Faculty of Arts, Business and Science
Visual Arts
Visual Arts (ART)
AP® Art History Volume 1
Smarthistory
Date: 2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Volume 1 contains all of Smarthistory’s content for numbers 1-47 (Global Prehistory and the Ancient Mediterranean)
Format: PDF
AP® Art History Volume 2
Smarthistory
Date: 2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Volume 2 contains all of Smarthistory’s content for numbers 48 – 98 (Early Europe, Colonial Americas)
Format: PDF
AP® Art History Volume 3
Smarthistory
Date: 2020
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Volume 3 contains all of Smarthistory’s content for numbers 99 – 152 (Later Europe, The Americas)
Format: PDF
AP® Art History Volume 4
Smarthistory
Date: 2020
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Volume 4 contains all of Smarthistory’s content for numbers 153 – 191 (Indigenous Americas, Africa, West and Central Asia)
Format: PDF
AP® Art History Volume 5
Smarthistory
Date: 2020
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Volume 5 contains all of Smarthistory’s content for numbers 192 – 250 (South, East, and Southeast Asia, The Pacific, and Global Contemporary)
Format: PDF
Art Appreciation
Bruce Schwabach (Herkimer Community College)
Date: 2017
Licence: CC BY 4.0
Adaptation of the course Art Appreciation by Lumen Learning covering elements and principles of design, what is art, context and perspective, periods in art history, fine art media and technique, and researching, communicating and evaluating arts information. Note: Some content is not open.
Formats: Pressbook webbook, EPUB, PDF, and more
Art History I
Bruce Schwabach (Herkimer Community College)
Date: 2018
Licence: CC BY 4.0
History of Art Survey course covering from prehistoric art to the Italian Renaissance.
Formats: Pressbooks webbook, EPUB, PDF, and more
Art History II
Bruce Schwabach (Herkimer Community College)
Date: 2018
Licence: CC BY 4.0
Survey course covering from the Proto-Renaissance to Post-Colonialism.
Formats: Pressbooks webbook, EPUB, PDF, and more
Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR)
Edited by Francesca Albrezzi, Michelle Millar Fisher, Parme Giuntini, Naraelle Hohensee, Renee McGarry, Alysha Meloche, Karen Shelby, Kathleen Wentrack, and Mary Zawadzki
Since 2011
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0
Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR) is a peer-populated platform for educators who use visual and material culture in their teaching practice. Home to an evolving and collectively authored repository of open educational content, AHTR serves as a collaborative virtual community for art history instructors at all stages of their academic and professional careers. The website supports learning in the classroom, in the museum, and online by blending traditional and technological approaches to pedagogy. AHTR strives to create engaging materials to support instructors and help them improve students’ understanding of art history and its value.
Format: Online
Art in Revolution: Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture 
Keri Cronin (Brock University)
Date: 2022
Licence: CC BY 4.0
This open access book is the culminating product of an open pedagogy assignment in VISA 2P90: Art in Revolution: Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture taught at Brock University during the Autumn 2021 semester. In this class we explored the ways in which images can shape and challenge dominant ideas and how some of the legacies of 19th-century imagery can have relevance for us today. Each week we worked through a number of case studies intended to dig deeper into issues surrounding art and visual culture from the 19th century. Students were required to submit a response for three of these case studies. These responses were due 2 weeks after the topic was explored class. Students had a choice to submit a written response or an artistic response. This book is a showcase of some of those responses.
This book is part of the Public Domain Core Collection which consists of a collection of public domain texts and a faculty guidebook for using those texts either as standalone resources or as the basis of open assignments.
Format: Pressbooks webbook
Artistic Responses to the Zong Massacre (1781)
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (PennState-University Park) and Robin Mary Bower (Penn State Beaver)
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Suitable for introductory or humanities survey courses, this module offers teaching resources for a unit on the 1781 Zong massacre. It focuses on artistic responses to the massacre and on how the massacre is a representative event of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The module includes artworks and texts that could be used in the classroom, discussion questions and activities, and a culminating writing prompt. This module invites students to reflect on the gaps in the colonial archive and to think about the role of art and literature in shaping understandings of historical events. It also provides students with an opportunity to recognize how the dehumanizing logic of slavery shaped modernity and how black artists challenge its legacy through their work.
Format: Word files downloadable as a .zip file (after completing the “Course Download Questionnaire”)
ArtxHistory
Natalie Coletta (Community College of Rhode Island)
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
A space facilitated by institutions, historians, curators, artists, faculty, and students who are committed to delivering quality scholarship that is accessible, inclusive, and open.
Format: Website
Includes: Timeline, videos, and sound recordings
The Bright Continent: African Art History
Kathy Curnow (Cleveland State University)
Date: 2021
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Through nearly 1000 images, it explores both “traditional” and “contemporary” African art through general discussion and specifics. The first chapter discusses materials, gender, training, and patronage. Chapter Two covers the elements and principles of design, as well as stylistic and contextual analysis. Chapter Three takes a thematic approach to African art, including numerous case studies. Chapter Four explores how religions—traditional, Christian, and Muslim—impact art and how different types of societies—nomadic, small-scale, and kingdom-based—favor varied arts. Appendices on note-taking and research are included. Maps. Note: Some content is not open.
Formats: Pressbooks webbook, EPUB, MOBI, and PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
CanadARThistories
Alena Buis (Langara College), Devon Smither (University of Lethbridge), Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere (OCADU and Queen’s University), Jen Kennedy (Queen’s University), Johanna Amos (Queen’s University), and Sarah E.K. Smith (Western University)
Date: 2022
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
CanadARThistories, a new online course and associated open learning objects, addresses growing concerns around inclusion, regionalism, Indigenization, and internationalization in art history curricula, and is conceived as a response to these ideas. The course highlights the rich visual and material culture of this land through a series of entries, written by subject experts, focusing on the artistic contributions of Indigenous and settler makers. It can be further shaped and reshaped to challenge and redistribute the traditional, chronological, and rigid narratives of Canadian art and to encourage learners to be co-constructors of knowledge.
