Jump to Main Content

  • Americans for the Arts
  • Arts Action Fund
  • pARTnership Movement
  • Animating Democracy
  • Load Picture

Home

Search form

Stimulating Local, State, and Federal Advocacy for the Arts

Action-Oriented Research to Make a Case for the Arts

Building Stronger Communities Through the Arts One Person at a Time

Forging Strategic Alliances that Propel the Arts Forward as a Solution

Offering Programs and Initiatives to Help You in Your Work as an Arts Leader

Reports & Data

  • Americans for the Arts Publications
  • Arts & Economic Prosperity 6
  • Arts & Economic Prosperity 5
  • Arts + Social Impact Explorer
  • 2021 Profile of Art Incubators
  • Business Contributions to the Arts: 2018 Edition
  • Creative Industries
  • National Arts Administration and Policy Publications Database
  • New Community Visions Initiative
  • Public Opinion Poll
  • Local Arts Agency Profile
  • Research One-Pagers
  • Animating Democracy History
  • Animating Democracy Contributors
  • National Arts Policy Roundtable
  • The National Initiative for Arts & Health Across the Military
  • Legislative Issue Center
  • State Policy Pilot Program
  • Aspen Seminar for Leadership in the Arts
  • YouthArts Toolkit
  • pARTnership Movement Toolkits
  • National Cultural Districts Exchange Toolkit
  • Local Arts Rapid Response Kit

Networks & Councils

  • Networks Overview
  • Arts Education Network
  • Emerging Leaders Network
  • Local Arts Network
  • Private Sector Network
  • Public Art Network
  • State Arts Action Network
  • United Arts Funds
  • United States Urban Arts Federation
  • Arts and Business Council of New York

Services & Training

  • About ArtsU
  • Tools for Local Arts Advancement
  • Start A Program

Promotion & Recognition

  • Annual Leadership Awards
  • Public Leadership in the Arts Awards
  • Arts and Business Partnership Awards
  • National Arts Awards
  • Jorge and Darlene Pérez Prize in Public Art & Civic Design
  • Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities
  • Americans for the Arts Professional Member Spotlights
  • Advocacy Partners
  • Arts Education Partners
  • Artists Committee
  • Private Sector Partners
  • Governmental Partners (Public Sector)
  • Leader Spotlights
  • Artist Think Tank
  • Arts. Ask for More
  • National Arts in Education Week
  • National Shop Local Artists Week
  • National Arts & Humanities Month
  • Public Art Network Year in Review

Focusing in on Topics of Interest to Provide Facts and Links to Resources

  • Advancing Arts Locally
  • Arts & Business
  • Arts & Civic Design
  • Arts & Economy
  • Arts Education
  • Arts & Healing
  • Arts Marketing
  • Creative Economy
  • Cultural Equity
  • Disaster Preparedness
  • For Artists
  • Funding Resources
  • International
  • Professional Development
  • Social Change
  • Strategic Partners
  • Can't Find Your Topic?

Shining the Spotlight on Arts Programs and Advocacy Work in States Across America

  • Connecticut
  • District of Columbia
  • Massachusetts
  • Mississippi
  • New Hampshire
  • North Carolina
  • North Dakota
  • Pennsylvania
  • Rhode Island
  • South Carolina
  • South Dakota
  • West Virginia

Researching the Benefits of Art Museums—A Nationwide Study

Posted by emily holtrop, oct 11, 2017.

research about art museum

What are the benefits of art museums to people? A question with so many answers. If you were a public administrator or official, you may say art museums support revenue growth, encourage participation rates across communities, or that they support K-12 academic test scores. While important, none of these data points address the meaning of art museums to individuals and communities.

One of the most pressing needs in the cultural sector is to identify the difference that art museums make in people’s lives and to demonstrate this value with evidence that can withstand intense scrutiny. Without research-based data, art museums and art educators will not succeed in convincing policymakers and civic leaders that museums are vital to civic life, leading to the significant reduction or even absence of opportunities to engage with original works of art as an integral part of education and community experiences. That museums are more than nice—they are necessary.

To begin to answer the question—what are the benefits of art museums to people—The National Art Education Association (NAEA) Museum Education Division and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) joined forces to conduct a nationwide, four-year intensive research study on the impact of single visit art museum school programs. Supported by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, this research is being led by Randi Korn & Associates (RK&A).

The NAEA/AAMD research team identified school-age children (grades 4-6) as the initial audience of study because single visit school field trips are the most prevalent student experiences at museums. According to a national survey of U.S. art museums, which was carried out as part of the present NAEA/AAMD study, 96% of museum respondents offer these programs. Along with family programs, they often offer young people their first entry-points to these learning environments and the objects they hold. Through teacher feedback and the direct experiences of museum educators leading excited, engaged classes through conversations and explorations of artworks, it is clear that good and productive things happen for students during art museum field trips. Research related to constructivist and inquiry-based pedagogies, engagement with original works of art, and aspects of learning in museum environments further support that art museums can be places where rich learning and discovery happen. Yet substantive research on art museum field trip programs is currently limited. In an environment of ever-shrinking school budgets and high stakes testing, teachers wishing to take their students on art museum field trips are under increasing pressure to show the educational benefit of such experiences.

research about art museum

For the past four years the NAEA/AAMD Impact Research Initiative has explored the benefits of single visit art museum programs on student learning. To date the study has produced a national survey of field trip practices as well as a published literature review on the impact of museum programs on students. During the 2016-2017 school year the study team worked with six geographically-diverse museums [1] and seven school districts throughout the U.S. to assess student learning during facilitated, single visit museum programs in five capacities: critical thinking, creative thinking, sensorimotor and affective response, human connections and empathy, and academic connections. In addition to providing insight into the effects of single-visit art museum programs on students, our hope is that the study’s results advance scholarship in both museum and art education, and serve as a powerful leveraging tool to support student learning in art museums.

research about art museum

At the time of the writing of this article, data collection has been completed and the team at RK&A are busy at work analyzing and compiling that data. This work will continue into the spring of 2018. At that time a Core Team, representing leadership from NAEA and AAMD as well as leaders in the field of museum education, will work with RK&A to create the final report and a User’s Guide for dissemination next summer. In October of 2018 a symposium will be held at the Detroit Institute of Art to bring leaders in the field of museums, museum education, and the educational and research sectors together to discuss our findings and what they mean for the field as a whole.

For more information on the NAEA/AAMD Impact Research Initiative, please read our White Paper . If you are interested in staying informed on the progress of our study and to be invited to the symposium, please share your contact information here . If you have additional questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me at [email protected] or [email protected] .

[1] The six museums that served as study sites:

  • Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH
  • Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
  • Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL
  • RISD Museum, Providence, RI
  • Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD
  • Reports and Data
  • Networks and Councils
  • Services and Training
  • Promotion and Recognition

By Location

Sister sites.

  • National Arts Action Summit
  • Nancy Hanks Lecture
  • Annual Convention
  • ArtsU Webinars
  • ArtsMeet National Event Calendar

Connect with Us

  • Sign Up for E-News
  • Manage Subscriptions

Connect with Others

  • ArtsMeet Calendar
  • News & Media

Americans for the Arts serves, advances, and leads the network of organizations and individuals who cultivate, promote, sustain, and support the arts in America. Founded in 1960, Americans for the Arts is the nation's leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts and arts education.

  • Internships
  • Privacy Statement
  • Web Accessibility Statement
  • Cultural Diversity Statement
  • Content ReUse Policy
  • Background image credits
  • 1275 K St NW, Suite 1200
  • Washington, DC 20005
  • T 202.371.2830  
  • © 2024
  • Website Designer Navigation Arts
  • Website Developer New Target  
  • Company Intranet  (staff only)

research about art museum

ICOFOM Study Series

Home Numéros 48-2 Articles Beyond the Modern Museum. A theor...

Beyond the Modern Museum. A theoretical framework for a museal landscape analysis

Today museum studies have a duty to keep pace with the museum’s perpetual renewal. This paper, then, aims to outline a new research path in order to grasp what are today the most significant categories and features of the contemporary museum. This will be done by bringing together the contributions of two disciplines so close to each other in subject and purpose, yet still so far apart in the academic discourse, namely museology and the sociology of art. Through the intertwining of theories and concepts of social aesthetics, the systemic approach, and new and post-critical museology, an attempt is made to develop a new research programme to observe museal landscapes. This will be applied to the city of Naples, in the belief that, while it is true that every community is in a class by itself, and therefore cannot be generalized, this is not true of this method which, on the contrary, could be fruitfully applied to a wide number of contexts.

Aujourd'hui, les études muséales ont le devoir de suivre le rythme du renouvellement perpétuel du musée. Ce document vise donc à tracer une nouvelle voie de recherche afin de comprendre quelles sont aujourd'hui les catégories les plus significatives et caractéristiques du musée contemporain. Cela sera fait en établissant un pont entre les apports de deux disciplines si proches l'une de l'autre par leur sujet et leur objectif, mais si loin dans le discours académique, c’est à dire la muséologie et la sociologie de l'art. Grâce à l'imbrication des théories et des concepts appartenant à l'esthétique sociale, l'approche systémique, la muséologie nouvelle et post-critique, on tente d'esquisser un nouveau programme de recherche pour observer les paysages muséaux.

Index terms

Mots-clés : , keywords: , introduction.

1 Museums have been there through all the stages of modernity, escorting the human species on a never-ending journey across the borders of past, present and future. But just like their favourite subject, namely human culture, museums too are in a state of perpetual change. Modernity is no longer the fabric of society and, in the same way, the modern art museum is something from a bygone era.

2 Just as in natural sciences new phenomena call for new theories to explain them, the new format of art museums requires a new approach in order to grasp their complex nature and role in a broader societal context.

3 Therefore, the aim of this paper is to outline a new pathway capable of granting insights through the study and observation of the museum by looking at two areas that are closely related but separated in common academic discourse: museology and the sociology of art. From the field of museology, this research refers to new museology (Vergo, 1989; Macdonald, 2006) and post-critical museology in order to underline the most characteristic features and facets of the art museum today. From the sociology of art, a wide number of approaches are taken into account, such as social aesthetics (Nisbet, 1976; Wolff, 1981; Griswold, 2012) and the systemic approach, ranging from the first, more structured theories (Danto, 1964; Becker, 1982; Bourdieu, 1983) to the more recent and fluid views (Luhmann, 2000; Latour, 2005; Van Maanen, 2009).

4 This paper, then, configures itself as a starting point, more than a finish line. The main goal is to take part in a perpetual debate fostering a new and cutting-edge research programme.

5 The approach resulting from this study is part of an ongoing PhD project and will be tested in relation to the city of Naples. Being characterized by its thriving cultural heritage, this city is our case study in order to prove the efficiency of the suggested approach, which could overhaul the way we look at the contemporary museal landscape, reconstructing it in a more thorough way.

The double evolution of mankind and artmaking. Why and how to study art

6 In January 2020, the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (MANN), opened the doors of the Lascaux 3.0 exhibition. Devised in partnership with the French département of Dordogne–Périgord, the exhibition is a global itinerant translation of the 18,000-year-old archaeological site. The event at the MANN under the direction of Paolo Giulierini was a very significant one, inasmuch as it underlined the impact a site that has much to say regarding the relationship between art and the human species. According to Georges Bataille, Lascaux, with its 900 square metres of prehistoric paintings, could be identified as the manifestation of the birth of art (Bataille 2007). It is crucial here to recognize art as an activity peculiar to the human species, based on the synergy between communication and technique, defined as mankind’s specific strategy to relate to the external world (Vattimo, 2014).

7 To observe art, then, is to observe mankind. To observe art through a scientific approach is, however, an extraordinarily complex task, for that art as an object of analysis is resistant to a static, fixed and universally accepted definition.

8 An answer to this everlasting issue could be attained through shifting the focus of the analysis to a mediological standpoint and by questioning not what art is , but rather what art does . In order to do that, as we will see, we need to focus on the distribution domain. Through the distribution domain the work of art is made disposable, and the organizations which engage in distribution give art a place inside its community or society (Van Maanen, 2009).

9 Among these organizations, there are museums. In the same way art escorted the human species on its complex evolutionary journey, changing both in form and substance, the art museum too has been anything but still, adapting its formats and paradigms to fit with human culture. The museum, now more than ever, is a complex medium, that enables an articulate process in which many different actors meet while they achieve a tangible expression of the techno-cultural nature of human utterance.

The Artworld arises. A new way to look at the work of art

1 Museum definition 2007 version, International Council of Museums (ICOM).

10 Recently museum studies have dominated a significant part of the academic discourse, by drawing strength from the increasing inclusiveness of the museum visiting practice. The definition of ‘museum’ itself (ICOM, 2019) has been the subject of debate and discussion, assessing the need to make explicit the complex cultural and social role of this public body. With its definition as an organization acting in the service of society, which is committed to a process of continuous communication, 1 to study the museum today is to study not just a simple institution or business, but rather a medium. Hence, this topic calls for a multidisciplinary set of concepts and knowledges to avoid omitting any of the many significant issues and features. Thus, this paper relies on the assumption that the best way to analyse the museum is from a mediological standpoint, with the ability to combine means, methods and notions of disciplines so close on a factual level, yet still so distant in the academic discourse, such as museology and sociology of art.

11 The first step of this paper was to emphasize the potential of art studies in order to comprehend the nature of human communication. The second step was to assess the need for a shift of perspective, focusing the discussion on what art does rather than what art is. The third step, then, involves weighing up the domain of distribution and its crucial role in signifying the museum as a medium.

12 Acknowledging the effectiveness of a distribution-focused analysis implies the recognition of art as a complex and multidimensional ecosystem, consisting of multiple elements and the relationships between them. Historically a topic of discussion in philosophy and aesthetics, theory of art had to wait until the second half of the 20th century to be studied in its own right. This resulted from the need for a systemic approach in the study of artistic processes.

13 The research paths arising from this demand were therefore fundamental in defining an artworld, a concept without which it would be impossible to understand the role o f the museum as the link between the production and the fruition of art. The expression “artworld” was coined in 1964 by Arthur Danto, in response to the need to rethink artistic theories in order to better frame the new movements flourishing during the second half of the 20th century. Thus, the idea of an artworld came to the aid of art theory scholars who were facing many issues, such as the artwork stripped of its mimetic role towards reality, or the artwork formally representing an everyday object. Today, we use ‘artworld’ to describe the ecosystem inhabited by artists, museums, organizations and audiences. All these actors engage in multiple relationships which perpetually renegotiate borders and boundaries of the ecosystem itself, debating and furthering art’s development (Danto, 1964). The artworld, by acknowledging art as a statement about reality rather than a piece of it, enables on one hand the communicative vocation of art, and on the other culture’s cumulative disposition, by admitting for example abstract art as an unreachable goal if not through a journey across the many steps of art history and theory.

14 Through the artworld concept then, Danto succeeded in shifting the focus of the signification of the artistic object. From now on, the artwork would be observed not on the basis of some alleged inherent properties but rather by relying on its contextual placement in a space made of relations and conventions: the artworld.

15 In the latter half of the 20th century the systemic approach was introduced, among other artistic theories, inflecting itself from time to time in a philosophical context (Danto, 1964), a sociological one (Bourdieu, 1983) or even an economic one (DiMaggio & Powell , 1983; Becker, 1982). All these contributions make clear that to understand art is also to understand the dynamics of the organizations which engage in it and the principles which rule its relationships with the social and economic environment (DiMaggio & Powell , 1983). Among them, at least two have to be further explored: Becker’s pragmatic institutional approach and Bourdieu’s field theory.

16 Becker’s perspective is based on the need for an extensive empirical understanding of the artworld in order to complete the discourse previously only carried out in philosophical terms. In making a difference in Becker’s argument are essentially two key concepts: collaboration and conventions. According to Becker, the very same connotation of “artist” and “artistic” relies on the concepts of collective activity (collaboration) and shared narratives (conventions).

17 Collaboration and conventions are then responsible for shaping the artworld itself, which is the network of people whose cooperation, organized via their shared knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of artworks the artworld is noted for.

18 Pragmatism and empiricism are, then, the cornerstones of Becker’s theory, in which he tries to outline a schematic list of the artworld’s characteristic activities in their broadest sense. Besides the artist’s core activities, such as the elaboration and the execution of the idea, Becker also points out some supporting activities, in particular regarding distribution, reception and consumption, engaging in an argument which recalls the Marxist concept of the product obtaining its completion in consumption (Corrigan, 1999). Every action is therefore bound to the other following a structure explainable in terms of a bundle of tasks (Becker, 1982), which again underlines the cooperative aspect. Such collaborations are made possible through the conventions which – under the form of shared practices and knowledge – constitute the conditions of existence of any collective action. Indeed, they both legitimate materials, forms, and dimensions and make possible the relationships between artists, distributors and audiences. Thus, artworks always bear the marks of the system which distributes them (Becker 1982).

19 Even if it is open to a certain amount of criticism, Becker’s approach is crucial since it opens the museum field to the observations of many activities involved in the artistic process, and considers the problems of the function of art in society : it connects the organizational aspects of the artworld with the substantive question of the value of art reception for audiences and for the culture they live in (Van Maanen, 2009).

