Archives of American Art (ICPSR 37087)
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Smithsonian Institution
This is an external resource to which ICPSR links as a courtesy. These data are not available from ICPSR. Users should consult the data owners (via Archives of American Art) directly for details on obtaining these resources.
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Founded at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1954, the Archives of American Art collects, preserves, and makes available primary sources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. The collection contains items of American culture over the past 200 years and consists of more than 20 million letters, diaries, scrapbooks, manuscripts, financial records, photographs, films, and audiovisual recordings of artists, dealers, collectors, critics, scholars, museums, galleries, associations, and other art world figures. The Archives also houses the largest collection of oral histories anywhere on the subject of art.
Each year, collecting specialists from the Archives of American Art travel the country seeking the papers of artists, dealers, and collectors, and once new collections are acquired, professional archivists preserve the materials and create easy-to-use guides.Data users can begin searching through the collections on the Explore the Collections page.