The course supports a second-year undergraduate survey of art in Canada. Through thematic modules, diverse visual traditions and their intersections will be introduced, as will the changing roles of art in society. The thematic modules and suggested assignments will centre learners, engaging them in active learning practices and the creation of new learning objects and resources, while also developing critical and analytical skills central to the field of art histories.
Formats: Pressbook webbook, EPUB, and PDF
Feminist Adult Educators’ Guide to Aesthetic, Creative and Disruptive Strategies in Museums and Community
Edited Darlene E. Clover, Suriani Dzulkifli, Hannah Gelderman, and Kathy Sanford (University of Victoria)
Date: 2020
Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Note: assigning sections is permitted, but adaptations are not allowed without permission)
This guide brings together a collection of imaginative aesthetic, arts-based and arts-informed methods, strategies and approaches to educating and research across community and institutional settings. This collection is a culmination of our responses to a deeply troubled gendered, colonial, unjust and unsustainable world and the role we know that art and creative practices can play. We believe fully that feminist adult education and research have transformative potentials when they encourage people to think critically as well as creatively, to critique power relations yet remain playful and hopeful, and to act individually yet more importantly, collectively and intentionally to disrupt, destabilize and dismantle continuing gender and other forms of inequity that often make other worlds seem impossible to achieve. Each of these contributions uses critical artistic production and analysis as means to visually educate, aesthetically illuminate, creatively initiate, imaginatively interrogate, performatively investigate, poetically motivate or theatrically activate for a more just, healthy and sustainable world.
Format: PDF
Ruth Ezra, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker (Smarthistory)
Date: 2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This book the Ancient Aegean, including Cycladic, Minoan, and Mycenaean art.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Guide to Ancient Egyptian Art
Ruth Ezra, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker (Smarthistory)
Date: 2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This book covers ancient Egyptian art.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Guide to Ancient Etruscan Art
Ruth Ezra, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker (Smarthistory)
Date: 2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This book covers ancient Etruscan art.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Guide to Ancient Greek Art
Ruth Ezra, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker (Smarthistory)
Date: 2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This book covers ancient Greek art.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Guide to Ancient Near Eastern Art
Ruth Ezra, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker (Smarthistory)
Date: 2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This book covers Sumerian, Akkadian, Neo-Sumerian / Ur III, Babylonian, Assyrian and Persian art.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Guide to Ancient Roman Art
Ruth Ezra, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker (Smarthistory)
Date: 2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This book covers ancient Roman art.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Guide to Byzantine Art
Edited by Evan Freeman and Anne McClanan (Smarthistory)
Date: 2021
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This book covers Byzantine art.
Formats: PDF and Pressbooks webbook
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Guide to Italian Art in the 1300s
Matt Collins, Corey D’Augustine, David Drogin, Holly Flora, Beth Harris, Donna L. Sadler, Joanna Milk Mac Farland, Louisa Woodville, and Steven Zucker (Smarthistory)
Date: 2020
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This book contains all of Smarthistory’s content for Italian art in the 1300s.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Guide to Italian Art in the 1400s
Lisa Ackerman, David Boffa, Joseph Dauben, David Drogin, Lane Eagles, Heather Graham, Sally Hickson, Beth Harris, Heather A. Horton, Rebecca Howard, Elaine Hoysted, Ellen Hurst, Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, Joanna Milk Mac Farland, Susan Nalezyty, Shannon Pritchard, Elizabeth Rodini, Lorenza Smith, Christine Zappella, and Steven Zucker (Smarthistory)
Date: 2020
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
This book contains all of Smarthistory’s content for Italian art in the 1400s.
Format: PDF
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning
Pamela J. Sachant, Peggy Blood, Jeffery LeMieux, and Rita Tekippe (University of North Georgia Press)
Date: 2016
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0
Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning offers a comprehensive introduction to the world of Art. Authored by four faculty members with advanced degrees in the arts, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. It includes over 400 high-quality images illustrating the history of art, its technical applications, and its many uses. Combining the best elements of both a traditional textbook and a reader, it introduces such issues in art as its meaning and purpose; its meaning and purpose; its structure, material, and form; and its diverse effects on our lives.
Format: PDF
Includes: Learning outcomes, key concepts, review questions, and key terms
Reviews: Open Textbook Library
Photography: What, How, Why
Maria Politarhos and Randy Matusow (City College of New York)
Date: 2023
Licence: CC BY 4.0
A beginner’s guide to the process of black and white 35mm analog film photography. Explains the picture-taking process, film development, and darkroom printing.
Format: Pressbooks webbook
Includes: glossary
Smarthistory: The Center for Public Art History
Beth Harris, Steven Zucker, and Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank (Smarthistory)
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Smarthistory unlocks the expertise of hundreds of scholars, making the history of art accessible and engaging to more people, in more places, than any other publisher.
Format: Website
Includes: Videos, sound recordings, essays, books, lessons, and syllabi
A World Perspective of Art Appreciation
Deborah Gustlin and Zoe Gustlin (Evergreen Valley College)
Last updated: September 2020
Licence: CC BY 4.0
Art appreciation is centered on the ability to view art throughout history, focusing on the cultures and the people, and how art developed in the specific periods. You cannot understand art without understanding the culture, their use of materials and sense of beauty. Art is also conveyed by the simple act of creating art for art’s sake. Every person is born with the innate desire to create art and similar to other professions, training is essential in honing skills to produce art.
Formats: Online and PDF
Includes: Glossary, images, and videos
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