20 The adoption of a systemic perspective in the study of art and the focus on the distribution domain – that is to say on the museal organization – opens up multiple and innovative research paths. However, this is not enough, as it is necessary to contextualize the distribution domain itself. Just as the artistic ecosystem takes the shape of a complex blend of different elements, so it is also to be contextualized in a broader setting, which in turn is conditioned by many processes, actors and relationships. A very significant step in this direction was made by Bourdieu, with his field theory (Bourdieu, 1983), whose main purpose was to elaborate a theoretical construct capable of explaining the artworld’s complexity and to reveal the underlying structures and mechanisms, beyond the simple enumeration.

21 In Bourdieu’s theory, field, habitus and capital play a main role in the artistic process. The field can be described as a structure of relationships between social positions, occupied by specific agents, who aim to gain, maintain and manifest a specific symbolic capital, relying on other forms of capital and on a shared cultural corpus (the habitus). Thus, Bourdieu proposes to approach the artistic field as a structure of objective relations, which could be described through a series of general principles regulating the distribution of capital, the strategy of conservation, subversion and recognition of the field’s laws. The heuristic proficiency of Bourdieu’s theory lies in the possibility of putting into the background the individual action stressing the structural relations between different social positions instead. Therefore, if on the one hand the study of artistic processes cannot be reduced to only aesthetic–philosophical speculation, it cannot be limited to just the examination of the time–space context either.

22 Among the other theories there are two similarly narrow ones that recur in art studies. The first is the “art for art’s sake” viewpoint, which considers the artwork as an isolated and closed object in itself. The second is the external reading of the artistic product, which does not go any further from observing the social conditions of the artwork’s context of production. In order to avoid both of these limited perspectives, artistic processes must be observed in relational terms.

23 For this reason, Bourdieu introduces the notion of external forces into the artistic theory. By including the literary and artistic field inside the broader field of power, indeed, he facilitates a research pathway built on the recognition of multiple domains, actors, forces and relationships involved in artistic processes. Moreover, Bourdieu contextualizes such processes in a much wider situational territory, which in turn is shaped by encounters with different agencies.

24 Still acknowledging a certain level of autonomy (regarding the rules which govern the field), the contextualization of the artistic field explains its dynamics in terms of balance between autonomous and heteronomous influences. Therefore, in the analysis of the museum, one cannot avoid turning to the political, cultural and economic landscapes by which it is surrounded, nowadays more than ever, as museums are increasingly characterized by their social role. It is in fact the distribution domain which develops itself as a space of encounter between the inside and the outside, a dimension in which both a connection and a clash occurs between the different forces joining the game. A passage through which, in the end, art can get its societal start (Van Maanen, 2009).

After the modern museum. A new way to look at a new museum

25 In the modern scenario the museum used to play the very same role on a cultural level that the factory played on a social and productive level. Public space par excellence, historical, cultural and artistic institution imperative in any true modern metropolis, the museum debuted on the urban landscape towards the end of the 17th century. Beyond its embryonic forms and its primitive ancestors – think about the widespread private Renaissance collections or the far more ancient centres of cultural production and preservation – museums came to life in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, of which they embody and organize philosophies and dominant narratives, such as the ideology of progress and the encyclopaedic worldview.

26 The term museum, not as an institution dedicated to the study of the Muses but rather as a modern institution devoted to cultural progress, was used for the first time, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , in 1683, referring to British historian and alchemist Elias Ashmole’s collection (Vergo, 1989). After Ashmole’s collection was described as public, the next logical step was to designate it as a museum, just as happened for some more famous cases such as London’s British Museum. To define the museum as an accessible area, a common good and a main actor in preserving and handing down cultural heritage is not an isolated phenomenon. In fact, it marks a line of continuity with other social processes occurring during the 18th and 19th centuries: the rise of the ideology of progress, the diffusion of scientific principles and the emergence of a new socio-political actor, namely the metropolitan population.

“These tendencies may be reduced to four principal characteristics which cluster round the definition of a museum: the first is that the collections on display should in some way contribute to the advancement of knowledge through study of them; the second, which is closely related, is that the collections should not be arbitrarily arranged, but should be organised according to some systematic and recognisable scheme of classification; the third is that they should be owned and administered not by a private individual, but by more than one person on behalf of the public […]” (Vergo, 1989, p. 8).

27 The museum, thus, offers itself to modernity as the most suitable version of the already established practice of collecting. The practice of collecting has changed following the modern pedagogic paradigm, emphasizing the semantic ritual value of things, the encyclopaedic project and the tangible manifestation of bourgeois luxury.

28 In addition, museums are deeply bound to other institutions, such as the World Expo between them they interweave the collectable object’s sacralization and the commodified object’s symbolic value (Abruzzese, 2000).

29 There’s no doubt that the factory building was the epitome of modernity, around which – materially and metaphorically – the organization of society unfolded itself. From the second half of the 20th century the factory has been through some major developments, becoming fragmented and scattered. In the same way museums have undergone numerous changes connected to what many scholars call postmodernity (Lyotard, 1984; Jameson, 1991). Whatever one wants to call it, we’re dealing with a redefinition of the typical modern narratives.

30 Politicians, rulers, artists, artworks, institutions and organizations: no one was spared in such an upheaval of aesthetic, social and linguistic dogmas. The same applies for museums too. For this reason, it is not possible anymore to make use, in museum studies, of frames and concepts that belong to an era which no longer exists. There’s a need for something to fit the ever-changing landscape around us. The systemic standpoints introduced by Becker and Bourdieu could fulfil this need if combined with a much more flexible vision able to explain contemporary social models.

31 The main arguments we will focus on in this section are Latour’s Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005) and Luhmann’s Social System Theory (Luhmann, 2000), in order to find a point of view from which we can observe the museum in its contemporary form.

32 Luhmann’s social system is that set of relations which arises between what he calls communicative utterances (Luhmann, 2000) Therefore, a social system is autonomous and autopoietic, in the sense that it is made by its own processes. However, it is not isolated, as it engages in a so-called structural coupling with other systems (Luhmann, 2000) which allows them to perpetually associate and to function through reciprocal interaction. Within this framework, the art system differs from the others in the types of communication which comprise it. These are the artistic utterances which rely on the ability to communicate in a material or perceptible form. The picture drawn in Art as a Social System is, then, a complex and compound one, in which the art system arises from the intertwining of different utterances such as artworks, the way they are distributed and displayed, and the dynamics springing from the fulfilment of their purpose. Thus, Luhmann’s perspective allows us to observe the art system as a multidimensional machine and, at the same time, as a fluid organism, as its very same component parts are identifiable as processual. Moreover, resulting from this view, is again the effectiveness of the analysis of the distribution domain, the dimension in which the art system’s objects are produced and offered, allowing the thriving of the system itself from utterance to utterance.

33 Strongly influenced by the modification of the modern paradigm is Latour’s Actor Network Theory, which is shaped as a strategy to observe social processes without any a priori cognitive constraints. ANT’s key concept is the network, which is described as an existing set of relations to be described and interpreted, a non-structured structure engaged in perpetual change (Latour, 2000). Such structures are characterized by some fundamental features: continual movement, an internal porosity and permeability, and the ability to be observed from various points of view.

34 To summarize, ANT offers some very effective concepts with which to understand the way artworlds organize themselves and function. In the first place, there is the articulation of the different levels of production, distribution and reception. These layers are in a condition of mutual and functional relationships between them and with what’s around them. In the second place, actors not only produce actions significant for themselves, but which also affect each other’s agency. Actor Network Theory then allows us to clarify the organization of the artworld on the various levels of production, distribution and reception and underlines the functional relationships between these layers. Moreover, there is the key idea of passage and its transmuting effect:

“It will be clear that the description of what happens with different groups of people when they go through the different types of passages the artworld provides, is also at the heart of the question of how art is made to function in a society. Conversely, the concept of passages challenges the artworld to think about how its translation centres function and possibly could be reorganized to generate other or additional effects” (Van Maanen, 2009, p. 103).

35 By making use of the sociology of translation’s vocabulary, ANT can answer a methodological issue arising from the observation of an unpredictable and hazy society. The same notion of translation – the complex process which constantly mixes together a variety of social and natural entities, and thus also enables an explanation of how only a few obtain the right to express and communicate, representing the many silent actors they have mobilized – emphasizes the continuity in which the processes of changing and remodelling occur.

36 Therefore, considering the art system as a network in this sense – rather than as a fixed and stable structure following, for example, the Bourdieusian paradigm – the museum earns a paramount role as a centre of creativity, organization and distribution.

37 What the theories of Becker, Bourdieu, Luhmann and Latour have in common, is that they all feature a position useful to understand how the artworld’s organization is vital for the functioning of art itself. Despite some differences, other common points emerge, which are very significant to the viewpoint of this paper. First, the assumption that art is not only something to look at but also does something, and it’s in this sense that the sociologist must approach it. Secondly, the view that aesthetic production, distribution and reception are interdependent and, for this reason, in order to comprehend what art does – and how – one must look at all three domains, emphasizing the role of the actors, such as museums, that allow their functional relationship.

“To understand what art does and what makes art do something, it should be known how different types of art events […] are conditioning different types of experience […]. What could be expected from the sociology of art is that it formulates the significance of the organizational character of art events for the societal functioning of the arts presented.” (Van Maanen, 2009, p. 128)

38 These events Van Maanen talks about are then crucial to ensure the functioning of art at an individual and a collective level, bringing organizational forms and their communication strategies into the foreground of a contemporary sociology of art. It will be clear how this idea suggests a research path based on the bridging between art sociology and museology, in order to grasp completely and extensively the observed phenomena.

“[…] So, the domain of distribution makes the work of art available – by using it in a particular way and in that sense changing it – creates the audience for it, and brings both together, three aspects to be studied by sociologists of art in detail. And by doing this, distributing organizations give art a place in a community or society, a specific place based on the type of events they provide.” (Van Maanen, 2009, 128)

Sketching a research proposal. Museology and sociology in the service of museal landscape study

39 Given the aim of this paper – to delineate a new research path for museum studies based on the evaluation of the actual features and conditions of the object of analysis – each of the studies taken into account bestows a crucial insight. From Becker and Bourdieu, we draw the framework within which one must look at the artworld Danto first talked about. On the other hand, from scholars such as Luhmann and Latour we learn how to adapt these concepts to the contemporary era. Sociology of art then has told us why to look at art and how to do it, by highlighting the priorities of art studies and of the distribution domain even beyond museology’s own interests. At this point, we should turn to museology in order to evaluate which aspects of the main systems of the distribution domain have to be taken into account.

40 Post-critical museology is a new line of research which draws upon sociological theory and method and, in line with its characterization of the hybrid nature of the museum, is itself a hybrid (Dewdney, Dibosa & Walsh, 2013). The primary aim of the post-critical point of view is thus to avoid the remote position of analytical critique (Dewdney, Dibosa & Walsh, 2013) and to develop a position calibrated to the political, economic and social changes occurring on a global scale and accountable for a new way of looking at art.

41 The bridging between museology’s most recent contribution and the sociology of art and media studies’ more rooted and well-rehearsed theories is intended to provide a theoretical framework capable of covering the needs brought about by the contemporary museal landscape.

42 Such a manifold framework is essential in moving back and forth between the observation of the agents of exhibition (museums) and the objects of exhibition (works of art). Because, while museology and the sociology of art’s systemic approach stresses the relevance of the domain of distribution, social aesthetics and media studies uphold the need to focus on artistic expressions for what they are, represent and do. Also, the recent developments in new and post-critical museology allow us to grasp the most relevant topics in museum studies today, such as the social role of museums and their relationships with digital and information technologies. These major issues must be again investigated moving from the observation of the museum as an organism to that of the artwork as its elementary particle. More specifically, the social role of the museum is to be observed through both the policy adopted by the museum and the messages conveyed by its events and exhibitions. The relationship with digital technology, in a similar way, lies in the technical dimension, on one hand, and in the aesthetic one, on the other.

43 Acknowledging the museum as something more than a public institution or a business means to stress its intermediary nature.

“Politicians represent their constituents, parliament represents the people, broadcasters represent public views and opinions […] art museums represent the continuity of visual culture and all of these uses of representational means ensure the stability of the existing order and relationship between people and things” (Dewdney, Dibosa, & Walsh, 2013, p. 4).

44 Thus, the museum becomes at the same time a network and a link, a set of hypertexts which goes back and forth from the realm of producers to that of consumers, a distinction that in itself no longer makes any sense in the contemporary mediascape.

45 It is not a coincidence that a great number of the terms used to describe the museum allude to the digital world’s vocabulary. As a matter of fact, one of the most characteristic features of the contemporary museum lies in its relationship with digital and information technologies. Software has in fact replaced a diverse array of physical, mechanical, and electronic technologies used before the 21st century to create, store, distribute and access cultural artefacts (Manovich, 2013).

46 The digital revolution has significantly influenced the museum’s organization, fulfilment of purpose and perception, as Dewdney, Dibosa and Walsh stress in their argument:

“[…] The two most compelling forces identified that are bringing about global change are those associated with technological advance and the convergence in digital form of a unitary code of information, and the even greater accumulation and movement of capital and labour in urban centres across the world. Both processes produce cultural relativism and a general separation of people and ideas from historical forms of tradition.” (2013, p. 5)

47 New media allow the museum to create new experiences and enhance familiar ones in unprecedented ways (Tallon & Walker, 2008), welcoming plenty of digital voices which enable many cutting-edge discourses. The art museum is increasingly becoming a far more meaning-rich environment for its users and comprises a growing number of bottom-up processes. But digital technologies are not just instrumental tools or technical assistants, as they also involve new languages and aesthetics which obviously influence art museums. Thus, there’s the need to observe digital media and their relationship with museums through a twofold perspective, alternating between channels and contents in order to draw a thorough picture.

48 There’s no doubt that digitization has been one of the most important revolutions in contemporary history but there’s much more behind the profound changes experienced by present-day museums. The remediation of modern narratives, ideas and institutions which has characterized the global scene since the second half of the last century has also made a difference in this context. This process had repercussions in the museal context, on the one hand highlighting the museum’s social role – being a space of expression for consumers too – on the other sharpening the relevance of social and political contemporary issues in museum practices.

2 Musei, Monumenti e Aree Archeologiche Statali, Ufficio di Statistica MiBACT (2019).

49 The research proposal sketched in this paper is part of an ongoing PhD project at the University of Naples “Federico II”. Thus, the methodology resulting from this study will be tested in application to the city of Naples which, as corroborated by MiBACT data, 2 stands out among other Italian cities for its rich and catalysing cultural heritage. Following the outcomes of the examined approaches, the aim of the project is to observe this metropolis’ museal landscape, dealing with both the single institutions and their specific offerings, and the relationships they establish with each other.

50 The guidelines will be essentially twofold. First, the influence of information and communication technologies from both a technical and an aesthetic perspective. Second, the realm of the social, regarding on the one hand the social role of the museum, and on the other the effect of recently arisen social issues in museum practice.

51 More specifically, the importance of digitization will be weighed through the observation of what museums offer, using the tools and methods of media studies and the sociology of art, and through an evaluation of how museum practices have changed thanks to digital tools. This last question will be addressed by using qualitative interviews of museum workers and selected participants from the audience. The social dimension of museums will be observed through both their policies and politics and the communication undertaken in their exhibitions. Moreover, in line with the post-modern de-institutionalization of society, it is necessary to take into consideration also the emergence of new actors which are not covered by the classic definition of museum but which today present themselves as protagonists in the field; for instance, exhibition venues tied to academic research and self- or co-managed social centres. These sites are now main actors in the interpretive and creative arena and will be observed following the same methodology outlined above in relation to museums.

52 The museum environment is, following Bourdieu, a cultural field immersed in a broader field. From the perspective of Luhmann, it is a system engaging perpetually in a structural coupling with other social systems. Finally, according to Latour, it is a fluid and open network in constant communication with other elements and networks. It will be clear, then, that the most meaningful changes which have occurred in the social, cultural, technological and political environments, have also had a strong influence on museums.

53 Museum studies need, therefore, to change the focus and breadth of the analysis, by targeting not the single museum, but rather the museal landscape. Moreover, in order to observe the most important features of the contemporary art museum, previously mentioned, it is necessary to adopt a transdisciplinary approach making use of the most contextually meaningful concepts and frameworks – explained extensively above – in museum studies, mediology and the sociology of art.

54 The museal landscape of Naples will be the testing ground for this transdisciplinary approach, enabling us to observe complex communities that rely significantly on their artistic, historic and cultural heritage. The final aim is to demonstrate the flexibility of the methodological proposal. Such an approach, defined on the basis of changes both in the artistic museal landscape and in the social sphere in general, may also be fruitfully applied to other case studies.

Bibliography

Abruzzese, A., & Borrelli, D. (2000). L’Industria Culturale . Roma: Carocci.

Bataille, G. (2007). Lascaux. La nascita dell’arte . Milano: Mimesis.

Becker, H. S. (1982). Art Worlds . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1983). The Field of Cultural Production. Poetics , 12, 311–356.

Corrigan, P. (1999). La Sociologia dei Consumi . Milano: Franco Angeli.

Danto, A. (1964). The Artworld. Journal of Philosphy , 61, 19, 571–584.

Dewdney, A., Dibosa, D., & Walsh V. (2013). Post-critical Museology . London & New York: Routledge.

DiMaggio, P., & Powell R. (1983). The Iron Cage Revisited. American Sociological Review , 48(2), 147–160.

Griswold, W. (2012). Cultures and Societies in a Changing World . Los Angeles: SAGE.

Jameson, F. (1991). Post Modernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism . Durham: Duke University Press.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Luhmann, N. (2000). Art as a Social System . Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Lyotard, J. (1984). Post-modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge . Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Macdonald, S. (Ed.). (2006). A Companion to Museum Studies . Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Manovich, L. (2013). Software takes Command . London & New York: Bloomsbury.

