Tappan and Tisch Halls

In Tappan Hall there are student mailboxes, locker facilities for storing coats and other belongings, graduate student carrels in the Fine Arts Library (see below), and a departmental study area with one PC and one Macintosh computer. Nearby Tisch Hall houses a graduate student office and meeting area, with desks for Graduate Student Instructors. In addition, graduate students have full access to the excellent equipment and resources available at computer clusters elsewhere on campus. Equipment and training are available so that graduate students may produce slides and digitized images needed for seminar papers and other needs.

Libraries

The Fine Arts Library in Tappan Hall is the major art history library on campus. It contains over 65,000 volumes, covering most areas of Western, Near Eastern, African and Asian art history; it is especially rich in scholarly periodicals. Other major library collections are housed in the Graduate Library (the central University research library), the Undergraduate Library, the Media Union (with strong collections in architectural history and modern art), the Clements Library (Americana), the Bentley Historical Library (Michigan history), and the Anthropology Library. There are also helpful specialized collections at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the Museum of Art. Special mention should also be made of the Asia Library and the Rare Book Room in the Graduate Library, which house an extremely rich collection of manuscripts, incunabula, seal impressions, and important illustrated books, facsimiles, and reference catalogues. The Papyrology Department of the Graduate Library is unparalleled in the western hemisphere.
A computer-based cataloguing system, MIRLYN (Michigan Independent Research Library Network), allows access to all the University library collections through on-line searches, which also can include bibliographic materials, recent periodical literature, and selected arts and humanities indices.

The Eleanor S. Collins Visual Resources Collections

The Department's collection is one of the largest in the country, containing over 795,000 images. These include 325,000 35-mm slides, 30,000 lantern slides, 250,000 study photographs and reproductions, and over 190,000 archival research images. The collection is used mainly to support teaching, with selected slides, photographs, and reproductions available as study material. Available for special research and reference within the collection are several photographic archives: Italian art from the I Tatti Photographic Archives; the Sinai Archive of materials from archaeological programs at the monastery of Saint Catherine; the Romanesque Photographic Archive; the Courtauld Institute Illustration Archive; and the Asian Art Archives. The Asian Art Archives, containing over 200,000 photographs and slides of Far Eastern, South Asian, and Southeast Asian art, is an especially valuable tool for graduate students pursuing work in the Asian field. In addition, the Department is adapting to the new technology of digital imaging. To date, the collection has approximately 12,000 images and 60,000 text records in its electronic database.

Campus Museums

The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. This museum houses collections of ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Near Eastern art, and material culture from prehistory through medieval times. A large portion of these collections derives from important excavations undertaken by the University in the early twentieth century. Additionally, the museum is home to excavation records and to an important archive of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs. The curators at the Kelsey are all regular faculty members of History of Art, Classical Studies, or Near Eastern Studies. The active exhibitions program provides students with opportunities for collaboration with students in all phases. Similarly, the collections, excavations, and other funded research projects of the curators are a constant site of student engagement and professional training. For more information, please see https://www.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey.

The University of Michigan Museum of Art. The Museum of Art is one of the major university museums in America and one of the principal research facilities available to the graduate student. It houses an excellent teaching collection, containing over 15,000 works in all media with special strengths in works on paper. Its holdings in western art span the centuries from the Middle Ages to the present. It has representative and wide-ranging collections of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian art, with growing collections of African art and Islamic art. Its active exhibition program presents ca. 15 exhibitions each year, many of them organized by UMMA with faculty and student involvement, and combines special exhibitions with displays exploring aspects of the collections. UMMA also maintains an active publications program, including typically 2-3 major exhibition catalogues each year and the Bulletin of the Museums of Art & Archaeology, an important vehicle for graduate student and faculty publication. UMMA staff work closely with our faculty to provide course support and opportunities for special research for both graduate and undergraduate students. (note: UMMA is closed for a major building and restoration project, and projected to reopen in early 2009. Their temporary exhibition space is at 1301 S. University.)

The Anthropology Museum obtained its earliest acquisitions from the Wilkes Expedition to the Pacific in 1838-42. Many significant collections were acquired by Joseph Beele Steere in the 1870s through the 1890s during his many famous trips to the Amazon, the Andes, the south Pacific and Southeast Asia. His Philippine expeditions began a long and continuing tradition of research in that area. In later years collections were acquired from many sources by museum staff and through the generous donations of private citizens. The Museum of Anthropology is organized into seven research divisions also known as ranges. The divisions are: Great Lakes Archaeology, North American Archaeology, Asian Archaeology, Ethnology, Physical Anthropology, New World High Civilizations, and Old World High Civilizations. There are also four research laboratories for: Ethnobotany, Pollen Analysis, Zooarchaeology, and Geology.

Other Museums in the Area

Several major museums are located within an hour's drive of Ann Arbor. The Detroit Institute of Arts contains important collections in almost every area of Western and Asian art as well as the arts of Africa and early America. Its library, conservation department, permanent and temporary exhibitions, and ample schedule of films and lectures make it an important facility for students in the History of Art. The Toledo Museum of Art is one of the richest municipal museums in the country, housing major collections of ancient, Renaissance, Baroque, and modern art as well as an encyclopedic collection of ancient through contemporary glass. The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn houses one of the country's largest collections of the arts and crafts of America. The Cranbrook Academy and Museum in Bloomfield Hills is an important regional locus for art exhibitions and thematic programming.

Further afield from Ann Arbor are the outstanding collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the  Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.