Visual Arts

The UCLA Library Special Collections acquires archival collections and primary source materials that reflect Los Angeles’s unique cultural identity. Our current priorities for collecting primary source materials and archives of creative individuals are centered on visual arts, landscape architecture and land art, photography, and artists’ books.

For more information, contact:

Genie Guerard
Curator, Manuscripts Librarian
 310.206.0521
 gguerard@library.ucla.edu

Current Collecting Priorities

• Art educators /artists working from the 1960s to the present –a period of vital political and artistic change that affected L.A. art museums, galleries, and art education.
• Designers: modernist and post-modern, especially those whose work breaks preconceptions and crosses boundaries between design and fine art.
• Landscape architecture and land art (design and installations that amplify awareness of environmental issues and impacts).
• Photography.
• Book arts and artists' books.

Collecting Criteria

• Archival materials that enlighten the creative processes and activities of artists, including sketches and working drawings, journals, correspondence, writings, syllabi.
• Artists and artists collectives whose work has been invisible or under-recognized by art museums, galleries, and critics.
• Visual art forms that bridge definitive labels or disciplinary lines; e.g., fine art and design.
• Landscape architecture that addresses sustainability and environmental impact issues through design intervention.
• Formats may include works of art on paper, exhibit-ready works and photographic prints, concept sketches, professional project documentation, and correspondence -materials that can be housed and preserved by LSC using standard archival materials, and digitized surrogates of oversize renderings.

Out of Scope

• Collections on artists, architects, designers, and art galleries that duplicate the collecting strengths of other local institutions.
• Comprehensive sets of working drawings and renderings by architects.
• Large framed works of art.
• Large three-dimensional models.

More About the Collection

• Visual Arts and artists in Library Special Collections
• Photography and photographers in Library Special Collections
• Portrait of a Jewish Artist: R.B. Kitaj in Text and Image, January - April 2008. Held in conjunction with the Skirball Cultural Center's R.B. Kitaj: Passion and Memory.
• Bonnie Cashin Collection of Fashion, Theater, and Film Costume Design - 1913-2000, January-May 2004
• Igniting Creative Thinking: The Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning, October - December 2017
• Richard Neutra in World War I: Sketches and Watercolors, May - July 2015
• John & Marilyn Neuhart: An Archive of Mid-Century Graphic Design, August 2014 - January 2015
• A Letter from the Renaissance: The Double Soul Ariel Soulé/Simon Toparovsk a contemporary art installation for UCLA Library Special Collections, August - December 2010