Nisbet, R. (1976). Sociology as an Art Form . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tallon, L., & Walker, K. (Eds.). (2008). Digital Technologies and Museum Experience . Plymouth: Altamira Press.

Van Maanen, H. (2009). How To Study Art Worlds . Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Vattimo, G. (Ed.). (2014). Martin Heidegger: Saggi e Discorsi . Milano: Mursia.

Vergo, P. (Ed.). (1989). The New Museology . London: Reaktion Books.

Bibliographical reference

Sara Pastore , “Beyond the Modern Museum. A theoretical framework for a museal landscape analysis” ,  ICOFOM Study Series , 48-2 | 2020, 178-192.

Electronic reference

Sara Pastore , “Beyond the Modern Museum. A theoretical framework for a museal landscape analysis” ,  ICOFOM Study Series [Online], 48-2 | 2020, Online since 26 January 2021 , connection on 15 February 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/iss/2720; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/iss.2720

About the author

Sara pastore.

Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”, Napoli, Italia

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Full text issues

  • 51(1-2) | 2023 Challenging the silences: Confronting taboos in museums and museology
  • 50-2 | 2023 Spaces for Global Museology
  • 50-1 | 2022 50 años de la Mesa Redonda de Santiago de Chile: lecturas en clave actual
  • 49-2 | 2021 The Decolonisation of Museology: Museums, Mixing, and Myths of Origin
  • 49-1 | 2021 Museology in tribal contexts
  • 48-2 | 2020 Defining the museum: challenges and compromises of the 21 st century
  • 48-1 | 2020 The future of tradition in museology
  • 47(1-2) | 2019 Museology and the Sacred
  • 46 | 2018 The politics and poetics of Museology
  • 45 | 2017 The predatory Museum
  • 44 | 2016 Museology exploring the concept of MLA (Museums-Libraries-Archives)
  • 43b | 2015 New Trends in Museology
  • 43a | 2015 New Trends in Museology

The Journal

  • Presentation
  • Editorial staff
  • Submission of papers

Information

  • Website credits
  • Publishing policies

RSS feed

Newsletters

  • OpenEdition Newsletter

In collaboration with

Logo ICOFOM (Comité international pour la muséologie)

Electronic ISSN 2306-4161

Read detailed presentation  

Site map  – Website credits  – Syndication

Privacy Policy  – About Cookies  – Report a problem

OpenEdition member  – Published with Lodel  – Administration only

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search

Jump to navigation

Search form

  • Collecting and Provenance Research

Provenance—or the history of ownership of a work of art from the time of its creation to the present—is a critical aspect of museum work in the twenty-first century. Understanding to the extent possible the provenance both of new works entering the collections and of works already held in the collections is critical to the mission of the Princeton University Art Museum. 

Accordingly, the Museum actively conducts and carries out research on new acquisitions, whether prospectively coming into the collections by purchase or by gift, as well as doing so retrospectively on works already within its care. In doing so, the Museum seeks to meet and surpass both the requirements imposed by law and by cultural conventions and those required or requested by the museum field. This includes relevant U.S. and state law, international agreements such as the UNESCO Accord of 1970, bilateral treaties between the U.S. and other sovereign nations, and professional guidelines of both the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the American Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), all of which help to guide the Museum’s legal and ethical collecting policies and practices. In addition, the Museum collaborates with colleagues, experts, and officials both in the U.S. and around the world to consider the legal and ethical dimensions that relate to ownership of works of art. 

It can be difficult to determine the complete provenance of many works of art. Objects are often bought and sold anonymously before arriving at a museum; past owners may die without disclosing where they obtained the works in their collections; dealers do not always make known the sources of their holdings; and the records of dealers and auction houses are often incomplete. For all these reasons, gaps in provenance are common, especially for works whose acquisition can date back decades or even centuries. Therefore, the Museum’s provenance research remains a critical element of making the collections accessible to users, including those who visit the Museum itself or who draw on our web resources. 

The history of investigating provenance within the museum industry has itself been, at best, uneven. Historically, the questions posed of potential acquisitions in past decades were often lacking, relative to today’s standards. Evidence that a work of art was legally acquired or in many cases exported by its owner may not have been requested or provided, leading to a dearth of inherited information regarding works of art that entered the collections in the past. Indeed, the documentation of export licenses was often scarce in the past, such that even the most diligent provenance researcher can struggle to find evidence of a work’s original exportation from a source culture. 

Significant research has been expended at Princeton in key areas of provenance, such as research into the history of objects that may have changed hands during the Nazi era (1933-1945) in Europe, or works that are subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This work, and work in other areas of cultural sensitivity, continues. When appropriate, this research and other cooperative efforts have led to the transfer of ownership of certain works of art we have been able to determine exchanged hands inappropriately or even illegally prior to coming to Princeton. Each such instance requires deep and case-specific interrogation. 

As a teaching museum, the Princeton University Art Museum is committed to teaching through its professional behavior, including its adherence to and interrogation of both legal and ethical standards. We believe that our ability to retain the public trust in us as an educational and cultural institution rests on holding ourselves to the highest standards of provenance and of ethical conduct. As such, the Museum has committed itself to an important project of both ongoing research and of transparency, through which its established provenance information related to individual works of art will be made publicly accessible via our Web-based collections portal and other appropriate sites. This is the work not of weeks or of months but of years, but is work that we feel is a vital part of our teaching and research mission. 

If you have provenance-related inquiries or information, please contact Associate Director for Collections and Exhibitions Chris Newth at [email protected]  

For Further Information

American Alliance of Museums: Provenance

Association of Art Museum Directors: Standards and Practices

The Art Loss Register

Getty Provenance Index

Provenance Guide of the International Foundation for Art Research

Researching Holocaust-Era Assets Records at the National Archives and Records Administration

Researching the Provenance of a Work of Art

UNESCO Convention and Protocols of 1954

UNESCO Accord of 1970

World War II Provenance Research

  • Curatorial Areas

an image, when javascript is unavailable

  • Icon Link Plus Icon

Research Art is Everywhere. But Some Artists Do It Better Than Others.

By Kavior Moon

Kavior Moon

Dozens of archival documents—showing text too small to read and vintage photos of white men—are pinned in a semi-ordered, semi-chaotic grid.

Related Articles

In the global south, labeling a research project "art" can be a tool for evading censorship, when does artistic research become fake news forensic architecture keeps dodging the question.

How did this come to be? On the institutional front, art schools have been establishing programs and centers for “artistic research” and “research-creation,” particularly in Canada and across Europe, for more than 20 years. In 1997 the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki established an early notable doctoral program for artists; two decades later, PhD degrees in art are available in multiple countries. Globally renowned curators such as Catherine David, Okwui Enwezor, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Ute Meta Bauer made their careers organizing large-scale international exhibitions often laden with research-based art and organized within a curatorial framework predicated on theory. Now, there are professional artists with research-based practices teaching their students various research methodologies and encouraging the production of yet more research-based works.

The current trend has an even longer historical trajectory when related to artists and their motivations. One might find traces in the work of Leonardo da Vinci or 17th-century naturalists such as Maria Sibylla Merian. Hito Steyerl, a contemporary research artist par excellence, describes the formal and semiotic investigations of Soviet avant-garde circles in the 1920s as formative for research art today. In her 2010 essay “Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research as Discipline and Conflict,” Steyerl discusses authors, photographers, and self-proclaimed “factographers”—including Dziga Vertov, Sergei Tretyakov, Lyubov Popova, and Aleksandr Rodchenko—whose epistemological debates centered on terms such as “fact,” “reality,” and “objectivity.” From Constructivism, in which artists were redefined as designers, technicians, and engineers engaged in developing new approaches to constructing forms, emerged the program of Productivism and the associated method called “factography.”

Factographers aimed to chronicle and analyze modern life, particularly through texts, photography, and film. They did not claim to portray reality objectively and impartially (as opposed to conventional documentary makers) but rather to actively transform reality through ideological acts of signification, through new modes of production and collective reception. As Steyerl reminds us, “fact comes from [the Latin] facere , to make or to do.”

Another pivotal moment in the historical development of research-based art came with the conceptual turn in art in the 1960s and ’70s, particularly with the emergence of institutional critique. Moving away from formalist painting and sculpture, Conceptual artists contended that the idea or concept of an artwork (not its physical form) was the art. Texts, diagrams, photographs, and other forms of matter-of-fact documentation feature heavily in the works of Conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth, the Art & Language group, Mel Bochner, Hanne Darboven, and Christine Kozlov, among others. From this point of view, art can be seen as a transmission of “information,” the term curator Kynaston McShine used to title his landmark Conceptual art survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970.

WITH ARTISTS INCLINED TOWARD INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE like Hans Haacke, one begins to see research not just informing the work of art but becoming an essential part of its content. A significant early example is Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), which was made using extensive information that Haacke found in the New York County Clerk’s records. The work is simply a presentation of facts: it comprises 142 photographs of building facades and empty lots, maps of the Lower East Side and Harlem indicating each property’s location, and texts and charts detailing information about transfer of ownership, land value, and mortgage lenders.

With prolonged viewing, one notices that the many corporations that owned the properties were actually run by notorious landlord Harry J. Shapolsky and his relatives and associates, who bought, sold, and mortgaged the properties within their own real estate group. The shell corporations effectively obscured the properties’ ownership ties to the Shapolsky family as well as the tax advantages these inside deals conferred. One of the city’s biggest slumlords at the time, Shapolsky had previously been indicted for bribing building inspectors and convicted of rent-gouging.

For institutional critique artists, research became a key means to investigate and expose various social systems and the sociopolitical context of the art world. In doing so, the aim was to show how what we consider “art” is not timeless but in fact socially constructed, powerfully conditioned by the conventions and normalizing practices of art institutions. Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. was one of the reasons the artist’s major solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that year was famously canceled after then director Thomas Messer accused Haacke of “muckraking,” calling his work “extra-artistic” and a potential “alien presence” within the museum.

Although Haacke clearly made visible the machinery behind one of the most lucrative real estate operations in New York, the more fundamental threat, art historian Rosalyn Deutsche has pointed out, was how his work would have framed a series of slum properties against the museum’s pristine space, revealing it as a highly controlled space of material privilege. Deutsche persuasively argues that Haacke’s work implicitly raises questions about how proprietorial interests shape not only urban space but cultural spaces as well—a line of inquiry that Haacke and other institutional critique artists would develop in subsequent research-based works.

THE LAST MOMENTOUS SHIFT in the 20th century occurred around the 1980s and ’90s, as more and more artists used research to inform their works reflecting feminism, postcolonialism, queerness, and other forms of identity politics. An early example is Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79), a six-part series that juxtaposes documentation of the artist’s experience as a new parent and the development of her son during the first six years of his life with research on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. A feminist critique of Conceptual art as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis, Post-Partum Document presents the mother-child relationship as an intersubjective exchange of signs between mother and child.

During these decades, artists often used archival materials or the form of the archive in their works, making research-based art to recuperate overlooked histories and marginalized figures or groups. In her landmark Import/Export Funk Office (1992–93), Renée Green presented books, magazines, photographs, cassette tapes, videotaped interviews, and other source materials taken from both her library and that of German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen, creating an extensive audiovisual archive of international hip-hop and African diasporic culture in the United States and Germany. Hal Foster termed this tendency “an archival impulse,” looking at the works of Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, and Thomas Hirschhorn.

Another artistic approach entails questioning the authority and authenticity of archives by pointing out their inherent biases. Between 1989 and 2004, Walid Raad developed a collection of both found and fabricated materials—documents, notebooks, photographs, news clippings, interview transcripts, and videos—related to the Lebanese Civil War (1975–91). His archival displays, presented under the guise of an imaginary foundation named “The Atlas Group,” blend fact and fiction to deconstruct the truth claims of documentary media, and bespeak distrust of official narratives, while also exploring the links between history, memory, trauma, and fantasy.

ONE CAN SEE a variety of research-based approaches in the practices of numerous artists today, applied with varying degrees of success. Some critics have voiced skepticism of much research-based art currently in vogue. In a 2019 lecture at the Kunsthalle Wien, Claire Bishop decried many research-based artworks as “information overload” and mere “aggregation” without hierarchy or narrative in ways that are symptomatic of our “browsing” habits in the internet age.

While a number of artists have used research as a crucial component in large-scale works—Steyerl in her immersive installations, Hirschhorn in his sprawling “monuments” to various critical theorists—others favor a more understated mode: pared-back, subtle, and visually economical. These artists often start by researching objects, ideas, events, or sites, and pair their installations with detailed supplemental texts that make one reconsider the presented materials in light of what can’t immediately be seen, often intangible issues of historical context, social injustice, and the law.

Maria Eichhorn, a second-generation institutional critique artist, bridges that now-established approach with the practices of younger research-based artists. For the 1997 edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster, she used the production fee she received to purchase a plot of land near the center of the show’s host city. Declaring the vacant lot a public sculpture, she titled her project Acquisition of a plot, Tibusstraße, corner of Breul, communal district of Münster, plot 5, drawing attention to the site’s recent history: years prior, residents had mobilized to stop the building of luxury condominiums there, and formed a tenants association to protect the availability of affordable housing.

Eichhorn exhibited a copy of the plot’s purchase contract and deed in the Landesmuseum, alongside a booklet detailing her research into the origins of cities in Europe, the historical establishment of land registers and real property, and the problem of affordable housing in present-day Munster. Instead of installing a piece of decorative “plop art,” Eichhorn prompted visitors to reflect on the economic and social realities of everyday urban spaces and the conflict of public and private interests. At the end of the exhibition, the artist sold the plot back to the city and donated its resale value to the area’s tenants association.

More recently, Eichhorn has focused on goods unlawfully obtained by the German state. For her 2003 exhibition “Politics of Restitution” at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, she worked with historian Anja Heuss to research the provenance of 15 paintings in the Lenbachhaus’s art collection on permanent loan from the Federal Republic of Germany. After World War II and until 1962, the Allies sought to return art objects stolen by the Nazis; after that, the remaining 20,000 or so unclaimed items were declared state property. Heuss determined that 7 of the 15 paintings were likely stolen or forcibly taken from their Jewish owners. Eichhorn displayed these paintings so as to reveal the markings on the reverse that document how they changed hands over time. She also exhibited another painting in the Lenbachhaus’s collection that was formally restituted just a year earlier to the heirs of its original Jewish owner.

Chronicling how these paintings got to where they are begs a follow-up question: what other objects currently in public collections were wrongfully taken by the state? Eichhorn’s 2017 Documenta project built on her work at Lenbachhaus, but dealt more actively with restitution. In Kassel, she created a project called “The Rose Valland Institute,” to investigate the looting of all forms of Jewish-owned property, not just artworks, since 1933. Her multiroom installation centered around a towering shelf filled with books from the main public library in Berlin. A wall text claimed that the nearly 2,000 volumes on view were once owned by Jewish persons and unlawfully acquired by the municipal library in 1943. Eichhorn also displayed photos, auction records, inventory lists, and other documents related to the confiscation of Jewish-owned assets, artworks, books, and other material possessions, as well as a reference library of publications on these issues.

Viewers also learned from accompanying texts that the Rose Valland Institute is an actual functioning organization, based in the Neue Galerie in Kassel for the run of the exhibition (and now in Berlin), whose mission is to return the looted items to their rightful owners or their descendants. Eichhorn’s project provokes viewers to actively question how objects in the country’s public collections were acquired, and to make their own restitution claims or provide other pertinent information.

Like Eichhorn, Cameron Rowland displays found objects accompanied by detailed handouts that elucidate the dark histories the objects index. Rowland’s work often addresses racialized exploitation and its ongoing effects, such as a piece titled Assessment (2018) that comprises an 18th-century English grandfather clock once housed at a plantation in South Carolina, and three 19th-century receipts that show property taxes were collected on slaves, clocks, and livestock alike in slaveholding states.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Rowland displayed Assessment alongside used everyday objects—leaf blowers, a hedge trimmer, a stroller, and bicycles—placed casually around the gallery. These items were purchased at police auctions of goods taken through civil asset forfeiture, a legal proceeding in which law enforcement can seize without warrant property believed to be connected to illegal activity. Originating in the English Navigation Act of 1660 to maintain England’s monopoly on trade with its colonies and West Africa, civil asset forfeiture has since thrived in the United States. Today, it is practiced by police departments as well as federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Astoundingly, Rowland notes in their text that in 2013, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency under DHS, contributed $1 billion in seized property to the Treasury Forfeiture Fund.

Just as property taxes on slaves were used to fund state governments in the antebellum South, auction sales from civil asset forfeiture are used to fund the agencies that seize properties. Together, the objects in Rowland’s show link issues of property concerning enslaved and undocumented people to highlight the dispossession and profiteering that results when groups of people are denied the protections of citizenship.

Where Eichhorn has focused on restitution, Rowland spotlights reparations. For Disgorgement (2016), part of an exhibition at Artists Space in New York, Rowland established an entity called the Reparations Purpose Trust, evidenced by framed legal documents on view there. Through this trust, they purchased shares of the insurance company Aetna, Inc., which had once profited from issuing insurance policies on the lives of slaves to slaveowners. The trust is to hold these company shares until the US government passes a law to make financial reparations for slavery, at which point the trust will dissolve and give its shares to the federal agency responsible for making the payments.

