Art and Art History: Los Angeles and Southern California

The Research Library at the Getty Research Institute focuses on the history of art, architecture, and archaeology with relevant materials in the humanities and social sciences. The range of the collections begins with prehistory and extends to contemporary art.

The special collections consist of rare and unique materials from the 15th century to the present: nearly 50,000 rare books, more than 27,000 single prints and drawings in albums and collections, 800 collections of rare photographs, and more than 12,000 linear feet of manuscripts and archives, as well as optical devices and 20th-century multiples and videos. These diverse resources have been acquired for their research value to art historians and scholars in related fields.

In keeping with LACMA’s commitment to research and education, the Mr. and Mrs. Allan C. Balch Art Research Library maintains an extensive, non-circulating collection of research-level materials that support the museum’s collections and programming. The library holds over 200,000 monographs, exhibition catalogs, journals, periodicals, reference resources, and current auction catalogs, as well as a growing collection of art ephemera files.

Los Angeles Contemporary Archive is an artist-run physical and digital living archive and non-circulating library in which contemporary creative processes are recorded, preserved, and made available to the general public. The collection includes artist books, studio and performance ephemera, audiovisual recordings, and digital media files.

The Archives of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are the repository for LACMA’s institutional records of enduring value; collecting preserving and making them available through the Balch Art Research Library. The Archives also includes a select number of collections relating artists and others who have made important contributions to the Museum.

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries is the largest repository of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) materials in the world. Founded in 1952, ONE Archives currently houses over two million archival items including periodicals, books, film, video and audio recordings, photographs, artworks, organizational records, and personal papers.

The collection of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts comprises more than 45,000 prints, drawings, photographs, and artists' books dating from the Renaissance to the present.

This educational research archive contains more than 90,000 protest graphics, from the 19th Century to the present—including the largest collection of post-World War II posters in the United States.

The poster collection includes more than 42,000 items representing the cinema from some of its earliest attractions to current theatrical releases, and consists primarily of one-sheet posters from Hollywood films as well as examples from independent and foreign productions. Production art materials document more than eighty years of motion picture design.

The Archives today is the world’s pre-eminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America.

The Museum of Modern Art Archives is an internationally recognized research center for modern and contemporary art. The Archives collects, preserves, and makes accessible nearly 90 years’ worth of the Museum’s historical records, 40 years’ worth of MoMA PS1 records, and other primary source documents concerning art and cultural history in the 20th and 21st centuries, including private archives and papers of artists, galleries, dealers, art historians, critics, and others.

Don't discount Wikipedia! Archival repositories (including the Getty Research Institute's Research Library) are updating entries to include links to their archival collections.