The Broad is a contemporary art museum that named after their founders, philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. It is home to 2,000 works of art collected over 50 years by Eli and Edythe. The collection is one of the world’s most prominent collections of post-war and contemporary works of art. They include in-depth representations by influential contemporary artists, which include Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Kara Walker and Alexander Calder. You can browse the collection by artist last name.
The National Gallery of Australia is one of the largest museums in the country. It houses more than 160,000 works of art in Australian art, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander art, Asian art, European and American art, Asian art and Pacific art. Users can conduct a keyword search or browse by the different categories.
Australian Prints + Printmaking provides “a gateway for information on printed images from Australia and the Asia Pacific region”. The site provides a database of prints and printmaking by artists from Australia and the pacific regions, including New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The site also allows users to explore the collections through three experimental web interfaces, designed by Mitchell Whitelaw and Ben Ennis Butler. The interfaces are created as part of their research into ‘generous interfaces’ that attempt to provide new ways to explore digital collections. Users can search or browse by artists, subjects, works and networks, and decade summary.
Established in 1900, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) is one of the largest museums in the United States. The museum collection houses more than 65,000 works of art from antiquity to present day. Users can search by keywords or browse by collecting areas, artist/maker, culture, classification and artist nationality.
The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is the national museum of New Zealand. Their collections online contain information of more than 500,000 works of art. Among them, more than 30000 have downloadable images for reuse in high resolution. Users can search by keywords.
A division of the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Museum at FIT (MFIT) is one of the specialised fashion museums accredited by the American Alliance of Museum. The museum’s permanent collection contains about 50,000 garments and accessories from the 18th century to present. The works include pertinent designers such as Chanel, Dior and Balenciaga. Users can search or browse by time periods and types.
This collection was started as part of the “All Of Us Or None” (AOUON) archive project by Free Speech Movement activist Michael Rossman in 1977. The objective was “to gather and document posters of modern progressive movements in the United States”. The collection contains more than 20,000 political posters with a focus on “the domestic political poster renaissance that began in 1965 and continues to this day”. Users can search or browse the images.
According to their Annual Report 2014, the Philadelphia Museum of Art contains about 227,000 works of art in their collections. More than 100,000 images are made available through their digital collection. Users can search by keywords, artist, country of work and curatorial departments.
The Cleveland Museum of Art houses close to 45,000 objects that span across 6,000 years. Their online collection provides access to close to 34,800 images. Users can search or browse by various collections, creators and types.
Callisphere is “the University of California’s free public gateway to a world of primary sources”. Powered by the California Digital Library (CDL), the platform currently have more than 230,000 images, contributed by 139 archives, libraries, museums, and historical societies in California. Users may search or explore the images across different themes or topics.
The Whitney Museum of American Art houses a comprehensive range of “twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists”. Their digital collection provides access to more than 21,000 artworks from more than 3,000 artists. Users can search or browse by artist.
The Art Institute of Chicago was founded as both a museum and school for fine arts around 1879. Today, it houses more than 300,000 works of art in their permanent collections, ranging from “Chinese bronzes to contemporary design and from textiles to installation art”. The digital collection contains more than 80,000 images, where you can search or browse by categories. The website also allows you to sign up for an account and make your own art collections by selecting artworks and adding notes about them. You can save your “collections” to revisit in the future or share them with your friends.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is continually making their collections accessible online. To date, their collections span from paintings, prints, drawings, photography to more specific works like African art, Asian art, decorative arts and new media.
The Museum of Fine Arts Boston is one of the most comprehensive museums in the world. From Ancient Egypt to contemporary art, the museum has nearly 450,000 works of art in its holdings. Its digital collection allows users to search and refine the results by collection type and classification.
The Guggenheim Museum contains an extensive holding of over 7,000 artworks from the late 19th century to present day. Their collection online presents “a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection of over 7,000 artworks”, which includes works from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The database can also be browsed by artists, dates, mediums, movements and venues.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales is one of Australia’s leading art museums. It contains more than 30,000 objects of Australian, European and Asian art. More than half of their objects are Australian art. Their digital collection contains more than 18,000 images across different types, media and origins.
Consists of two museums, de Young and Legion of Honor, the FAMSF contain 150,000 objects in their permanent collection. More than 90% of their collection were digitised and made available through their website. Users are able to search or browse the collection by object type, century, country and department.
Driven by the LOC Prints & Photographs Division, PPOC contains catalog records and digital images from their holdings. These includes photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings.
As one of the largest museums in the world, the Metropolitan Museum (MET) provides access to more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works across different periods and geographic locations. Such works can be downloaded directly from the Museum’s website for non-commercial use—including in scholarly publications in any media—without permission from the Museum and without a fee.