Where Rowland has focused on reparations, Gala Porras-Kim proposes mediation as a form of redress. In her project “Precipitation for an Arid Landscape” (2022), first presented at Amant in Brooklyn, she displayed works centered on Maya objects collected by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. In several large drawings, collectively titled “Offerings for the Rain at the Peabody Museum,” she depicts objects found in the Chichén Itzá cenote, a sacred Maya sinkhole in Mexico. These objects were originally deposited as offerings to Chaac, the Maya god of rain, lightning, and thunder, but between 1904 and 1911, the American diplomat and archaeologist Edward H. Thompson dredged them up.

A circular enclosure in the center of the gallery displayed photographs, documents, letters, newspaper clippings, and other publications from the Peabody archives and elsewhere, enabling viewers to learn about the troubling circumstances that brought the objects into the museum. Thompson purchased property around the cenote in order to access it before smuggling the artifacts into the US; an 1897 Mexican law made exporting antiquities illegal.

In a framed letter to the Peabody Museum’s director, part of a work titled Mediating with the Rain (2021–), Porras-Kim points out that the desiccated condition of the Chaac objects is at odds with their intended wet state. The objects were meant to remain in the cenote, where they had been preserved in water. Exposure to air and the excessive dryness of the museum’s climate-controlled storage rooms have permanently changed their physical composition. Now, she notes, the objects are “just dust particles held together through conservation methods.” Porras-Kim suggests opening a dialogue on how the objects could at least regain what she calls their “dignitary interests” and thus be spiritually restituted in some form. One idea she has proposed is to designate the objects as owned by the rain and “on loan” to the museum.

In combining artistic research and institutional critique, artists like Porras-Kim and the others surveyed here are critically interrogating the institutions thought to be arbiters of authority. In other words, they are researching research to question the norms of knowledge production and to challenge the status quo. Rather than conducting investigations in order to present conclusive results, they unsettle and expand how we can see the world with all its inglorious pasts. 

Techies Are Returning Their Apple Vision Pro Headsets. Here’s Why.

Inside rinascente’s first beauty fair, ai is the only reason i care about the iphone 16’s huge a18 chip upgrade, harris and blitzer’s youth baseball portfolio names ceo, this 2-in-1 treadmill is more than $100 off on amazon today (and folds under your bed).

ARTnews is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Art Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Quantcast

Research Center

About the center, please email [email protected] to make an appointment..

Discover tens of thousands of materials focused on the study of fine art, architecture, and design at the Milwaukee Art Museum Research Center. Together, the resources of the George Peckham Miller Art Research Library along with the Museum’s institutional archives and manuscript collections encourage deeper discovery of the Museum, its collection, and the history of art and design in the region.

With a focus on the artists and movements most prevalent in the Museum’s collection, the Research Center serves a range of visitors, from curators developing their next exhibition to students of art history, from art dealers answering provenance questions to community members interested in local art history. Plan your visit to solve academic puzzles, make discoveries, and deepen your understanding of the topics that interest you most.

George Peckham Miller Art Research Library

Established in 1916, the Art Research Library’s reference and research collections have grown to more than 35,000 volumes, including exhibition catalogues, catalogues raisonnés, academic journals, files pertaining to artists in the Museum’s collection, rare books, and more. The Art Research Library also provides access to digitized texts/images and online tools such as JSTOR and Oxford Art Online.

Institutional Archives & Manuscript Collections

The Research Center is home to several archival collections that tell the story of the Milwaukee Art Museum and of art and design in Wisconsin and the Midwest. Collections include archives of the Museum’s more than 130-year history, papers from several local arts organizations, and special collection archives that contain the business documents, correspondence, and visual and design materials from industrial designer Brooks Stevens and furniture designer and interior architect George Mann Niedecken, two Wisconsinites who changed the world of design as we know it.

In 2017, the Research Center moved to the historic Judge Jason Downer mansion at 1201 N. Prospect Avenue. The three-story Victorian Gothic Judge Jason Downer mansion was designed by architect Edward Townsend Mix and built in 1874. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

  • Forgot Your Password
  • Member Login

Association of Art Museum Directors

  • Code of Ethics
  • Audited Financial Statements
  • Our Centennial
  • Standards & Practices
  • From the Field
  • For the Media
  • Current Opportunities
  • Object Registry

Research on Art Museums

research about art museum

Explore recent research on art museums including staff demographics; museum director perspectives and priorities; and the first survey investigating the characteristics, roles, and experiences of Black trustees in North American art museums.

IMLS, Civic Engagement, and Art Museums

research about art museum

The IMLS has created a hub on their website for museums and libraries seeking ways to promote civic engagement, highlighting several initiatives from AAMD member museums.

Puerto Rico Art Museums Form Historic Alliance

research about art museum

Museo de Arte de Ponce and Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico have signed an agreement formalizing an historic alliance between the two institutions, which will last two years.

Salary Survey 2023

research about art museum

Now including benchmarks for intern compensation, as well as over 50 staff positions in art museums.

Art Museums and Impact Investing

research about art museum

Upstart Co-Lab, AAMD, and The Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums have partnered on a first-of-its kind survey on impact investing by independent museums of art and

Museums and Communities News

research about art museum

Pictured: The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia has been working on a collaborative project with Common Good of Atlanta for several years to bring art

Site Navigation

Smithsonian american art museum: research and scholars center.

Helene Sardeau (Mrs. George Biddle) at work in her studio photograph

The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s specialized art research databases—the  Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture and the  Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue Index —describe more than a half million art works in public and private collections worldwide. SAAM’s  Photograph Study Collection  contains more than a quarter million negatives and study prints documenting American art by leading fine arts photography firms.

Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture

The Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture were created by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to assist researchers in locating American paintings and sculptures for comparative study. Together, the Inventories reference over 400,000 art works in public and private collections worldwide and are complemented by a photographic study file of over 80,000 photographs, which are available for study in the museum’s Washington, DC office. Over 21,000 painters and nearly 15,000 sculptors are represented in the database.

The Inventory of American Paintings began in the early 1970s, and has collected data on over 350,000 paintings created by American artists active by 1914. The Inventory of American Sculpture began collecting data in 1985, and includes information on over 90,000 works created by artists born or active in the United States from colonial to contemporary times. Search the Art Inventories .

Photograph Study Collection

The Photograph Study Collection contains nearly a quarter million negatives, photographs, and slides documenting American art works from the late 1800s to the mid-20th century. As a research and study collection, the images constitute a unique visual record of American art, sometimes providing the only visual documentation of a changed, damaged or lost original. Search the Photograph Study Collection .  Highlights of the collection include:

Peter A. Juley & Son Collection

The Peter A. Juley & Son Collection contain nearly 127,000 negatives documenting art works by 11,000 American artists. Peter A. Juley (1862-1937) and his son Paul P. Juley (1890-1975) headed the largest and most respected fine arts photography firms in New York from 1896 to 1975. Their clients included artists, galleries, museums, schools, and private collectors.  The Juley Collection also contains 3,500 portraits of artists, including formal poses as well as candid shots that depict artists working in their studios, teaching classes, and serving as jurors for exhibitions.

American Sculpture Photograph Study Collection

The American Sculpture Photograph Study Collection contains 2,790 photographs of American sculpture, dating from the late 1890s to 1940. The collection was assembled by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for study purposes and includes photos from staff photographers, commercial photographers, publishers, and photographs "desirable in the study of art" assembled by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and presented to the Museum in 1930.

Walter Rosenblum Collection

The Walter Roseblum Collection contains 7,398 negatives covering American and European art. An accomplished photographer and teacher, Walter Rosenblum (1919-2006) supplemented his income by doing freelance work for major New York galleries, artists and collectors from 1945 to 1970. Among Rosenblum's clients were ACA Galleries, Graham Gallery, Matisse, New Gallery and The Contemporaries. The Rosenblum Collection reflects the art of his time and is particularly strong in American and European avant-garde, surreal and abstract works.

National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Program Collection

The National Endowment for the Arts Artists Fellowship Program documents art works by approximately 4,600 artists who received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts national Visual Artists Fellowship Program and its companion regional programs from 1967 to 1995. When the program ended, approximately 54,000 and 400 video tapes came to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Digital images for artists who have given their permission are searchable onsite in the Research and Scholars Center.

Library of Congress Copyright Deposit Collection

The Library of Congress Copyright Deposit Collection contains 2,461 photomechanical reproductions documenting art works by approximately 500 American artists from the 1890s to 1940s. The images were originally deposited with the Library of Congress as part of the copyright registration process for art works. The images, in color and black-and-white, are mounted on oversize board. The collection documents drawings, graphic prints, paintings, and other works of art by late 19th century and early 20th century American artists.

Photograph Study Collection Rights and Reproductions

Photographs from the Photograph Study Collection may not be reproduced without written permission from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It is important that you contact the Research and Scholars Center for specific details regarding the collection you are interested in.

Smithsonian American Art Museum Research and Scholars Center 750 Ninth Street NW Suite 3100 Washington, DC 20001-4505

Mailing Address Research and Scholars Center Smithsonian American Art Museum MRC 970, P.O. Box 37012 Washington DC 20013-7012

202.633.8380  202.633.8373 fax [email protected]

americanart.si.edu/research

Hours Appointment Required Metro Stop: Gallery Place

  • Art & Design
  • History & Culture
  • Science & Nature
  • Open Access
  • Smithsonian Institution Archives
  • Air and Space Museum
  • Anacostia Community Museum
  • American Art Museum
  • Archives of American Art
  • Archives of American Gardens
  • American History Museum
  • American Indian Museum
  • Asian Art Museum Archives
  • Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, African Art
  • Hirshhorn Archive
  • National Anthropological Archives
  • National Portrait Gallery
  • Ralph Rinzler Archives, Folklife
  • Libraries' Special Collections
  • Mobile Apps

Gallery 313, Saint Louis Art Museum

The Museum employs a staff of more than 250 employees, many of whom hold national- and international-caliber scholarly credentials and are active in conducting and publishing research across a number of fields. The Museum’s Richardson Memorial Library and Archives are important research resources and the Study Room for Prints Drawings and Photographs provides access to the Museum’s collection of works on paper.

Richardson Memorial Library and Museum Archives

The Library opened April 18, 1915 as the result of the first legacy gift ever given to the Museum—a bequest of stocks and bonds valued at the time at about $60,000 from Mary D. Richardson, who wished to honor the memory of her husband, St. Louis businessman J. Clifford Richardson. What started as a small library of 5,000 books has grown into a research collection of nearly 160,000 volumes.

Unlike many art museum libraries, the Richardson Memorial Library is open to the public. During its public hours—Tuesdays-Fridays, 10:00 am – 4:30 pm—the Library is often used by visiting art historians, university students and local collectors. The Library also responds to reference requests by telephone and email.

The Library oversees the Museum Archives, which house the historical records of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Study Room for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

Because works of art on paper are light sensitive, they can only be exhibited for short periods of time. Works not on view in the Museum’s galleries may be viewed by appointment in the Study Room for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. Individuals and groups are welcome.

Provenance Research

The history of ownership, or provenance, of works of art has always been an integral part of scholarship at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The Museum scrutinizes the provenance of every work that enters the collection. The Museum also continually researches the works already in its collection.

Woman looking through file boxes in an archive

Provenance Research

What is provenance.

  • Provenance at the DAM
  • Explore Provenance
  • Repatriations and Restitutions 

Provenance Updates

Upcoming events, department staff.

Woman leaning in to examine a painting with goggles on

"Provenance" is information about an artwork’s history of ownership. We can learn a lot about an artwork and the context in which it was created, as well as changing tastes in collecting, by researching and studying its provenance. Researching the ownership of an artwork, and how and where it changed hands can help museums illuminate objects, artists, and cultures, and enable a museum to tell stories about the world to its visitors. Provenance research is always ongoing and is an important aspect of curatorial practice, and part of a collecting institution’s due diligence and best practices. A gap in a work's ownership history is common, especially for works that date back centuries. Gaps in provenance can be attributed to information lost to time, lack of record keeping, natural disasters or war, or even suggest troubling or illegal aspects of an object's journey and may be a cause for further research. A growing availability of information from digitized records, online databases, and other resources are providing new avenues to information that sheds light on an artwork’s ownership history.

Woman in a room of files conducting research

Provenance at the Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum requires provenance research on proposed acquisitions, and curatorial staff also research artworks currently in the collection to ensure legal ownership. U.S. law, conventions regarding cultural property, and professional guidelines by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and the American Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) all help guide the museum’s legal and ethical collecting policies and practices . The museum additionally collaborates with colleagues and officials in the U.S. and around the world to review legal and ethical questions related to the history of art works.  

DAM curatorial staff conduct provenance research on an ongoing basis, and this process is methodical and fact based. Sources for research include not just the object and museum documentation, but review of an artist’s list of known artworks, as well as scholarship, exhibition and publication history. Dealer, collector, auction, and photo archives can contain helpful ownership information, as can newspaper articles, obituaries, ancestry websites and red-flag lists and lost art databases. While provenance research takes place for all new acquisitions and across collections, additional attention is placed on objects where certain legal and ethical considerations apply:

Ancient Art or Art from Archaeological Contexts

The Museum deplores the illicit excavation of objects from archaeological sites, the destruction and defacing of ancient monuments, and the theft of works from individuals, museums and other repositories. DAM follows U.S. law and professional guidelines in recognizing the importance of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import and Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Gaps in provenance history are common for antiquities and in researching existing collections or incoming acquisitions, the Museum applies a high level of due diligence and research that includes a legal and ethical analysis, consultations with scholars or individuals from countries of origin, and U.S. and foreign government officials, as appropriate, surrounding facts of the artwork’s history.

Art Associated with a Legacy of Colonialism or Conflict

DAM recognizes that artwork coming from locations that may have experienced colonial rule and armed conflict may have been acquired under conditions that were forced and considered unethical today. DAM is committed to researching these works and consulting appropriate communities to determine facts about an object’s history, purpose, and method of initial transfer from the local context. The museum adheres to guidance from the Association of Art Museum Directors on colonized areas.

Art Acquired during the Nazi era

Artworks that may have been in continental Europe between 1933 and 1945 are carefully researched to ensure legal ownership. During this period, thousands of artworks owned by private and mostly Jewish collectors were seized or sold through forced sales. DAM’s Nazi Era Policy supports research efforts to identify and return any works to confirmed owners or heirs as well as publicly post artworks that were in Europe and have gaps in the ownership history that span this era. AAM policy on Nazi Era can be found on their website .

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA )

U.S. Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, and the federal law requires museums to actively consult with Indigenous communities and repatriate ancestral remains and funerary objects, and certain works of sacred or ceremonial importance and objects of cultural patrimony central to the identify of a community. DAM’s NAGPRA Policy recognizes that an important legacy of this law has been the value of consultation and collaboration with indigenous communities that continues today. 

Woman doing research in the museum's archive

Explore Provenance in the DAM's Online Collection   

The DAM’s global art collection is home to more than 70,000 objects from around the world. As the online collection database is expanded, collection works and information about them are added daily. Object materials, size, artist, and more are included in the listings. Most object listings include a section called Known Provenance. 

How to Read Provenance Information:

  • DAM uses a variety of formats for listing a provenance history that follow a variation of the format suggested by the AAM Guide to Provenance Research (Washington D.C., 2001): 
  • All provenance is listed in chronological order, beginning with the earliest owner.  
  • Methods of transfer, such as gift, sale or by inheritance, and date of transfer, if known, are noted. 
  • Galleries, dealers, and collector names involved in the sale of artworks are put in (parenthesis). 
  • Unknown or anonymous collectors or owners are sometimes referred to as a “private” dealer or collector. 
  • Life dates for owners or individuals are put in [brackets].   
  • Finally, periods (.) between ownership reflect a gap or unknown period of time from one owner to the next. A semicolon (;) indicates that a direct transfer occurred between owners. 

Review the following example to see how to read a provenance label:

  • Provenance Deconstructed (PDF)

To contribute to the knowledge around the history of ownership of an artwork/s in the museum’s collection, or to submit a query, the museum invites community members, colleagues or members of the public to send an email to [email protected] . 

Art Repatriations and Restitutions

The Denver Art Museum has a track record of working proactively and collaboratively to definitively confirm and return artworks proven to belong to another nation or individual. The Denver Art Museum would restitute (return of an artwork to an individual or family) or repatriate (return of cultural property to its nation or community of origin) for claims made through laws including NAGPRA, adherence to guidelines for Nazi-era works; or research that may have uncovered illegality or unethical circumstances surrounding a work in the collection.

DAM Repatriation Selected Press Releases:

  • 1979: Repatriation of Zuni War God
  • 1995: Repatriation of Objects to Blackfeet Tribe Under NAGPRA
  • 1998: Repatriation of El Zotz Lintel to Guatemala
  • 2000: Restitution of 17th Century Dutch Painting, The Letter
  • 2016: Repatriation of Torso of Rama to Cambodia
  • 2021: Repatriation of Sculpture to Nepal
  • 2021: Repatriation of Four Artworks to the People of Cambodia
  • 2022: Repatriations to India
  • 2023: Repatriations of Works Connected with Nancy Wiener Gallery

Woman examining an artwork in the museum facilities

Look here for information about provenance efforts at DAM, including statements, blog posts, and other stories.

