Research Guides: Contemporary Art: Books

Art Browsery

Look. Learn. Create.
Visit the Art Browsery on the 4th floor of Cabell Library to see a selection of new visually rich books available for checkout.

Browsing Contemporary Art Books

Try browsing the N500's to N6000's in

Reference (1st floor)
General Collection (3rd floor) &
Oversized section (4th floor)

This area includes:

Major biennial/triennial exhibition catalogs
e.g. Whitney Biennial, Documenta, Venice Biennial (Biennale di Venezia), Carnegie International…
Contemporary or modern art history surveys
Subject-specific surveys
Selected major gallery or museum catalogs

Google Books

Featured Contemporary Art Books

Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art Series
A collaboration between the Whitechapel Gallery in London and MIT Press. " Each volume in the series is a definitive anthology on a particular theme, practice, or concern that is of central significance to contemporary visual culture. The artists and writers included in these books, like the guest editors who conceive them, represent the diversity of perspectives, generations, and voices defining art today."

How to Find Ebooks

To find ebooks in VCU Libraries collections:

Go to the homepage of the library website, library.vcu.edu
Type your search into the yellow bar and click Search.
On the right-hand side of your results page, filter by Material Type (Books) and Show Only (Access Online).
You may also want to filter by Publication Date.
View ebooks available to you through VCU Libraries across various platforms.

Interlibrary Loan

If you can't find the book, article, or dissertation that you want at VCU, try these resources to find what you need.

ILL
Via Interlibrary Loan, you can order books, articles, and various items that VCU does not own.
WorldCat (via FirstSearch)
Consolidated catalog of items held by libraries worldwide.

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VCU access only
RALC
The Richmond Academic Library Consortium is a group of Richmond area libraries which have agreed to extend limited borrowing privileges to students, faculty, and staff of any RALC school.

Theses and Dissertations

Dissertations may be useful sources for researching the state of the field and the bibliographies can often provide
a wealth of new sources.

Dissertations and Theses Full Text (Proquest)
Full text for most dissertations from 1997 to the present. Includes full text for some earlier dissertations, along with over 2.4 million dissertations and theses citations from around the world.

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(1637 - present) VCU access only
Further Resources For Locating Dissertations