Visual Resources Center Hours of Operation
Hours: Monday–Friday, 9:30 AM to 5:00 PM
Location: Katzen 142 (near the rotunda)
If you would like to make an appointment with the curator, Kathe Hicks Albrecht, please e-mail kalbrec@american.edu or call 202-885-1675.
The Art Department’s Visual Resources Center houses a collection of approximately 100,000 35mm slide images and over 15,000 digital images. The images represent works of painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and other arts. One of the collection’s strengths is its representation of the works of women artists, from the Renaissance work of Sofonisba Anguissola to Judy Chicago's Womanhouse installation, as well as the text art of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. Although the majority of the collection has a Western European focus, the center also offers an outstanding and diverse collection of Asian, Native American, Near Eastern and other non-western art images. Recent areas of collection development include postmodernism, ancient Greek and Roman architecture, sculpture and painting, and Islamic art.
The Visual Resources Center serves the Art Department as an essential and daily resource. Art history faculty employ images as an intrinsic part of their curriculum, and studio faculty frequently use the center’s images to augment their drawing, painting, sculpture, and printmaking courses. Slides may also be checked out by AU faculty outside the Art Department with the understanding that the borrowed slides be returned immediately after use. Please contact Kathe Hicks Albrecht in the Visual Resources Center for more information on image loan policy.
The Digital Image Collection includes images scanned in-house from the slide collection and also several thousand licensed digital images from commercial sources (Scholars Resource and Davis Art Images). Works in the Digital Image Collection directly support art history courses. All art history instructors teach with digital images in the classroom. The program in use at AU also generates web pages for student study.
The Library/Kassalow Collection is a small but outstanding library available to art history graduate student for in-house study. It is a non-lending library. The Collection was established originally with a generous donation from Mrs. Sylvia Kassalow. Since her original donation in 1999 of over 900 volumes, the Library has expanded and now includes over 1,300 books. We’ve added new books on artists, art theory and criticism, and general art history scholarship and have received several further donations by alumni and friends of the Art History Program. The Library is open during regular VRC hours.
The Graduate Thesis Collection — view a list of collected Graduate Thesis Papers (pdf) — is also housed in the Visual Resources Center in the Graduate Study Library. Thesis papers are submitted as a requirement for the Art History Master’s Program and papers are kept in the department for reference and study.
ARTstor and other networked resources are available to art history students through AU's Bender Library, which offers a complete listing of art resources, including electronic journals, indices/databases, and links to further art history information such as the BHA (the Bibliography of the History of Art) and RILA (Repertory of Literature of the Arts).
It is an exceptional opportunity to study art history in Washington, D.C., the home base of the federal government and all its agencies, and of the embassies and consulates of every country in the world. Washington is one of the world's great cultural and educational centers, whose museums, libraries, universities, music and concert halls, and historical archives are available as first-hand resources for study and research in the arts and humanities.
Local world-class museum and libraries include: the National Gallery of
Art, National Museum of American Art, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian
Institution, J. H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Renwick
Gallery, the Textile Museum, the Freer Gallery (Oriental art), Sackler
Gallery (African art), Dumbarton Oaks (Byzantine and pre-Columbian), Corcoran
Gallery of Art, Phillips Collection, National Museum of Women in the Arts,
the Archives of American Art, the Library of Congress.
Internships at many of these institutions are available to our M.A. candidates.
A year-long internship at the National Museum of American Art provides
a valuable opportunity for students interested in museum professions.
The Consortium of Washington Universities greatly enhances the course offerings and library holdings of American University. Students are encouraged to augment their studies by taking graduate courses at the University of Maryland and George Washington University. The joint holdings of the Consortium universities, immediately accessible to all American University students, collectively constitute one of the top libraries in the country.
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