  • DAM & New NAGPRA Guidelines - Jan. 18, 2024
  • Unpacking Modigliani: Discovering the Travels of Portrait de Femme – Dec. 11, 2023
  • Online Collection Information and Resources at the DAM – Dec. 5, 2023
  • Two Sculptures Returned to Republic of India in 2019 and 2022 – Oct. 31, 2023
  • Updates on Benin Artworks at the DAM – Sept. 21, 2023
  • Provenance Research and Cultural Property Update – Sept. 6, 2023
  • Prioritizing Provenance Research – March 10, 2023
  • Bunker Name Removed from Arts of Asia Gallery at DAM – March 10, 2023
  • Denver Art Museum Statement Regarding Emma Bunker – Dec. 13, 2022

Browse upcoming events related to provenance research at the Denver Art Museum.

Limestone sculpture of an Indian figure in armor

Returning Home: DAM Repatriations over a Half-Century

Lori Iliff, Senior Provenance Researcher Lori Iliff is Senior Provenance Researcher and head of the Provenance Research Department at the Denver Art Museum. Lori has 25 years of experience at DAM in roles ranging from Chief Registrar to Chief of Exhibition and Collections Services. She has formerly held curatorial and registrar positions at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, and The University Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology (now the Penn Museum) at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her bachelor of arts in art History and archaeology from the University of Missouri and a master's in classical and Near Eastern archaeology from Bryn Mawr College. Lori’s expertise focuses on legal, ethical, and cultural patrimony issues and impacts on museum management and policy development and on DAM’s provenance research efforts and outreach for its encyclopedic collections.

Renée Stokesbury, Associate Provenance Researcher Renée Stokesbury is the Associate Provenance Researcher at the Denver Art Museum. She was formerly the Associate Museum Director at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art in Denver, where she served other key curatorial and administrative roles since 2011. She has been a frequent lecturer and participant in provenance seminars, panels, and training courses held at the University of Denver, University of Colorado, the Holocaust Museum Houston, and at regional museum conferences. Her research has appeared in various publications including the Denver Art Museum reprint for the Nature as Muse catalog, as well as the Clyfford Still catalogue raisonné. She received her bachelor of arts in art history and history and a master's of humanities in visual studies from the University of Colorado Denver. Renee’s expertise includes best practice standards for provenance research, art law policy, and wartime looted art restitution issues.

A 3D panorama view of the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing at The Met

The Met 360° Project

This award-winning series of six short videos invites viewers around the world to virtually visit The Met's art and architecture in a fresh, immersive way. Created using spherical 360° technology, it allows viewers to explore some of the Museum's iconic spaces as never before.

Viewed more than 11 million times, this series affords an access and a perspective typically unavailable to the public. Viewers can experience the magic of standing in an empty gallery after-hours, witnessing a bustling space in time-lapse, or floating high above The Met Cloisters for a bird's-eye view. We strung cables, removed protective covers from works of art, and rigged cameras up high, all to allow viewers to explore The Met as never before.

Get a behind-the-scenes look at how we created the videos in a Digital Underground article written by Director/Producer Nina Diamond.

You may view these videos on YouTube on multiple devices:

  • On your smartphone: Move your phone up, down, and behind you to see all directions.
  • On your desktop computer: Use the mouse to scroll in all directions. (Note: For an optimal user experience, use Chrome or Firefox as your browser.)
  • On Google Cardboard or a VR headset

Be sure to turn up the volume to hear the music, too.

Architect Richard Morris Hunt designed this majestic space in 1902. He never could have imagined that today the Museum's main entry greets more than six million visitors a year. Now you can experience its Neoclassical grandeur in a way no one ever has before.

Come explore not just behind the scenes, but everywhere in 360°. This video lets you soar past the colonnades, up toward the oculus in the ceiling, and cast a look down over the Grand Staircase and balcony. Aren't you curious who creates those colossal flower arrangements when you're still asleep?

The Met Cloisters

Take to the sky to explore the majestic vistas of The Met Cloisters. This branch of the Museum in northern Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park is dedicated to the art, architecture, and gardens of medieval Europe.

Explore 360° views over the city, across the Hudson River, and high above two richly landscaped gardens. Inside, spin around to admire the medieval cloisters that form the core of the historic building, and listen to the resonant chimes from the bell tower, more than 100 feet above ground.

The Temple of Dendur

Immerse yourself in this 360° video capturing dawn to dusk in the Temple of Dendur. Built around 15 B.C. when the Roman Emperor Augustus ruled Egypt, the temple was a 1968 gift from Egypt to the United States in recognition of support given to save its monuments threatened by the Nile.

The temple's setting in The Sackler Wing was designed to approximate the light and surroundings of its original location in Nubia, including a reflecting pool that evokes the Nile.

The Met Breuer

On March 18, 2016, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened The Met Breuer, its new space was dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

Whether you're a recent or longtime fan of the building's classic modernist design, or have just been struck by its bold form at Madison Avenue and 75th Street–here's your chance to enjoy a 360° perspective on architect Marcel Breuer's landmark 1966 creation. Scan up the jagged facade to the trapezoidal window with clouds above, or hover inside the entrance lobby over the sunken garden courtyard.

After four years, the Museum has now permanently closed its Breuer location. The Frick Collection will take over the building during the upgrade and renovation of its museum space at 1 East 70th Street.

The Charles Engelhard Court

Come explore the crown jewel of The Met's American Wing in spherical 360° video. Float in mid-air among the sculptures, including cheek-to-cheek with the gilded sculpture of Diana on its tall pedestal. Try tipping your view over the upper balcony's edge to witness the crowd below in time-lapse—all using your mouse, track pad, or smartphone. You can even peek at the easels of two artists at work.

Flanked by stunning Tiffany stained-glass windows, The Charles Engelhard Court in The American Wing houses some of the Museum's most iconic sculptures, mosaics, and architectural elements.

Arms and Armor Galleries

Visit The Met's distinguished collection of arms and armor from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and America. Experience the galleries from above and take a closer look at some of the key objects of sculptural and ornamental beauty—all in 360. This may be the only time you’ll ever get to stand in the middle of a parade of armored soldiers on horseback. No matter where you turn—from the flags overhead to the weapons gleaming below—you'll find unprecedented access to these masterpieces of original design and traditional craftsmanship.

Production Credits

Director/Producer Nina Diamond

Production Total Cinema 360 | Koncept VR (The Temple of Dendur in 360°, The Great Hall in 360°, The Met Breuer in 360°)

Koncept VR (The Charles Engelhard Court in 360°, The Met Cloisters in 360°, The Arms and Armor Galleries in 360°)

Composers Simon Fisher Turner (The Temple of Dendur in 360°, The Great Hall in 360°, The Met Breuer in 360°)

Austin Fisher (The Charles Engelhard Court in 360°, The Met Cloisters in 360°, The Arms and Armor Galleries in 360°)

Sound Engineer James Aparicio (The Charles Engelhard Court in 360°, The Met Cloisters in 360°, The Arms and Armor Galleries in 360°)

Graphics Natasha Mileshina

Special Thanks

Christina Alphonso, Massomeh Ansari, Seal Belair, Stephen Bluto, Olivia Boudet, Elaine Bradson, João Henrique Brandão, Libby Bressler, Kaelan Burkett, John Byck, Narsayah Chabilall, Marco Castro Cosio, Richard Carroll, Catherine Chesney, Jennie Choi, Skyla Choi, Jennifer Ciarleglio, Michael Cirigliano, Saul Cohen, Sheryl de la Pena, Cristina Del Valle, Michael Dominick, Tim Dowse, Kimberly Drew, Anne Dunleavy, Ariel Estrada, Kate Farrell, Sean Farrell, Dia Felix, Elizabeth Fiorentino, Jenny Foley, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Scott Geffert, Christopher Gorman, Sarah Higby, Staci Hou, Edward Hunter, Alexandra Kozlakowski, Donald LaRocca, Caleb Leech, Chad Lemke, Griffith Mann, Theo Margelony , Heather Masciandaro, William Necker, Lauren Nemroff, Taylor Newby, Christopher Noey, Leila Osmany, Michael Ostergren, Barbara Padolsky, Kevin Park, Diana Patch, Matt Pezzolo, Josh Phagoo, Stuart Pyhrr, Luisa Ricardo-Herrera, Lisa Rifkind, Jose Rivero, Maruf Rizaev, Catharine Roehrig, Amy Romero, Tom Scally, Rebecca Schear, George Sferra, Sean Simpson, Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, Sree Sreenivasan, Pari Stave, Emily Sutter, Loic Tallon, Pierre Terjanian, Phil Tharel, Thayer Tolles, Nick Torres, Elyse Topalian, Maya Valladares, Van Vliet & Trap - Event Design, Elena Villaespesa Cantalapiedra, Sheena Wagstaff, Andrew Winslow, Sheralyn Younge, Sylvia Yount, Julie Zeftel, Seth Zimiles

2017 Webby Award, Best Culture & Lifestyle Video (Juried Award and People's Voice Award)

2017 Shorty Award, Best Cultural Institution

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Moskva, Russia

The ceremony for the laying of the Museum’s foundation stone took place on August 17, 1898 in the presence of Tsar Nicholas II and members of his family. The name of the museum – Alexander III Fine Arts Museum – was officially approved. Building work had commenced a month before that ceremony, which was important as by then the Committee for the Establishment of the Museum already had at its disposal a major part of its collections. The Museum was created on the basis of Moscow University’s “Cabinet of Fine Arts and Antiquities” which had been set up as both a public museum and one for educational purposes. In it the main stages in the history of art from ancient times until the post-Renaissance era were represented through casts, models, painted copies and galvanocopies. This museum was the first of its kind in Russia. Work to create it had been initiated (1893) by the highly respected Professor Ivan Tsvetaev (1847-1943), who had a doctorate in Latin literature and art history and was later to be the Museum’s first director (1911-1913). At the end of 1896 a competition to design the building for the Museum was announced and 19 architects from various cities in Russia took part. From among the entrants the University Board selected Moscow architect, Roman Klein (1858-1924), to build the Museum. It was constructed in keeping with the latest building techniques and principles of museum practice. The design was based on the model of a Classical temple on a high podium with an Ionic colonnade along its facade. The interior decoration combined elements drawn from the various historical periods represented by the exhibits. Engineers I.I.Rerberg and V.G.Shukhov were involved in the construction work.

At the end of 1896 the terms and conditions for a competition to design a building for a museum of fine arts bearing the name of Alexander III and affiliated to Moscow University appeared in the St. Petersburg and Moscow press. That was the moment in the Museum's history when the plan devised by Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev (1847-1913) for the creation of an art museum for the general public and the promotion of education ceased to be a mere dream and began to take real shape. Nineteen architects from several different towns in Russia entered the competition. Fifteen of their designs were examined in detail and seven singled out for awards. One of the seven architects involved was selected by the University board to build the museum – a young but already well-known Moscow architect, Roman Ivanovich Klein (1858-1929). It was he who then proceeded to elaborate final plans for the project. The building was erected in accordance with the latest requirements of building technology and museum design. On the outside it had the appearance of a Classical temple on a high podium with an Ionic colonnade along its façade. Its glass roof ensured that there was sufficient daylight in the first-floor galleries and the two atrium- courtyards. Ivan Tsvetaev himself was to play a considerable role in shaping the Museum's appearance, being interested not merely in its architecture as such but also in its educational function as a reflection of the history of architecture. Anxious to avoid the kind of eclectic combination of different styles popular at that time, Tsvetaev, when drawing up the terms and conditions for the architectural competition, had insisted that the plans submitted by those entering should be either in the Classical style or that of the Renaissance period. It was also specified that the decoration of the interiors should incorporate elements of a range of historical periods in keeping with the items on display. In order to organize a museum affiliated to Moscow University, a special Committee for the Establishment of the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts started to function in 1898. It had been envisaged as a voluntary association of individuals keen to play an active part in the systematic propagation of academic knowledge in the field of fine arts among wide strata of Russian society. It brought together leading figures from the University, professors from the History and Philology Faculty, top representatives of the city's administration and private individuals, who were contributing funds for establishing the Museum or donating works for it to display. The Committee was set up so as to function while the Museum was being built, but in practice it continued to exist until February 1917. From the moment the Committee was inaugurated until his assassination in February 1905, it was chaired by Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich (1857-1905). As early as 1854, he came forward as a patron of the University's museum. His report delivered in July 1895 announced the decision taken by Nicholas II to delay the stone-laying ceremony for the building of the Industrial and Technical Training School in Kolmazh Court – planned as a commemoration of the Silver Jubilee of Alexander II's accession, so as to clear the site for the new museum. In 1898 the whole site was set aside for the new construction project. That same year, thanks to the efforts of the Grand Duke, 200,000 roubles were allocated from the State Treasury to the construction of the museum. At the expense of the Deputy Chairman of the Committee, Yuri Stepanovich Nechaev-Maltsov (1834-1913) – a leading industrialist and courtier – white frost-resistant marble was quarried and brought to Moscow from the Urals for the facing of the Museum's façade and colonnade. Nechaev-Maltsov also financed the granite base-platform and steps leading up to the entrance and the coloured marbles for the main staircase. In addition, Y.S. Nechaev-Maltsov acquired the first original works of art and cultural artefacts from Ancient Egypt for the Museum. Thanks to him, the Museum acquired a whole series of valuable copies of artworks of antiquity famous the world over. All in all Nechaev-Maltsov contributed two million roubles to the construction of the Museum and the assembly of its collection (two thirds of the total cost). The Secretary of the Committee and its actual organiser was art-historian Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor from the department for the theory and history of art at Moscow University with a doctorate in Roman literature. The starting point for the Museum's collection had been Moscow University's "Cabinet" (Museum) of Fine Arts and Antiquities, which included Greek vases, a numismatic collection, a number of casts taken from works of Classical sculpture and a small specialist library. After Professor Tsvetaev had been appointed head of this "Cabinet", he began to expand the collection systematically, in particular its sculpture section and library. By such means he turned it into a Museum of Fine Arts at the disposal of students for educational purposes and of the public at large, where plaster casts, models and galvano copies in the context of a single and integrated academic programme were designed to introduce students and visitors to the main stages in the history of art from ancient civilizations up until the 16th century and this would make the Moscow museum the first institution of its kind. Since 1881 the sculpture collection of Moscow University's "Cabinet" had been housed in two rooms of the former hospital block of the University. Despite the cramped and shabby nature of the premises in 1894, this small museum intended for students was made accessible, not just to students of Classics, but also for art lovers in general. In 1898, however, when the building was demolished, the collection had to be removed. Subsequently all the collections from Moscow University's "Cabinet" were transferred to the new Museum of Fine Arts on Volkhonka Street. Tsvetaev ordered casts and other copies moulded directly from original art works in workshops abroad. In several cases these were the first such copies to be made. The most representative collection of such casts and copies was that of Greek and Roman art, in particular, sculpture. The collection reflected what were then the latest archaeological discoveries and scientific reconstructions of works of sculpture. The art of the Middle Ages, the Italian and Northern Renaissance, presented to the Russian public for the first time, constituted separate sections of the Museum's display. Many works exhibited in the Museum using high-quality casts and copies were a revelation for art-lovers and artists, if for no other reason than that they were depictions of the originals with their actual dimensions. One of the jewels of the Museum's collection was its unique collection of original works of Ancient Egyptian art and cultural artefacts (over 6,000 in total). The collection assembled by the Russian scholar and Egyptologist, V.S.Golenishchev was acquired by the state and transferred to the Museum in 1909-1911. Shortly before the Museum opened, M.S.Shchekin donated Italian paintings and works of applied art from the 13th-15th centuries and Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Fyodorovna and D.V.Khomyakov presented the Museum with its first original works of Italian sculpture of the 16th-18th centuries. Other donors also made major contributions to the Museum's collection. While creating the Museum, Professor Tsvetaev consulted the artists Viktor Vasnetsov, Vasilii Polenov and many others. When it came to foreign scholars, the leading authority for Tsvetaev was the German archaeologist and director of the sculpture department in Dresden's Royal Museums, Georg Trei. The first members of the Museum's staff were Professor V.K.Malmberg from Moscow University (who succeeded Professor Tsvetaev as Director after the latter's death) and the orientalist, B.A.Turaev, from St. Petersburg who set up the first display in the Egyptian and Babylonian-Assyrian Galleries and also former graduates from Moscow University – A.V.Nazarevskii and N.A.Shcherbakov, who were appointed as curators - and Tsvetaev's students straight after graduation working as unpaid trainees - A.N.Zograf, D.S.Nedovich and A.A.Sidorov. Professor Tsvetaev's establishment of an art museum led Moscow University to set up a subsidiary art-history department – the first of its kind in Russia – which in 1909 was to become an independent entity. The Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts opened with grand celebrations on May 31 (June 13), 1912. Emperor Nicholas II and the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna attended the ceremony. Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev was the Museum's director between 1911 and the day he died. The new museum was popular with the general public right from the start. On weekdays between 700 and 800 people would visit and on Sundays and public holidays as many as 2,500. The majority of the visitors were teachers and gymnasium pupils, young women attending higher-education courses, students from the Moscow Archaeological Institute and members of the clergy. Special lessons for students and guided tours for the general public were organized in the Museum's galleries. In 1923 it was decided by the People's Commissar for Education that a central museum illustrating the history of western painting should be established, housed in the building of the Museum of Fine Arts, which was no longer to be affiliated to the University. In 1924 pictures from the former collections of G.A.Brokar, D.I.Shchukin, from the State Museum Repository and various Leningrad Museums were acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts. This made it possible for the Museum's specialist staff, headed by Professor N.I.Romanov, to create a new exhibition of painting arranged in accordance with scientific principles and this was opened on November 10, 1924. Between 1924 and 1930 the Museum acquired a large number of pictures from nationalized Moscow estates, from the Ostroukhov Museum of Painting and Icon-Painting, from the Historical Museum, the Kremlin Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery – works of West-European art from periods not previously represented in its galleries. Some pictures were also transferred from the Hermitage, other Leningrad museums and the Leningrad Museum Repository. Gradually the Museum came to possess a core collection for its Picture Gallery of Western Old Masters. By this time the Museum had also acquired over 1,000 cuneiform tablets and approximately 3,000 other Ancient-Egyptian objects from the former Museum and Research Institute of the Classical Orient. In 1932 the Museum was renamed the State Museum of Fine Arts and in 1934 the name of Alexander Pushkin was added to its full title – the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. In 1941-1944 a large proportion of the Museum's contents were evacuated to Novosibirsk and Solikamsk. Restoration of the Museum building, which had suffered from bombing raids during the war, began in 1944 and work also started on preparing the displays once more for the public (the Museum finally re-opened on October 3, 1946) under the supervision of the then director, the sculptor S.D.Merkulov, Professor B.R.Vipper, the Deputy Director responsible for academic issues, and the Chief Curator, A.A.Guber. Work began again aimed at making the museum and its contents better known to the general public and at expanding both its collection and its involvement in archaeological excavations in the Crimea and the Taman Peninsula, which had started back in 1927. Apart from regular archaeological expeditions to the North Pontic region in the period 1951 to 1973, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts also participated in the work of the Transcaucasian Archaeological Expedition within the territory of Ancient Erebuni together with the Institute of Archaeology of the Armenian SSR and the State Hermitage Museum: some of the works of Urartu art and the cultural artifacts discovered during those excavations are held in the Museum's repositories. In 1948, when the State Museum of New Western Art was closed and the items in its collection were re-distributed between Moscow and Leningrad, the Museum acquired around 300 paintings and over 60 works of sculpture by West-European and American artists of the late 19th century and the first third of the 20th. The majority of the works concerned were those of French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, which had belonged to the Moscow collectors Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, and the Museum also acquired that museum's collection of drawings and its archive materials. This acquisition meant that the range of the Museum's collections extended as far as the 20th century, which at the same time made it more famous. Between the end of 1949 and 1953 the Museum's galleries were used to house exhibitions of Gifts presented to Joseph Stalin. On December 15, 1953, however, the permanent exhibition of art was rearranged as before. Over the whole period of the Museum's existence it has hosted over 1,200 exhibitions consisting both of works from the Museum's own repositories and also works from many other collections from within our own country and from abroad. A major event in the cultural life of Moscow was the opening, in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, of an exhibition of masterpieces from the Dresden Art Gallery, which had been saved from destruction by Soviet soldiers during World War II. In 1958 and then again in 1995-2007 exhibitions were held in the SMII entitled "Works of Art from the Museums of the German Democratic Republic", "Exhibition of European Paintings – 14th-19th centuries", "Five Centuries of European Drawings. Drawings by Old Masters from the former collection of Franz König", "Trojan Treasures from the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann" and so on. In 1985, on the initiative of the Soviet collector, Doctor of Art History, I. S.Zilberman, and the Museum's director, I.A.Antonova, a special Department of Private Collections was set up. The idea behind this department was an innovation within the museum world: for the first time collections themselves, rather than individual works from collections, provided a focus of study and 'items' for museums to collect. The exhibition in this new department was opened to the public in a specially reconstructed building on January 24, 1994. At the present time the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts houses four types of exhibitions: (1) an exhibition of casts made from works of sculpture and architectural monuments which has remained substantially the same as it was when the Museum was still affiliated to Moscow University, including casts of works from the Near East, the Classical world, the Middle Ages and the Italian and Northern Renaissance; (2) a section containing original works of art and cultural artifacts from Ancient Civilizations and also materials from excavations organized by the Museum; (3) a gallery of pictures from the 8th to the 20th century, including works by European Old Masters, Byzantine icons and ancient mosaics and works by West-European and American painters and sculptors of the 19th and 20th centuries. The principle behind this exhibition was to demonstrate the nature of national schools of painting and the succession of one era after another in the world of art; (4) the last type is that of the Department of Private Collections, in which each collection is an integral artistic and cultural phenomenon in its own right, which sheds light on the personality of the individual collector. In 2006 a Centre for the Aesthetic Education of Children and Young People was opened in what had once been a private house in the immediate vicinity of the Museum and which came to be known as the "Museion". In August of that same year work began on a significant expansion of the exhibition of the Museum's paintings and sculpture from the 19th and 20th centuries. The building concerned is known as the "Gallery of Art from the Countries of Europe and America – 19th and 20th centuries". The Museum also has departments in other parts of Moscow. In 1996 a Tsvetaev Educational Art Museum was installed in the building of the Russian State University for the Humanities. It opened on May 30, 1997 (at 15, Chayanov Street). It houses plaster casts from the original museum, which had been part of Moscow University, as well as some duplicates of the latter. In 1961, in response to a proposal from the pianist Svyatoslav Richter and with his active involvement, the Museum began to hold within its walls an international musical festival known as "December Evenings" and, after 1997, as the "Svyatoslav Richter December Evenings". In 1999, in accordance with the musician's last will and testament, his flat (Flat 58, 2/6 Bolshaya Bronnaya Street) was bequeathed to the Museum and this memorial to him is now open to visitors. At the present time the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts comprises over 670,000 paintings, works of sculpture, drawings, works of applied art, archaeological artifacts, coins and medals and art photographs. Its repository of manuscripts contains documents relating to the history of the Museum, academic works and letters written by the Museum's founder, by other leading lights of the Museum and well known art-historians and artists and, also, archive materials from several museums whose collections were transferred to the Pushkin Museum. The Museum has its own restoration workshops and one of Moscow's finest specialist academic libraries. In 1991 the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts was added to the state register of particularly valuable institutions constituting the cultural heritage of the peoples of the Russian Federation.

