Conducted by the American Folklife Center in 1977, the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project survey sought to "assess and document the status of ethnic art traditions in more than twenty ethnic communities in Chicago." Out of this survey grew a collection hosted by the Library of Congress containing over 1,000 visual artworks (photographs, prints, and drawings), manuscripts, film and video works, and audio...

University of Chicago alumnus and long-time Hyde Park resident Leon H. Lewis was a great lover of jazz and he spent many an evening in the jazz clubs of the South Side. As part of the Chicago Jazz Club Project, several employees of the Chicago Jazz Archive at the University of Chicago worked with Lewis to create a map of Chicago's jazz clubs from roughly 1915 to the early 1940s. Visitors can view...

Anne C. Goodrich went to China as a missionary in 1931, and she soon found herself fascinated by the world of the paper gods she encountered in and around Beijing. Goodrich wanted to learn more about the world of these local folk religions and she began purchasing a great deal of these materials as they became available. Many years later she would publish a three-volume study on the subject. After...

Several scholars and collectors, such as Langdon Warner and Lawrence Sickman, have presented their extensive East Asian rubbings collection to Harvard University, and these materials have remained a valuable resource for decades. Persons working in the fields of Chinese history, biography, epigraphy, calligraphy, and fine arts have come to Cambridge to consult the rubbings, and now many of them...

A curtain of glowing white nylon that winds across the brown earth until it disappears where the land meets the blue sky - this is what images of Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76, an installation artwork created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude depict. Running Fence, stretched 24 1/2 miles through Sonoma and Marin counties in California to end in the Pacific Ocean, was the...

The Chrysler Museum of Art is based in Norfolk, Virginia and its mission was greatly enhanced by a major gift from Walter Chrysler, Jr. many decades ago. Today, the museum holds one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of glass in the world, as well as galleries of ancient art, American painting and sculpture, and more. Visitors to the marvelous website can learn more about the museum...

The Cincinnati Art Museum has a long and storied history, and their collection includes works by a variety of artistic masters, old and new. This website provides interested parties with access to items from their permanent collection, courtesy of a grant from the Harold C. Schott Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The works here are organized into ten different themes,...

This website from the National Portrait Gallery presents "America's most profound national experience" through the Smithsonian Institute's extensive portrait collections. Readers who have a Flash plug-in will likely enjoy the opening movie, which features a jaunty civil war era tune played on penny whistle and snare, along with a series of telling portraits from the era. From the homepage, readers...

As the United States continues to explore the legacy of the Civil War, this timely collection adds to the conversation. The University of Alabama Libraries Digital Collection has created this collection of printed music created between 1861 and 1865 in the Confederacy. During its short-lived existence, the Confederacy produced more than 7,000 books, pamphlets, broadsides, maps, pieces of sheet...

In 1963, the Universite de Moncton opened in New Brunswick, Canada. The university's visual art program ushered in a contemporary art movement in the region of Acadia. This online exhibit by the Virtual Museum of Canada is dedicated to twenty prominent Arcadian contemporary artists, including printmakers, sculptors, photographers, and painters. For each featured artist, visitors can read a short...