ARTstor Subject Guide :: Women's Studies

ARTstor, a non-profit digital library of more than one million images for education and scholarship, provides subject guides on a range of topics. Its Women’s Studies handout highlights content related to the history and depiction of women across world cultures and includes search tips, suggested search terms, and featured collections.

A search for “feminist” in ARTstor turns up 295 results ranging from photographs of the Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S. to stills from Chantal Ackerman’s 1976 film Jeanne Dielman.

ARTstor also works directly with women artists and their estates to present extensive documentation of artists’ oeuvre. Its partnership with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has resulted in a collection of approximately 1,200 images of works by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986). The images in the collection present the entire range of O’Keeffe’s oeuvre, from the artist’s iconic flowers and bleached desert skulls to nudes, landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, as well as her highly innovative abstractions.

Collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art has resulted in approximately 5,800 images of American and European costumes and accessories which were formerly in the Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Museum Costume collection was established in 1902 and is the world’s most comprehensive collection of American fashion from the late 19th to mid-20th century. Highlights of the collection include the definitive collected works of costumes and patterns by Charles James, the British-born designer who was a major force in New York fashion in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as many examples of Belle Époque fashion.

ARTstor is currently collaborating with Judy Chicago to share a collection that will consist of images depicting The Dinner Party (1974-1979), along with individual works and other collaborative projects from throughout Chicago’s career, such as the Birth Project (1980-1985), Powerplay (1982-1987), and recent works in glass. Chicago (b.1939), an artist, author, feminist, and educator whose career spans four decades, helped to initiate a worldwide feminist art movement. Her most well-known work, The Dinner Party, is an icon of feminist art and was executed with the participation of hundreds of volunteers.