Look From The Inside

The pushkin state museum of fine arts, in this collection, 1 museum view.

  • Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Rubin Museum, Haven for Asian Art, to Close After 20 Years

It is the first major art museum in New York to close within recent memory. It said it would now focus on traveling exhibitions and long-term loans.

A person walks down the sidewalk past the glass facade of a building with the words “The Rubin Museum of Art.”

By Zachary Small

The Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan will shutter after two decades of championing its prized collection of art from Himalayan Asia, with leaders saying on Wednesday that they wanted to envision a modern museum without walls. But the museum, which will sell its building, had also faced some financial challenges in recent years.

Doors to the Rubin Museum will close Oct. 6, when its last exhibition ends, before transitioning into an institution that will focus on traveling exhibitions and long-term loans. Nearly 40 percent of its employees will lose their jobs; the museum’s leader, Jorrit Britschgi, had eliminated nearly two dozen positions in 2019 to cut costs.

“The definition of what a museum is has evolved dramatically in recent years,” Noah Dorsky, the museum’s board president, said in a statement. “Historically, the Rubin’s culture embraces continual change and evolution, and in our new incarnation, we are redefining what a museum can be.”

The closure of its galleries shocked some museum professionals, who said it was the first time in their recent memory that a major museum had closed in New York City. Leading museums have faced a severe cash crunch since the Covid-19 pandemic changed the habits of tourists, leading several institutions to cut jobs and raise ticket prices . However, none have taken the Rubin’s extreme step of relinquishing all their real estate.

“Financially, things are really difficult for institutions right now,” said Laura Raicovich, a former museum executive who writes about challenges facing the arts. “The scarcity model of how cultural organizations operate in this country has become extreme, where the reliance on individual donors and corporations is higher than ever before.”

The museum said it was not closing its building because of financial challenges. A museum spokeswoman said that its endowment had grown to more than $150 million at the end of 2023, which is large for an organization of its size. And its budget has grown since the pandemic.

But there had been signs of challenges when it came to operating expenses. The Rubin Museum ran a $5.9 million deficit in 2022, according to its most recent tax filings. And like many museums, it saw its attendance drop after the pandemic. But the museum said it expected its next set of tax filings would show a surplus.

Founded in 2004 to promote the art collection of Donald and Shelley Rubin, the art museum has hosted nearly 4,000 Himalayan art objects spanning 1,500 years of history. Its location on West 17th Street filled nearly 70,000 square feet inside a building previously occupied by Barneys New York, the fashion department store. The Rubin family purchased the property in 1998 for $22 million.

Britschgi said the museum intended to sell its Chelsea location, prime real estate that would most likely fetch tens of millions of dollars. That money, he said, would be deposited in the Rubin’s sustaining fund.

The building next to the museum, 115 Seventh Avenue — which housed Barneys until 1997 — sold for $21.5 million to a Queens developer in December. Louis Puopolo, head of operations for Douglas Elliman Commercial, said it could be optimal timing for the Rubin and an opportunity to pressure the new neighbors to make a competitive bid.

“They’re probably wisely saying, ‘We’ll put it on the market since it’s such a fantastic location,’” said Puopolo, who added that the property could be converted to residential or be used to house another museum or cultural center.

Through the years, the Rubin’s exhibitions could be revelatory; it was one of the only spots in New York that focused on Asian art, and there was a string of lauded shows through the 2010s that brought contemporary artists into the context of Tibetan and Nepalese traditions.

“What the Rubin tried to do was make objects that are normally classified as artifacts in other museums into objects that were as vibrant and alive as contemporary art,” said Chitra Ganesh, an artist who will be included in the museum’s last exhibition. “What the closure signals is that there continues to be a lack of structural support and visibility for Asian artists.”

Items from the museum’s collection will be included in upcoming installations in Milan and Chicago this year, and an exhibition called “The Gateway to Himalayan Art” will travel to universities in several states through 2026.

Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, noted that the museum could face questions about its charitable status if the public did not receive regular access to the art collection.

“Donors to the museum have been able to claim tax deductions for helping the museum display art to the American public,” she said. “Will the public continue to benefit from this art once the museum closes?”

Britschgi said the museum, which will stay based in New York and collaborate with other institutions, was classified as a public charity and would not change its legal status. “People hear ‘museum’ and think it is a space where we can walk into,” he said. “That is changing for us.”

Scholars also expressed concern that the museum’s decline would affect its commitment to provenance research. The institution repatriated several religious artworks back to Nepal after citizen activists unearthed information that indicated relics at the Rubin had been smuggled out of the country.

Britschgi noted that the museum recently hired another employee to conduct provenance research. “Repatriation remains an important part of our work,” he said. “This decision has nothing to do with the works that we have repatriated.”

The museum director said he was proud of his seven-year tenure. He had planned to depart in 2021 but stayed on through the pandemic after the board allowed him to work remotely from Europe.

“I am proud to have led the organization through interesting times, and partially also turbulent times,” Britschgi said. “I am proud to have led the organization through a phase of innovation and experimentation, and now a phase of bold changes and transformation as we are entering a new chapter.”

Ronda Kaysen contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly categorized the museum’s plans to cut 40 percent of its jobs. They are the first major cutbacks since 2019, not the latest in a series of cutbacks. The museum said staff reductions in 2020 had not been the result of layoffs.

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that the Barneys store at 115 Seventh Avenue closed. It was 1997, not 2020. (A separate location on Seventh Avenue closed in 2020.)

How we handle corrections

Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology. More about Zachary Small

Art and Museums in New York City

A guide to the shows, exhibitions and artists shaping the city’s cultural landscape..

Chuck Close’s longtime gallerist, Arne Glimcher, has organized an exhibition of Close’s final portraits at Pace Gallery in Chelsea. Will it help restore his reputation ?

Sixty years after the Beatles appeared live on “Ed Sullivan,” Paul McCartney reflects on his photos capturing those halcyon days . The Brooklyn Museum will exhibit them, and some will be for sale later.

At the Swiss Institute, Raven Chacon, a Pulitzer-Prize winner, makes art warmed — socially and spiritually — by hope .

A Brooklyn Museum exhibit titled “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” showcases art work collected by musical superstars — and makes a show of the collectors, too .

New York City has added another jewel to its glittering cultural crown, a major collection of early Greek figures and vessels , and it takes up little more than one medium-size wall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Looking for more art in the city? Here are the gallery shows not to miss in February .

  • Skip to main content
  • Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Author Interviews

How the art world excludes you and what you can do about it.

Elizabeth Blair 2018 square

Elizabeth Blair

research about art museum

In her new book Get the Picture, journalist Bianca Bosker explores why connecting with art sometimes feels harder than it has to be. Above, a visitor takes in paintings at The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London in 2010. Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images hide caption

In her new book Get the Picture, journalist Bianca Bosker explores why connecting with art sometimes feels harder than it has to be. Above, a visitor takes in paintings at The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London in 2010.

When Bianca Bosker told people in the art world she'd be writing a tell-all about their confounding, exclusive ecosystem, "bad idea," they responded.

"They didn't come right out and threaten my safety or anything," she writes in Get the Picture , "My reputation, well-being, and livelihood as a journalist —that, however, was another story." Judging from the book's recent reviews , she need not worry too much.

Bosker's motivation for writing the book was partly frustration. "I didn't know how to have a meaningful experience of art and that bothered me," she tells me, "But also like I think the art fiends that I got to know, it's not just that they look at art differently. They behave sort of like they've accessed this trapdoor in their brains and I envied that."

Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker

Other journalists might have relied on research and interviews. Bosker went gonzo. She spent five years immersed in the New York art scene, working as a gallery assistant and helping artists in their studios. After getting a license to be a security guard with the state of New York, she got a guard job at the Guggenheim.

Bosker didn't necessarily set out to write a takedown of the art world, though the result is pretty much just that. She writes about the time a performance artist sat on her face. And recounts a conversation with a dealer who said her mere presence (he didn't like her clothes) was "lowering my coolness." It's unvarnished, awkward and eye-opening.

Borderline hostile

"Working at galleries, I became initiated into the way that the art world wields strategic snobbery to keep people out. And I think it's deliberate and I think it's unnecessary," says Bosker.

Take the wall texts you often see at art museums. While they might be well-intentioned, Bosker believes they're part of an over-emphasis on context .

"For the last 100 years or so, we've been told that what really matters about an artwork is the idea behind it." Bosker says that "art connoisseurs" were very interested in "where an artist went to school, who owns her work, what gallery had shown it, who he slept with" and was surprised by "how little [time they] actually spent discussing the work itself."

Of those wall labels, "I thought they were annoying, like borderline hostile ... they just drove me crazy."

At a recent visit to the Guggenheim, we saw one that included the phrase:

"...practice explores the liminal spaces of human consciousness..."

Bosker shudders. "If I had a dollar for every time someone in the art world used the word 'liminal,'" she laughs. One artist she worked with told her, "'Reading the wall labels is like you're trying to have a conversation with the artwork, but someone keeps interrupting.'"

As a museum guard, Bosker occasionally took the matter into her own hands.

"I would actually try and stand in front of the wall labels so that people wouldn't just fall back on the approved interpretations. They would challenge themselves and really wrestle with their own eye, which is so strong," she says.

Small galleries deliberately keep out the 'schmoes '

If museums make some people feel unwelcome, Bosker learned that small, contemporary art galleries can be even worse. One that we visited in downtown Manhattan was hard to find. That's typical, Bosker explains.

She says a lot of galleries "deliberately ... hide themselves from the general public ... I worked for someone who referred to general public as 'Joe Schmoes' and I think there are a lot of ways to keep out the schmoes, and where you put your gallery is a big one."

Now, to be fair, those galleries are in the business of selling art.

research about art museum

Gallery owner Robert Dimin likes that Bianca Bosker is unmasking "our opaque art world" with her new book Get the Picture . DIMIN hide caption

Rob Dimin, another gallery owner Bosker worked for, does not refer to the general public as "schmoes" but he does like that his new gallery is tucked away. It's on the second floor of a building with just a small plaque by the entrance.

Dimin's last gallery was a storefront. "You [were] more likely to get people that had no intention or idea about the art or really interested in the art, just maybe kind of stumbling in," he says, "There [were] moments when we were on the street level that people would come in and just have phone conversations on rainy days because it was an open space."

People walking into a gallery to get out of the rain aren't usually interested in buying art. But Dimin admits that the art world is "opaque" and he's glad Bosker is unmasking it. There are parts of it even he doesn't understand.

"Even as an art dealer, it sometimes is confusing," he says, "Like, why is X, Y and Z artists getting acquired by every museum and having these museum shows? What is challenging for a person like me who's been in this business for 10 years, I can only imagine a person not within the industry having more challenges."

How to have a meaningful experience with art

Intentionally confusing, elitist, cloistered. While Bosker's new book likens the art world to a "country club," she says her feelings about art itself haven't been diminished.

"Seeing artists in their studios agonize over the correct color blue, over ... the physics of making something stick, lay and stay, really convinced me that everything we need to have a meaningful experience with art is right in front of us," says Bosker.

research about art museum

Bianca Bosker takes a close look at a work by Julianne Swartz at the gallery Bienvenu Steinberg & J in New York. Bosker says it's OK to "walk around a sculpture ... just don't touch it." Elizabeth Blair/NPR hide caption

Bianca Bosker takes a close look at a work by Julianne Swartz at the gallery Bienvenu Steinberg & J in New York. Bosker says it's OK to "walk around a sculpture ... just don't touch it."

