Contemporary Visual Arts

Resources at Johnson County Community College,
Including Academic Departments, Billington Library, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

Johnson County Community College is home to a world-class contemporary art museum and one of the "Big Ten" college collections of public art:

The college also offers numerous academic programs in the visual arts where individuals are able to study and/or create contemporary art. They include:

Billington Library

  • Magazines and Journals
  • Online access to literally tens of thousands of full-text articles relating to contemporary art is available through various databases including:
  • Specialized Databases
    • Oxford Art Online which includes Grove Art, an electronic version of the respected thirty-four volume dictionary of Art.
    • ArtStor is the electronic repository of hundreds of thousands of images from all periods and genres of art.
    • JSTOR with the full-text of many scholarly art journals.
    • Project Muse containing many additional scholarly journals in full-text.

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  • The Book Collection
    • The Reference Collection contains more than two hundred volumes including, several art encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories, and biographical sources.
    • The Circulating Collection lists several thousand individual monographs about art, hundreds of them about contemporary art and artists. Some subject headings that will lead you into the collection include: Art, Modern; Art American 20th Century; Ceramic 20th Century, etc. Works about individual artists may be located by searching for them as subjects, entering last names first, e.g. Abakanowicz, Magdalena or Bourgeois, Louise or Ferguson, Ken, etc. It is also possible to search by genre, e.g. Postmodernism or Performance Art.

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  • Other Library Services
    • Reference Librarians are on duty all the hours the library is open and we are happy to assist library users in their search for information.
    • Interlibrary Loan is a service for researchers that locates and borrows books and copies of journal articles from libraries throughout the country.
    • The Library's New Collection of circulating DVD's contains many programs relating to contemporary art.

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  • The Internet: Check these websites for more information:
    • AskArt.com The American Artist's Bluebook, a directory of 42,000 American artists with geographic affiliation, biographical information, predominant themes and media, magazine references, links to museum websites with the artist's work in the collection, images, etc.
    • wwar.com World Wide Arts Resources and absolutearts.com are online sources featuring images of over 80,000 works by over 10,000 contemporary artists from around the world.
    • the-artists.org features major modern and contemporary visual artists, each artist with portrait, brief biography, links to articles, essays and interviews.
    • artist-info.com the worldwide contemporary art database, research artists and their exhibitions around the world.
    • Gallery websites: most have images of work by the artists they represent, and some have resumes, artists' statements, and other information. Artists' personal websites: search by "Artist Name" +artist and you may find a personal page with similar information as the gallery site.

 
 
 

Created by Karen Gerety Folk and Andrea Kempf, July 2008 Return to Guides Index