Research Guides: Art Research Guide: Criticism and Curatorial Practice

Articles in Online Journals

Alternately, you can search individual subject databases below:

Art & Architecture Source This link opens in a new window Combines content from Art Full Text, Art Index Retrospective (1929-1984), Art & Architecture Complete. Provides access to more than 630 international full-text journals and thousands of images, books and magazine articles. Help Guide
Art, Design and Architecture Collection This link opens in a new window This collection provides full-text access to more than 400 journals and magazines with subject coverage of design, crafts, architecture, philosophy and history. It includes the art and design indexes ARTbibliographies Modern, Design and Applied Arts Index and the International Bibliography of Art.
Canadian Business and Current Affairs (CBCA) Complete This link opens in a new window This database is a longstanding, comprehensive Canadian periodical collection covering multiple subjects and topics, with millions of full-text records. Accessible to readers and researchers at every level, the Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database features a diversified mix of publications, including scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, reports, radio and television transcripts, news, dissertations, and more. Includes Canadian Art Magazine. Help Guide

Ebooks

Browse a sample selection of ebooks from our online collections related to Criticism and Curatorial Practice:

Curating Differently by Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe
Publication Date: 2016-01-15
Curating Differently is a collection of essays that offers critical perspectives on and analyses of the intersections of feminisms, art exhibitions, and curatorial spaces from the 1970s onward. It brings together case studies from Australia, Israel, Europe, and North America that critically account for diverse strategies and interventions in curatorial space.
Curatorial Dreams by Shelley Ruth Butler; Erica Lehrer
Publication Date: 2016-05-30
The volume explores the value of curatorial dreaming as an intellectual exercise in humanities and social science scholarship, presents this way of translating theory into practice as a form of public scholarship, and shows how exhibitions can be a method for conducting reflexive, participatory research and crowd-sourced exhibition criticism.
Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology by Gabriel Menotti
Publication Date: 2019-02-14
Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology delves into the underbelly of cinema in order to explore how images circulate and apparatus crystallize across different material formations. The indisciplinary experience of curators and projectionists provides a means to suspend traditional film studies and engage with the medium as it happens, as a continuing, self-differing mess. From contemporary art exhibitions to pirate screenings, research and practice come together in a vibrant form of media scholarship, built from the angle of cinema's functionaries — a call to reinvent the medium from within.
New Collecting: Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art by Beryl Graham (Editor)
Publication Date: 2014-05-01
The collections of museums, galleries and online art organisations are increasingly broadening to include more new media art. Because new media is used as a means of documenting, archiving and distributing art, and because new media art might be interactive with its audiences, this highlights the new kinds of relationships that might occur between audiences as viewers, participants, selectors, taggers or taxonomisers.
A Pedagogy of Witnessing by Roger I. Simon
Publication Date: 2014-08-18
Explores the curating of “difficult knowledge” through the exhibition of lynching photographs in contemporary museums.
Public Art in Canada: Critical perspectives by Annie Gérin; James S. McLean
Publication Date: 2016-01-29
Public Art in Canada provides an overview of the current debates in the field of public art that are informed by the theories and critical literature of art history, communication studies, cultural studies, sociology, and urban studies. The rigorous essays and original works of art collected in this volume present a compelling demonstration of the strategies, aesthetic and otherwise, used by artists to elicit intellectual, sensual, or emotional responses that can only be obtained through artistic practices in public places.

Search for more ebooks in the following databases:

Ebook Central This link opens in a new window
Full text access to more than 170,000 ebooks representing all academic subject areas. Includes the Academic Complete collection which contains titles from more than 200 leading university and academic presses.
Help Guide
Scholars Portal E-Books This link opens in a new window
Scholars Portal Books provides access to a wide range of scholarly digital texts on a single platform. Most of the content is from academic publishers, and is available to Ontario universities that have purchased ebooks with perpetual access rights. Publishers represented on the platform include Oxford University Press, Emerald, IEEE, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and most Canadian University Presses, including University of Toronto, McGill-Queens, and Presses de l'Université du Québec.
Art & Architecture ePortal This link opens in a new window
A&A ePortal is an authoritative eBook resource that features important works of scholarship in the history of art, architecture, decorative arts, photography, and design. It makes key works published by Yale University Press available in digital format along with texts from a number of other publisher, museum and gallery partners such as MIT Press, The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Art Gallery, and Harvard Museums. This growing collection of more than 200 eBooks provides unlimited simultaneous user access.