Here are a few tips she has for readers looking to evade the snobbery:

"My philosophy had always been when I went to a museum ... a scorched earth approach to viewing. I was like, 'You have to see everything. That is how you get your money's worth.'" Bosker says "museum fatigue" is real and compares it to eating everything at an all you can eat buffet. "No wonder you feel a little ill at the end of it."

"If you find one work and you just spend your entire half hour, hour, hour and a half at that piece, you've done it. And I think that that can be oftentimes an even more meaningful experience."

Find five things

Don't 'get' art? You might be looking at it wrong

Don't 'get' art? You might be looking at it wrong

"An artist that I spent time with encouraged me to, in front of an artwork, challenge yourself to notice five things. And those five things don't have to be grandiose, like: 'This is a commentary on masculinity in the Internet age.' It could just be, you know, like this yellow makes me want to touch it." Taking the time to notice those things will help viewers think about the choices an artist has made, Bosker believes.

"I think being around art ultimately helps us widen and expand our definition of what beauty is. And I think beauty ... is that moment when our mind jumps the curb. It can feel uncomfortable, but it also is something that draws us to it. ... It's something that all of us need more of in our life. And art can be the gateway to finding more of it. It doesn't have to happen with the traditionally beautiful artwork."

Get as close to the source as possible

"What we see when we go to a museum is not necessarily the best that culture has to offer. ... It's the result of many decisions by flawed human beings. And one way to get around that is to widen your horizons. ... Go to see art at art schools, go see art at the gallery in a garage and just kind of go close to the source."

This story was edited for audio and digital by Rose Friedman. The web page was produced by Beth Novey.

  • contemporary art

The Renwick Gallery is closed temporarily for a pipe replacement project. For updates, sign up for emails from SAAM.

Home

Visit Planning

  • Plan Your Visit
  • Event Calendar
  • Current Exhibitions
  • Family Activities
  • Guidelines and Policies

Access Programs

Accessibility.

  • Dementia Programs
  • Verbal Description Tours

research about art museum

Explore Art and Artists

Collection highlights.

  • Search Artworks
  • New Acquisitions
  • Search Artists
  • Search Women Artists

Something Fun

  • Which Artist Shares Your Birthday?

Exhibitions

  • Upcoming Exhibitions
  • Traveling Exhibitions
  • Past Exhibitions

Art Conservation

  • Lunder Conservation Center

research about art museum

Research Resources

  • Research and Scholars Center
  • Nam June Paik Archive Collection
  • Photograph Study Collection
  • National Art Inventories Databases
  • Save Outdoor Sculpture!
  • Researching Your Art

Publications

  • American Art Journal
  • Catalogs and Books
  • Scholarly Symposia
  • Publication Prizes

Fellows and Interns

  • Fellowship Programs
  • List of Fellows and Scholars
  • Internship Programs

Featured Resource

A painting of an eye seen in the reflection of a mirror

  • Support the Museum
  • Corporate Patrons
  • Planned Giving
  • Donating Artworks
  • Join the Director's Circle
  • Join SAAM Creatives

Become a member

A couple dances while a string band plays music

Public Transit

Access ramps are located on both sides of the 8th and G Streets NW entrance. The museum is above the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail station, which is served by the Green, Yellow, and Red Metro lines.

There is limited on-street parking at meters; several  paid parking garages are available in the neighborhood .

Common FAQs

Frequently asked and answered questions about visiting the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

No, tickets are not required to visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum or its Renwick Gallery.

Yes! We have free audio guides available in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, ASL, and Descriptive Audio. You can start using them by navigating to our Audio Guide page .

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.

SAAM is located at Eighth and G streets NW in the Penn Quarter neighborhood in Washington, DC. The museum is above the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail station, which is served by the Green, Yellow, and Red Metro lines

SAAM offers daily walk-in tours from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. and 2 to 3 p.m. every day of the week. and 4 to 5 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. All walk-in tours are subject to volunteer docent availability and last-minute cancellations may occur. Please check with the information desk upon arrival.

Beginning February 2023, visitors are required to pass through screening at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the effort to standardize security throughout the Smithsonian Institution. Check the  Smithsonian's security policy  for the most up-to-date information.

Visitors are required to walk through a metal detector; those who cannot go through the metal detector will be hand-screened with an electronic wand by security personnel. Help speed your entry by limiting the number and size of personal belongings and bags brought on-site. 

Security officers are located throughout the building to protect the Museum, its collections, and most importantly, our visitors. Please feel free to ask them for assistance. A Security Desk is located by the Museum entrance/exit at the G Street and F Street entrances.

The Smithsonian American Art museums welcomes all visitors and is committed to making its collections and galleries accessible to everyone. We offer a range of programs for both adults and children with disabilities.

Access ramps are located on both sides of the museum’s 8th and G Streets NW entrance. All visitors may enter SAAM's main building using either the entrance located at 8th and G Streets NW or the entrance located at 8th and F Streets NW.  If you are using MetroAccess Paratransit, please use 800 G Street NW as the address for our building. Barrier-free access and restrooms are available. View more information on  accessibility at the museums .

Accessible restrooms are located on all floors of SAAM.

Service animals are welcome at Smithsonian museums. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a service animal is defined as a dog that has been individually trained to do work or perform tasks for an individual with a disability. 

Audio Guides

Experience the museum your way.

Smartify's free personalized tours are tailored to your interests and the time you have available. Simply answer a couple of quick questions and we'll hand pick a collection of unmissable objects and captivating stories just for you.

research about art museum

The innovative Luce Foundation Center for American Art allows visitors to browse thousands of artworks from SAAM's collection.  

research about art museum

The glass-enclosed Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard is one of the most magnificent gathering spaces in Washington, DC.

research about art museum

The Lunder Conservation Center with its floor-to-ceiling glass walls allows visitors to see into the laboratories where conservators preserve artworks.

Current Exhibitions at SAAM

Upcoming events at saam.

research about art museum

  • Smithsonian American Art Museum Learn More Free | Meet in G Street Lobby  

research about art museum

  • Smithsonian American Art Museum Get Tickets Free | Registration required

research about art museum

  • Smithsonian American Art Museum Get Tickets Free| Registration encouraged

research about art museum

  • Smithsonian American Art Museum Get Tickets Free | Registration required 

Shopping and Dining

research about art museum

The light-filled Courtyard Café offers a selection of baked goods, sandwiches, salads, desserts, and beverages. 

research about art museum

Visit the SAAM Museum Store for an inspiring array of art-inspired objects and books.  

Support SAAM

Ensure that American art is available to all with a gift to fund research, exhibitions, and programs at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery. 

Host your next event at one of our two elegant and dazzling museum venues. Let us make your event unforgettable! 

  • ALL MOSCOW TOURS
  • Getting Russian Visa
  • Top 10 Reasons To Go
  • Things To Do In Moscow
  • Sheremetyevo Airport
  • Domodedovo Airport
  • Vnukovo Airport
  • Airports Transfer
  • Layover in Moscow
  • Best Moscow Hotels
  • Best Moscow Hostels
  • Art in Moscow
  • Moscow Theatres
  • Moscow Parks
  • Free Attractions
  • Walking Routes
  • Sports in Moscow
  • Shopping in Moscow
  • The Moscow Metro
  • Moscow Public Transport
  • Taxi in Moscow
  • Driving in Moscow
  • Moscow Maps & Traffic
  • Facts about Moscow – City Factsheet
  • Expat Communities
  • Groceries in Moscow
  • Healthcare in Moscow
  • Blogs about Moscow
  • Flat Rentals

research about art museum

Art in Moscow: Museums, Galleries and Museum-Reserves

There is no strict dress code in Moscow museums. However, if you are going to explore ancient churches and holy places we recommend more conservative outwear. Women should have their heads covered.

All state museums and galleries are free every third Sunday of the month. Some of the Moscow museums are free on holidays, and during the «Museum days» and «Museum Night».

If you’re looking for great cultural tours around art points of Moscow, we have a great MOSCOW ART & DESIGN TOUR , available for you everyday except Mondays.

Moscow Museums

The Moscow Kremlin

The Moscow Kremlin

Don’t miss a chance to see the very heart of Moscow, the Kremlin, the symbol of the Russian State, one of the greatest architectural ensembles in the world, a treasury of unusual relics and monuments of art. It is situated on a high Borovitskiy hill above the Moskva River, so you’ll be able to see a spectacular view of the city center. The famous Armory Chamber and the Diamond Fund are real treasure-houses, where you can see ancient Russian regalia, ceremonial tsar’s dress, church hierarchs’ vestments, arms, gold and silverware by Russian, European and Eastern masters. The Kremlin is the official President’s residence and remains a gorgeous political landmark. The UNESCO has included the ensemble of the Moscow Kremlin in the World Heritage List.

Site: http://www.kreml.ru/

The State Historical Museum

research about art museum

Ivan Zabelin, Aleksey Uvarov, and several other Slavophiles founded the State Historical Museum in 1872 to promote Russian history and national self-awareness. During its century-long history, the museum has collected more than 4.5 million of valuable items and over 12 million pages of documental archives. Its exhibitions range from relics of prehistoric tribes that lived in the territory of present-day Russia, through priceless artworks acquired by members of the Romanov dynasty. The museum’s historical building which was reconstructed and equipped to meet all the visitors requirements is on the Red Square.

Site: http://www.shm.ru/

The State Tretyakov Gallery

The State Tretyakov Gallery

The State Tretyakov Gallery takes a special place among the national art museums of the world. Established with the efforts of one person, the dedicated collector Pavel Tretyakov, it possesses a unique collection of Russian art, more than 150000 masterpieces, created by famous Russian artists throughout the centuries. The historic building of the State Tretyakov Gallery at Lavrushinski Lane presents Russian art from the 11th through the early 20th century. The state Tretyakov Gallery at Krymsky Val has an excellent collection of Russian art of the 20th century, modern art and holds temporary exhibitions.

Site: http://www.tretyakovgallery.ru/

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

research about art museum

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is one the largest European museums of fine art. It has one of the most remarkable collections of fine arts in Russia that consists of artworks from ancient times to the present day. Visitors can see great paintings by world famous artists: Rembrandt, Botticelli, Canaletto, Tiepolo, along with the remarkable collections of Impressionists, Post-impressionists, modernists: Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso and others. Moreover, the museum holds the private collectors’ galleries, many of were inaccessible to public for many years.

Site: http://www.arts-museum.ru/

Moscow Museum of Modern Art

Moscow Museum of Modern Art

Moscow Museum of Modern Art specializes in the modern art of 20th and 21st centuries. The famous Russian artist and sculptor Zurab Tsereteli has founded it. The museum is located in four historic buildings in Petrovka Street, Gogolevsky Boulevard, Ermolaevsky lane and Tverskoy Boulevard. The museum’s collection depicts the development of avant-garde. The largest part of the collection consists of masterpieces of Russian artists, but you can also find works by Anri Russo, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and many others.

Site: http://www.mmoma.ru/

The Moscow Planetarium

The Moscow Planetarium

The Planetarium in Moscow first opened its doors in 1929. After a global reconstruction, it was reopened in 2011. Now it is a multifunctional complex that combines scientific and educational resources: the interactive museum «Lunarium», the Museum of Urania, the Big Star Hall and the Sky Park, family recreation center, that focuses on different age groups. The Moscow Planetarium is one of the biggest planetariums in the world.

Site: http://www.planetarium-moscow.ru/

Moscow Galleries

Garage museum of contemporary art.

Inside Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Hall

Exhibit on display during the opening of «Art Experiment»

The museum is a kind of independent platform aimed to disclose and reveal a new way of thinking. The Garage Center currently reflects the contemporary innovations of national and world’s culture. It invites you to the beautiful world of modern art, showing its best pieces. This center offers a great number of various exhibitions, educational projects for kids and adults, and publishing. The Garage Center is also called The Museum of Everything. It provides ways and reasons for public dialogue and the creation of progressive ideas.

Site: http://garageccc.com/

The Multimedia Art Museum

Fifty Years of Bond Style Exhibition

Fifty Years of Bond Style Exhibition

The Multimedia Art Museum opened in October 2010 at the base of the Moscow House of Photography. One of the main principles of MAMM s work is complete openness to the new forms of visual expression and for the fresh, innovative trends in the Russian and foreign media art and photography. There are seven floors of spacious exhibition halls and minimalist architecture that is a great font for modern art. The exhibition history of MAMM and Moscow House of Photography counts more than 1300 exhibitions in Russia and abroad. Moreover, Multimedia Art Museum has different educational programs and holds famous Moscow art festivals: Photobiennale, «Fashion and Style in Photography» and others.

Site: http://www.mamm-mdf.ru/

Lumiere Brothers Photography Center

Lumiere Brothers Photography Center

This modern photo gallery is located in the very heart of Moscow, next to the Kremlin, Cathedral of Christ the Savior, big art galleries, design studios famous clubs and restaurants. The photography Center houses in an old and huge mansion at the Moskva River Embankment. Lumiere Brothers Photography Center has three huge exhibition rooms, lecture hall, library with an immense collection of rare books in photography and an independent bookshop. The Center is conducting research work, organizing educational projects, providing a base for the future Russian Museum of Photography.

Site: http://www.lumiere.ru/

Winzavod

Winzavod (Wine Factory) is the first and the biggest Center of Contemporary Art in our country. It unites all the areas of modern culture: exhibitions, festivals, lecture programs, cinema, concerts, theater premieres. You will find here a big amount of art galleries, artists’ workshops, designers and photographers studios, art cafes, fashion showrooms, a bookshop, children’s studio and many other things. The purpose of Winzavod is to support and to develop Russian contemporary art, art initiatives and help talented young people. Visiting Winzavod you will see the art that defines not only today’s but also tomorrow’s life.

Site: http://www.winzavod.ru/

research about art museum

The Manezh was built in 1817 in honor of the 5th anniversary of Russia’s victory in the 1812 war. Then it was called «Exerzierhaus», building, intended for military drills. The building has the unique construction – wooden structure trusses overlap the space of 44.86 square meters without any intermediate supports. After 1917, Manezh served as a garage for government vehicles. And since 1957 it has been continuously used for exhibitions and public events. In 2004, the building was severely damaged by fire. Renovated in 2005 the Manezh doubled its area. Nowadays it is one of the leading Moscow exhibition halls. There are two exhibition spaces, a conference room and a cafe on the third-floor observation deck. The Manezh hosts numerous fairs, festivals, and exhibitions.

Site: http://moscowmanege.ru/

Flacon Design Factory

Flacon Design Factory

Flacon Design Factory, located in the territory of a former glass factory, has become a pioneer in the revitalization of industrial zone outside the historic center of Moscow. Flacon has become a powerful launch pad for multiple cool projects, self-expression of creative individuals and carrying-out of sociocultural initiatives. No wonder that the atmosphere at Flacon entirely coincides with its motto: «Create as you please!» The Factory includes offices, co-working zone, shops, workshops, exhibition and creative projects spaces. Lectures, film screenings, fairs, design festivals, innovative exhibitions, presentations, concerts, limited actions and design community work days pass here weekly.

Site: http://flacon.ru/

Artplay

Artplay is near Winzavod in the former industrial space in the area Kurskaya metro station and occupies an area of 75,000 square meters. Artplay, providing a new life to carefully reconstructed factory buildings, has become an important part of the contemporary cultural landscape of the city. Artplay unites designers, architects, furniture, lighting, ceramics, decorative materials shops, involving them in cooperation with each other. Young Moscow galleries, artists’ studios, cafes, bars, bookstores, music club, school of design, theater, children’s art studio are also situated here. Three exhibition halls regularly host contemporary art exhibitions, festivals, video art, alternative music concerts, performances, film screenings, lectures and master classes.

Site: http://www.artplay.ru/

CCI Fabrika

CCI Fabrika

The Center For Creative Industries «Fabrika» is an art space for non-commercial creative projects. Today it is the example of peaceful coexistence of art business, operating enterprise, production, and workplaces for talented people in Moscow. CCI Fabrika is a member of the international network of non-profit cultural centers – Trans Europe Halls. This project is a typical umbrella-center. It is developing in both ways: creating and exhibiting its cultural projects and offering workspaces for other creative groups. Here you can find art studios and workshops of design, architecture, cinema, theater, cartoon animation and contemporary music studios.

Site: http://www.proektfabrika.ru/

Moscow Museum-Reserves

Tsaritsyno State Museum-Reserve

Tsaritsyno State Museum-Reserve

Tsaritsyno State Museum-Reserve is one of the largest historical, cultural, recreation and touristic complexes. Its total area is more than 700 hectares. It is an excellent combination of nature – marvelous rivers, ponds, streams, forests – and scientifically restored and renovated architectural and landscape monuments. The museum’s collection of historical items, exhibitions, and educational programs will be attractive for both national visitors and foreign tourists.

Site: http://www.tsaritsyno-museum.ru/

Arkhangelskoye Country Estate

Arkhangelskoe Estate

Russian cultural monument is a good sublimation of the stunning beauty of a green space and luxurious collection of paintings, sculptures, unique books and pieces arts and crafts. During its long history, the estate was used as a recreation place for emperors, politicians, famous writers and poets. Today it is the finest place to have an enjoyable walk and to see the richest collection Russian art.

Site: http://www.arhangelskoe.su/

Kolomenskoe Museum-Reserve

Kolomenskoe Museum-Reserve

A unique historic place – Kolomenskoe – is situated in the picturesque surrounding over the Moscow River banks. A magnificent country estate has appeared at the lands full of legends. Archeological discoveries state that the first settlements appeared here in the VIII century. It is an ancient and uniquely formed place. Today this is a unique complex of cultural monuments of high historical value.

