The Roots and Flowering of Civilization: A Sloane Art Library Guide (Biol 006)

General:

First, if this is your first art course, consult our web page ARTIFAQ: Learning and Writing about Art which you'll find on the Sloane Art Library website. It's geared to writing about works in the Ackland, and much of it will be relevant to this course and will give you a jump start in using library resources such as Art Full Text and the Grove Dictionary of Art Online.

Subject and Technique:

In searching the online catalog, try subject searches such as plants in art. Look at the entries and the other subject headings used for them, such as botany-pictorial works and plants-folklore. These may be useful to you in your research. A handy book for plant symbolism is the Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols (Art Reference GR35 .J6) and another is Nature and Its Symbols (Art Reference N7680.I4713 2004). You might also want to look at the Art Library's webguide: Books on Iconography, Mythology and Symbolism This guide also includes a short list of books that are designed to assist you in looking at works of art (terminology, etc.) If you are studying a print, you might want to learn more about the technique by consulting How Prints Look (NE863 .I9 1987).

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Artist:

You can also search by the artist. We have books, for example, by or about Wenzel Hollar, David Teniers (and Titian), Cornelis Visscher, Lewis Hine, Clare Leighton, William Christenberry. Be sure to have the correct spelling of the artist's name, and variant spellings as well. For example, Wenzel Hollar is usually referred to as Wenceslaus Hollar. One way to find out about artists' names is the Getty Union List of Artist Names online.

You'll also find information about artists in our biographical dictionaries in Art Reference, for example. If we do not have books about a particular artist, look in the biographical dictionaries or the Grove, or in more general surveys of the period in which the artist worked (e.g. for Cornelis Visscher, search the online catalog for Painting, Dutch --17th century) for books which discuss painting during that period.

Even if you do find a specific book on an artist, it's a good idea to look at a survey of the art of the time as well. You can combine terms and do a keyword search as well (e.g. Dutch and still life and 18th to find books about that subject if you are researching the work of Jan van Os.) Those of you working on 20th century American cotton or tobacco imagery might want to look at books such as Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-Making, 1935-1943 (Davis TR820.5 .K53 2004) or other books on FSA photographs. Use keyword FSA and photographs or FSA and photography.

Whether the artist is known or not, look at surveys of the culture or period, or medium which you might find by a keyword or subject search, e.g. painting and India or photography-china or performance art.

To find citations and/or full text periodical articles in art journals use Art Full Text and Bibliography of the History of Art. You can also find full-text articles in the big collections such as Academic Search Premier, JSTOR and Project Muse. Get to know all of these resources since you'll be able to use them for other courses. All of these are online on the Libraries Article Databases and More section available from the Libraries' main page. Try a search in Academic Search Premier using the phrase plants in art and see what you find.

It's important to remember that you may find information in other disciplines such as the science literature (e.g. AGRICOLA, the National Agriculture Library database) as well as in art. For American artists, especially photographers, America: History and Life is a wonderful database. For American artists of foreign origin like Tseng, Ethnic Newswatch is another good database. Also, for artists who have recently died, like Tseng, obituary notices such as you might find in the New York Times are important.

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Finding Images to compare with your work:

There are now many museum websites with digital collections. Both natural history museums and art museums might be consulted. A few are:

Art Museums:
Fine Art Museums of San Francisco has a large image database, "Image Base" which is searchable by artist, keyword, country etc.

National Gallery of Art has a Collections database that is searchable by artist, title or part of title (e.g. Ceres) or broad subject/themes (e.g. botanical, mythology, etc.)

Natural History Museums:
American Museum of Natural History
Field Museum
National Museum of Natural History
Harvard Museum of Natural History

Other Image Sources:
ARTstor provides curated collections of art images and associated data for noncommercial and scholarly, non-profit educational use.

For contemporary artists like William Christenberry and Tseng Kwong Chi, there will be extensive information on the internet (art gallery sites are useful and usually have images). See especially the Center for Creative Photography's TKC website for Tseng. There is also a useful guide to looking at photographs.

Print illustration indexes are also available.

In the Biology Libraries:
Index to Illustrations of Living Things Outside North America: Where to Find Pictures of Flora and Fauna. (Zoology and Davis Ref Z7998.N67 M85)

Index to Illustrations of the Natural World: Where to Find Pictures of the Living Things of North America. (Zoology, UL and Davis Ref Z7998.N67 T45)

In the Art Library:
Plant, Animal & Anatomical Illustration in Art & Science: A Bibliographical Guide from the 16th Century to the Present Day. (Art Reference QH46.5 .P436 1990)

Includes indexes for artist, subject, etc.

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Campus Resources

The Couch Biology Library (Coker Hall-Botany and Wilson Hall--Zoology) can help with finding information on scientific aspects. Be sure to survey the science literature as you do your research. Consult the Biology library staff for the best resources and/or consult their web page.

The Photographic Archives is a rich repository of North Carolina images, including agricultural. You'll find many digitized images of stunning documentary photographs of tobacco pickers by the NC photographer Bayard Wootten, for example. In the Rufus Morgan collection, you will find stereographs of cotton pickers. You might compare these North Carolina agricultural images with the Ackland works.

Heather Gendron, Art Librarian

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