Online Reference Books - Encyclopedia and Handbooks

Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Full text articles from over 600 academic encyclopedias, guides, handbooks. Use the concept map for a visual mind-mapping tool.
Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 2nd edition This link opens in a new window
The Encyclopedia surveys the full breadth of critical thought on art, culture, and society, from classical philosophy to contemporary critical theory.
Help Guide
Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
Oxford Art Online offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today. Through a single gateway, users can access and cross-search Oxford’s acclaimed, regularly updated art reference works: the Grove Dictionary of Art and the Benezit Dictionary of Artists.
Includes over 200,000 articles that span ancient to contemporary art and architecture, as well as over 19,000 images of works of art, structures, plans, and artist signatures

Images and Media

Criterion on Demand This link opens in a new window
Criterion on Demand is a streaming video platform that provides access to a growing library of more than 4,000 feature films which including classics, foreign films, new releases and documentaries. The collection comprises films from a number of leading production companies such as 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, Warner Brothers, as well as smaller independent producers such as Mongrel Media.
Help Guide
This collection is licensed for personal research or educational/instructional classroom use only, and films may not be screened for other purposes.
Films on Demand - Master Academic Collection This link opens in a new window
Films on Demand (FOD) is a streaming video service which provides access to more than 15,000 educational videos across all subject areas. It includes content from Films for the Humanities & Sciences, BBC, PBS, Nova, and numerous other educational film producers. Special features allow users to organize and bookmark clips, create and share playlists, personalize folders, and embed clips (register for an account using your OCAD U email address to select and download content).
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National Film Board of Canada (NFB) This link opens in a new window
The National Film Board of Canada's is an award-winning online Screening Room, featuring over 5,000 productions. This collection includes documentaries, animations, experimental films, fiction and interactive works. NFB showcases films that take a stand on issues of global importance that matter to Canadians—stories about the environment, human rights, international conflict, the arts and more.
Help Centre
The National Film Board’s mission is to provide new perspectives on Canada and the world from Canadian points of view, perspectives that are not provided by anyone else and that serve Canadian and global audiences by an imaginative exploration of who we are and what we may be. We will do this by creating, distributing and engaging audiences with innovative and distinctive audiovisual works and immersive experiences that will find their place in classrooms, communities, and cinemas, and on all the platforms where audiences watch, exchange and network around creative content.

Open Access Resources

Open access literature is online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions (1). Accessing these resources do not require an OCAD U account.

1. Suber P. Open access. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press; 2012. 242 p. (MIT Press essential knowledge series).

Artcyclopedia This link opens in a new window
Covers painting, sculpture, photography, video and digital art, architecture, and decorative arts. Search or browse for images by Movement, Medium or Subject.
FAQs
AskART This link opens in a new window
Auction records, biographies, low res. images for thousands of contemporary artists. Many Canadian artists included.
Help Guide
Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
Indexes more than 10,000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.

Books in the Library

Aesthetics Equals Politics by Mark Foster Gage
Call Number: BH301 P64 A36
ISBN: 9780262039437
Publication Date: 2019-04-01
These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics—one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement.
Curatorial Activism by Maura Reilly; Lucy Lippard
Call Number: N72 S6 R34
ISBN: 9780500239704
Publication Date: 2018-04-17
Arranged in thematic sections focusing on feminism, race, and sexuality, Curatorial Activism examines and illustrates pioneering examples of exhibitions that have broken down boundaries and demonstrated that new approaches are possible.
Curatorial Challenges by Malene Vest Hansen (Editor); Anne Folke Henningsen (Editor); Anne Gregersen (Editor)
Call Number: AM7 C86
ISBN: 9780815370062
Publication Date: 2019-03-27
Bringing together international curators and researchers from the fields of art and cultural history, the book provides new research and perspectives on the curatorial process and aims to bridge the traditional gap between theoretical and academic museum studies and museum practices. The book focuses on exhibitions as a primary site of cultural exchange and argues that, as highly visible showcases, producers of knowledge, and historically embedded events, exhibitions establish and organize meanings of art and cultural heritage.
Field Notes on the Visual Arts by Karen Lang
Call Number: N7475 F43
ISBN: 9781783209965
Publication Date: 2019-08-15
Seventy-five scholars, curators, and artists traverse chronology and geography to reveal the meanings and dilemmas of art. Organized under seven major headings—anthropomorphism, appropriation, contingency, detail, materiality, time, and tradition—contributions are written by historians of art, literature, culture, and science, as well as archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, curators, and artists.
Museums and communities : diversity, dialogue and collaboration in an age of migrations by Vivien Golding (Editor); Jen Walklate (Editor)
Call Number: AM7 M856
ISBN: 9781527516083
Publication Date: 2019
This volume presents seventeen essays critically reflecting on the collaborative work of the contemporary ethnographic museum with diverse communities.
Sovereign words: Indigenous art, curation and criticism by Katya García-Antón (Editor); Liv Brissach (Text by); Daniel Browning (Text by); Kabita Chakma (Text by); Megan Cope (Text by); Katya García-Antón (Editor)
Call Number: N6351.2 I53 S67
ISBN: 9789492095626
Publication Date: 2019-05-21
Artists and cultural practitioners from Indigenous communities around the world are increasingly in the international spotlight. As museums and curators race to consider the planetary reach of their art collections and exhibitions, this publication draws upon the challenges faced today by cultural workers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to engage meaningfully and ethically with the histories, presents and futures of Indigenous cultural practices and world-views. Sixteen Indigenous voices convene to consider some of the most burning questions surrounding this field.