Art History and Visual Studies: A Research Guide: Catalogs

Collection Catalogs

Collection catalogs document materials in a museum, gallery or private collection. Usually, the catalog is in print form, but increasingly, this genre of publication is transforming into online databases of digital images and associated metadata about each piece.

Sometimes, the catalogs form a complete inventory of the collection, but that is unusual. Usually, what you'll find is a catalog that highlights the gems of the entire collection or focuses on a subset, such as "Latin American Paintings" or "East Asian Sculpture."

To search for online collection databases, visit museum websites and look for links (often menu items) to Collections. Usually, you'll find highlights or an image database.

Or the Chicago Art Institute's:

You can also try google's advanced image search (it's under "settings") and try searching for any of these words: collection | gallery | museum | database.

Exhibition catalogs document temporary installations—usually gallery shows or museum exhibitions. They can range from a checklist of works exhibited to a significant work of scholarship on the themes and/or artists represented. Since the 1970s, they are likely to be illustrated, although they do not necessarily reproduce every work included in the exhibition. Most include excellent documentation, such as extensive bibliographies, footnotes, exhibition records, and some also reprint primary source documents.

Finding exhibition catalogs in the library catalog
Catalogs for gallery, library and museum exhibitions are not always catalogued (that is catalogued for the library catalog) with the terms "exhibition catalog" or "exhibition catalogue."

Here are a few rules of thumb that should help your keyword searching:

• Use the term exhibition (which refers to a range of materials displayed), rather than exhibit (which refers to only one piece, as in a legal display)
• For exhibitions that feature the works of individual artists (or a group of artists in which individuals are specifically named), subject terms list the artists, followed by the term, "exhibition":
  Kusama, Yayoi > Exhibitions
• Exhibition venues are often named in subject terms: Gagosian Gallery (London, England) or Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art .
• Themes, too: World War, 1914-1918 > Posters > Exhibitions