Site: http://mgomz.ru/kolomenskoe

Sergiev-Posad City

Sergiev Posad

Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve

Museum of Sergiev-Posad is a historical and art reserve. It is located within the unique wall of the St. Sergius Trinity Lavra. This ancient monastery gathered its treasures during centuries from the tsars, princes and boyars donations. Moreover, many art and craft items were made at Lavra’s workshops. Now, the collections of Sergiev-Posad Museum-Reserve include rare, ancient icons, Cyrillic alphabet books, medieval manuscripts, visual art items, gold and silver showpieces.

Site: http://www.stsl.ru/

PLAN YOUR TRIP WITH US

research about art museum

Happy to help you with everything, from general plan of your visit to plane tickets or hotel stay. We may also support your Russian Visa request with a letter of invitation if you need so.

SEE OUR TOURS

Tverskaya Street in Moscow

We host around 60 tours every month in English, Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic and other languages. All of our tours =>

SAVE THIS LINK

research about art museum

If you only started to think about visiting Moscow, just save our site in your browser’s bookmarks or follow us on Facebook and Instagram to be in touch.

Our Private Tours in Moscow

Moscow art & design private tour, moscow metro & stalin skyscrapers private tour, soviet moscow historical & heritage private tour, layover in moscow tailor-made private tour, «day two» moscow private tour, whole day in moscow private tour, gastronomic moscow private tour, all-in-one moscow essential private tour, tour guide jobs →.

Every year we host more and more private tours in English, Russian and other languages for travelers from all over the world. They need best service, amazing stories and deep history knowledge. If you want to become our guide, please write us.

Contact Info

+7 495 166-72-69

[email protected]

119019 Moscow, Russia, Filippovskiy per. 7, 1

Mon - Sun 10.00 - 18.00

National Museum of African American History & Culture

  • Plan Your Visit
  • Group Visits
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Accessibility Options
  • Sweet Home Café
  • Museum Store
  • Museum Maps
  • Our Mobile App
  • Search the Collection
  • Exhibitions
  • Initiatives
  • Museum Centers
  • Publications
  • Digital Resource Guide
  • The Searchable Museum
  • Freedmen's Bureau Search Portal

Black History Month Resources

  • Teaching and Learning
  • STEM at NMAAHC
  • School Group Tours
  • Opportunity Corner
  • Early Childhood
  • Talking About Race
  • Digital Learning
  • Strategic Partnerships
  • Ways to Give
  • Internships & Fellowships
  • Today at the Museum
  • Upcoming Events
  • Ongoing Tours & Activities
  • Past Events
  • Host an Event at NMAAHC
  • About the Museum
  • The Building
  • Meet Our Curators
  • Founding Donors
  • Corporate Leadership Councils
  • NMAAHC Annual Reports

Communicator Award of Excellence logo

Students, make your voice heard this Black History Month with our museum. Join us in exploring stories of African Americans in the Arts throughout February, with a special focus on art as a platform for social justice around five weekly focus areas: literature and poetry, performing art, visual art, music and digital art.

  • Week 1, Feb. 1-4: Literature and Poetry
  • Week 2, Feb. 5-11: Performing Arts
  • Week 3, Feb. 12-18: Visual Arts
  • Week 4, Feb. 19-25: Music
  • Week 5, Feb. 26-29: Digital Arts

Social justice has historically created visual and literary arts to capture the spirit and platforms of resistance, and to share those messages to audiences outside of mainstream ways. Art as a platform for social justice is found throughout African American history   .

Resources for the Classroom or Home

NMAAHC Smithsonian Learning Labs All Grades Learning Lab from the Smithsonian Institution is a free, interactive platform for learners and educators. Users can explore well-known and lesser-known moments of history through millions of authentic, digital resources, create content with online tools, and share in the Smithsonian's expansive community of knowledge and learning​.

Grade K-2 and Up

  • Black Women Artists
  • Music & Sound: Instruments in the NMAAHC Collection

Grade 3 and Up

  • Essential Historian Skills: Art As A Platform For Social Justice
  • Essential Historian Skills: Taking the Stage
  • Harriet Tubman
  • Frederick Douglass
  • Madam C.J. Walker
  • Jackie Robinson
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.

Grade 6 and Up

  • In Full Color: The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s-70s
  • Read Between the Brushstrokes: Unite
  • Read Between the Brushstrokes: Walking
  • African American Historians of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
  • The New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance
  • The Science of Sound: Acoustic Activities Inspired by Dr. James West
  • The Corona's Cooling Power
  • A Celebration of African Americans at NASA

Resources for a Museum Visit

NMAAHC Pathways    Grade 3 and Up and Great for Families and Groups    Use these self-guided tour experiences to explore the NMAAHC.

  • Art in Community
  • But Is This Art? 

Essential Historian Skills    Grade 6 and Up    Some of the answers of the past are locked in primary sources. Practice becoming a historian by questioning primary sources in our History Galleries.

  • Artist in Context: Phillis Wheatley 
  • Artist in Context: Paul Laurence Dunbar
  • Art in Context: The Black Arts Movement

My NMAAHC Journal    Grade 3 and Up    Students find artifacts and stories centered on the arts in our Culture Galleries. Practice ways to think like a historian and how to question gallery objects.

  • Exploring the Arts! 

NMAAHC Highlights    Grade 3 and Up    A quick guide of three not-to-miss objects and stories throughout the NMAAHC that highlight the connection between art and social justice.

  • Art as Platform for Social Justice 

Programs at the Museum and Online

Virtual art workshop: gel plate printing.

Image of Virtual Art Workshop: Gel Plate Printing

Explore More! in STEM: Flying High with the Triple Nickles

This is a *free* event!

Event Image for Explore More! in STEM: Flying High with the Triple Nickles

Explore More! in STEM: To the Moon and Beyond!

Event Image for Explore More! in STEM: To the Moon and Beyond!

North Star: A Digital Journey of African American History

Explore African American history through digital activities on the Smithsonian Learning Lab platform. The activities, or collections, have gathered objects, stories, videos and thinking questions all in one place.

Black History Month Digital Toolkit

Join us in uplifting the humanity, innovation and vision of African American artists throughout February.

Subtitle here for the credits modal.

research about art museum

  • For the Media
  • Open Records
  • Division of Marketing & Communications

UGA Today

Joro spiders well poised to populate cities

A large black-blue and yellow spider is shown hanging in a web in front of a blurred background.

Study suggests invasive spider tolerates urban landscape better than most native spiders

The Jorō (Joro) spider was first spotted stateside around 2013 and has since been spotted across Georgia and the Southeast. New research from the University of Georgia has found more clues as to why the spider has been so successful in its spread.

The study found the invasive orb-weaving spider is surprisingly tolerant of the vibrations and noise common in urban landscapes.

In this new study, researchers examined how Joro spiders can live next to busy roads, which are notably stressful environments for many animals.

The researchers found that while Joro spiders near busier roads are somewhat less likely to attack simulated prey, the spiders don’t seem to be hurting for it and clock in at about the same weight as their counterparts in less busy locations. That suggests the species can successfully compensate for its human-dominated landscape.

Environmental portrait of researcher Andy Davis in his laboratory.

“If you’re a spider, you rely on vibrations to do your job and catch bugs,” said Andy Davis , corresponding author of the study and a research scientist in UGA’s Odum School of Ecology . “But these Joro webs are everywhere in the fall, including right next to busy roads, and the spiders seem to be able to make a living there. For some reason, these spiders seem urban tolerant.”

Busy roads don’t affect Joro spider health, weight

Joro spiders are regularly spotted in areas that native Georgia spiders don’t inhabit.

They build their golden webs between powerlines, on top of stoplights and even above the pumps at local gas stations—none of which are particularly peaceful spots.

That is what drew Davis and his team to study their behavior near roadsides.

Davis and a team of undergraduates from the Odum School used a tuning fork to simulate the vibrations caused by prey when caught in a spider’s web and then watched if the spiders attacked. Of the more than 350 trials, Joro spiders attacked the simulated prey 59% of the time.

I don’t know how happy people are going to be about it, but I think the spiders are here to stay.” —Alexa Schultz, co-author of the study

The spiders in webs near busy roads attacked about half the time while those near lower traffic areas pounced 65% of the time.

Despite that slight difference, it doesn’t look like it’s affecting the spiders’ body mass or health.

“It looks like Joro spiders are not going to shy away from building a web under a stoplight or an area where you wouldn’t imagine a spider to be,” said Alexa Shultz, co-author of the study and a third-year ecology student at UGA. “I don’t know how happy people are going to be about it, but I think the spiders are here to stay.” Her undergraduate co-authors, Kade Stewart and Caitlin Phelan, agreed.

A man and two women work to capture a large spider on a stick.

Co-authors of the study Kade Stewart, Caitlin Phelan and Alexa Schultz handle a Joro spider. (Photo by Andy Davis)

Joro spiders likely to spread beyond Southeast

In their native Japan, the East Asian Joro spider colonizes most of the country. Japan also has a very similar climate to the U.S. and is approximately the same latitude.

The present study builds on previous work from Davis’ lab that showed Joro spiders are well equipped to spread through most of the Eastern Seaboard due to their high metabolism and heart rate. The spiders are also cold tolerant, surviving brief freezes that kill off many of their orb-weaving cousins.

Their hardiness is one trait that’s enabled the spiders to explode in population stateside, with numbers easily in the millions now. The new research suggests that the Joros’ tolerance of urban vibrations and sounds is likely another factor in the species’ exponential growth.

But their spread shouldn’t be too alarming, the researchers said. The spiders are rather timid .

Published by Arthropoda, the study is available here .

You may also like

research about art museum

UGA to launch new School of Medicine

research about art museum

Altera Investments named fastest-growing UGA business

research about art museum

Facilities Management Division introduces new electric…

research about art museum

Georgia Museum of Art receives two statewide awards

research about art museum

UGA Libraries seed grants support scholarship in the…

Uga’s hairy dawg gets his hearing tested.

IMAGES

  1. Researching the Benefits of Art Museums—A Nationwide Study

    research about art museum

  2. What Exactly is the Art Museum in Modern Times?

    research about art museum

  3. Museum

    research about art museum

  4. Art museum review essay

    research about art museum

  5. Best Art Museums in the U.S

    research about art museum

  6. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

    research about art museum

COMMENTS

  1. Researching the Benefits of Art Museums—A Nationwide Study

    Emily Holtrop What are the benefits of art museums to people? A question with so many answers. If you were a public administrator or official, you may say art museums support revenue growth, encourage participation rates across communities, or that they support K-12 academic test scores.

  2. American Art Journal

    The leading peer-reviewed journal of American art history and related visual culture. Since its founding in 1987, American Art has been an indispensable source for scholars, educators, curators, museum-goers, collectors, and professors and students at colleges and universities worldwide. The journal critically engages material and conceptual ...

  3. Research and Scholars Center

    The Smithsonian American Art Museum's specialized art research databases, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture and the Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue Index, describe more than a half million artworks in public and private collections worldwide.

  4. Art Perception in the Museum: How We Spend Time and Space in Art

    Aesthetics research aiming at understanding art experience is an emerging field; however, most research is conducted in labs without access to real artworks, without the social context of a museum and without the presence of other persons. The present article replicates and complements key findings of art perception in museum contexts.

  5. Researching Your Art

    Researching Your Art | Smithsonian American Art Museum Home / Research and Scholars Center Researching Your Art Want to learn more about the painting you found while clearing out the attic? What about the drawing that has been hanging in grandma's hallway since you were a kid?

  6. Teaching and Learning in the Art Museum

    Published online: 20 November 2018 Summary Activities that actively and deliberately support museum visitors' engagement with art and promote learning occupy a distinct, though contested, place in the history and current framing of the art museum across the globe.

  7. Beyond the Modern Museum. A theoretical framework for a museal

    11 The first step of this paper was to emphasize the potential of art studies in order to comprehend the nature of human communication. The second step was to assess the need for a shift of perspective, focusing the discussion on what art does rather than what art is. The third step, then, involves weighing up the domain of distribution and its crucial role in signifying the museum as a medium.

  8. Rethinking Research in the Art Museum

    ABSTRACT. Rethinking Research in the Art Museum presents an original and radical perspective on how research can function as an agent of change in art museums today. The book analyses a range of art organisations and draws on numerous interviews with museum professionals to outline the limitations of existing models of museum research.

  9. Conservation and Scientific Research

    The Department of Scientific Research investigates the material aspects of works of art in The Met collection.

  10. Research on Art Museums

    Key findings include: The field grows more diverse: With respect to the race and ethnicity of museum staff, data show a continued, moderate increase in people of color (POC) across all museum roles. [3] Museum leadership and conservation positions, while growing more diverse, have not exceeded one-fifth POC representation overall.

  11. Getty Library

    One of the world's most comprehensive art historical research libraries

  12. Collecting and Provenance Research

    Collecting and Provenance Research. Provenance—or the history of ownership of a work of art from the time of its creation to the present—is a critical aspect of museum work in the twenty-first century. Understanding to the extent possible the provenance both of new works entering the collections and of works already held in the collections ...

  13. What Is Research Art?

    How did this come to be? On the institutional front, art schools have been establishing programs and centers for "artistic research" and "research-creation," particularly in Canada and across...

  14. Milwaukee Art Museum

    Collection About the Center Please email [email protected] to make an appointment. Discover tens of thousands of materials focused on the study of fine art, architecture, and design at the Milwaukee Art Museum Research Center.

  15. Association of Art Museum Directors

    Research on Art Museums. Explore recent research on art museums including staff demographics; museum director perspectives and priorities; and the first survey investigating the characteristics, roles, and experiences of Black trustees in North American art museums.

  16. Smithsonian American Art Museum: Research and Scholars Center

    The Smithsonian American Art Museum's specialized art research databases—the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture and the Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue Index —describe more than a half million art works in public and private collections worldwide.

  17. Research

    Research The Museum employs a staff of more than 250 employees, many of whom hold national- and international-caliber scholarly credentials and are active in conducting and publishing research across a number of fields.

  18. Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery

    Explore the sweep of four centuries of the the American imagination at the nation's flagship museum for American art and craft. Dive into inspiring artworks, special exhibitions, and the reimagined collection — American Voices and Visions: Modern and Contemporary Art.

  19. Provenance Research

    The Denver Art Museum requires provenance research on proposed acquisitions, and curatorial staff also research artworks currently in the collection to ensure legal ownership.

  20. The Met 360° Project

    On March 18, 2016, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened The Met Breuer, its new space was dedicated to modern and contemporary art. Whether you're a recent or longtime fan of the building's classic modernist design, or have just been struck by its bold form at Madison Avenue and 75th Street-here's your chance to enjoy a 360° perspective on architect Marcel Breuer's landmark 1966 creation.

  21. The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

    The Museum was created on the basis of Moscow University's "Cabinet of Fine Arts and Antiquities" which had been set up as both a public museum and one for educational purposes. In it the main stages in the history of art from ancient times until the post-Renaissance era were represented through casts, models, painted copies and ...

  22. Rubin Museum, Haven for Asian Art, to Close After 20 Years

    Founded in 2004 to promote the art collection of Donald and Shelley Rubin, the art museum has hosted nearly 4,000 Himalayan art objects spanning 1,500 years of history.

  23. How the art world excludes you and what you can do about it

    Other journalists might have relied on research and interviews. Bosker went gonzo. She spent five years immersed in the New York art scene, working as a gallery assistant and helping artists in ...

  24. Tretyakov Gallery

    The museum attracted 894,374 visitors in 2020 (down 68 percent from 2019, due to the COVID-19 pandemic). It was 13th on the list of most-visited art museums in the world in 2020. The façade of the gallery building was designed by the painter Viktor Vasnetsov in a peculiar Russian fairy-tale style.

  25. The Lahore Museum: A Crucible of Research in Pahari Painting by Mr F S

    Pahari Painting | Lahore Museum | Art History His talk today will be on the Pahari paintings collection in the Lahore Museum and their significance in the art-historical research into the various schools.Before 1947, the Lahore Museum collection had one of the pre-eminent collections amongst the provincial museums across India.It's subsequent division saw one third going to East Punjab and two ...

  26. Visit SAAM

    Two museums in one historic location. Sharing its space with the National Portrait Gallery, SAAM is a twenty-five minute walk from the Renwick Gallery, which is near the White House. SAAM is a fifteen minute walk from the Smithsonian Castle on 9th Street NW, directly north of the National Mall. Download a Museum Floorplan.

  27. Art in Moscow: Museums, Galleries and Museum-Reserves

    The Multimedia Art Museum opened in October 2010 at the base of the Moscow House of Photography. One of the main principles of MAMM s work is complete openness to the new forms of visual expression and for the fresh, innovative trends in the Russian and foreign media art and photography. ... The Center is conducting research work, organizing ...

  28. Black History Month Resources

    Students, make your voice heard this Black History Month with our museum. Join us in exploring stories of African Americans in the Arts throughout February, with a special focus on art as a platform for social justice around five weekly focus areas: literature and poetry, performing art, visual art, music and digital art.

  29. Joro spiders well poised to populate cities

    The Jorō (Joro) spider was first spotted stateside around 2013 and has since been spotted across Georgia and the Southeast.New research from the University of Georgia has found more clues as to why the spider has been so successful in its spread.. The study found the invasive orb-weaving spider is surprisingly tolerant of the vibrations and noise common in urban landscapes.