art assembled in the United States. All of the work in this collection was produced between 1968 and 1980
Video Data Bank - Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists, representing the work of more than 550 artists and 6,000 video art titles.
Videobrasil - Video art works from the geopolitical South of the world – Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
YouTube
Art 21 YouTube channel - is a groundbreaking documentary television series focusing on contemporary visual art by artists working in the United States.