Biographical Resources

This collection of artists' biographies includes 149,000 biographies as well as auction records, exhibition histories, and over 11,000 images of artists’ signatures and stamps of sale.

The Inventory of American Paintings and the Inventory of American 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 artworks in public and private collections worldwide. Records are compiled from a variety of sources including published catalogues, collection checklists, reports from collectors, journals, and magazines. The records include basic descriptive information on each artwork, including artist, title, execution date, dimensions, markings and inscriptions, subject, owner, and location. Over 21,000 painters and nearly 15,000 sculptors are represented in the database.

The Pre-1877 Art Exhibition Catalogue Index (AECI) is comprised of 136,494 records describing fine artworks exhibited in the United States and in Canada up through 1876 (the Centennial year). The Catalogue contains information from 1,057 exhibition catalogs, broadsides, newspaper articles, and gallery notices.

The Photograph Archives of the Smithsonian American Art Museum contains over a half million photographs, negatives and slides documenting American art from colonial to contemporary times. As a research and study collection, the Archives constitutes a unique visual record of American art, sometimes providing the only known image of an artwork that has since been altered, damaged or lost.

A list of databases, archives, search engines, publications, and other independent projects from Voices of Contemporary Art (VoCA) whose main focus is the documentation of artist interviews, both online and in print.

The Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN) is a structured resource that can be used to improve access to information about art, architecture, and material culture. Through rich metadata and links, it is hoped that the Getty vocabularies will provide a powerful conduit for research and discovery for digital art history and related disciplines.