DIGITAL LAB

The Digital Lab of the School of Art consists of Macintosh®-based facilities for graduate students of the School from all areas of study and undergraduates. Each department has its own computer lab for graduate work, and there is an undergraduate graphic design lab as well. For general and classroom use there is a public lab that includes scanners and printers. The graduate facilities include Epson 7600 wide-format printers, 11×17 scanners, and additional equipment based on the needs of the students in the department. Supplemental equipment includes laser printers, video editing stations, and slide scanners. Digital projectors and equipment are available for overnight loan; however, all students who work digitally are expected to have their own portable FireWire hard drive.

All computer facilities are available to students twenty-four hours a day; departmental access is required for some labs. The labs are supported by digital technology faculty members and have individual student monitors as well.

DIGITAL MEDIA CENTER FOR THE ARTS

The Digital Media Center for the Arts (DMCA) at 149 York Street is a multimedia facility that was created to establish connections between traditional art and the computer age. The Center was conceived by and serves the several arts departments and institutions at Yale. Beyond providing classroom and laboratory facilities, the DMCA provides instruction and equipment that allow faculty and students in all arts disciplines to discover and create in the diverse fields of electronic media. Advanced technologies, staff expertise, and interdisciplinary approaches make the DMCA an ideal auxiliary for Yale’s arts community.

RALPH MAYER LEARNING CENTER

Through the generosity of the late Bena Mayer, a painter and the widow of Ralph Mayer, author of The Artist’s Handbook of Techniques and Materials, The Painter’s Craft, and A Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques, archives related to her husband’s research and writings have been given to the Yale University School of Art for the establishment of the Ralph Mayer Learning Center. The purpose of the Center is to support research and writing on the use of materials, and for the study of artists’ techniques in the field of drawing and painting. A seminar entitled “Techniques,” which has been part of the curriculum of the Yale School of Art for over fifty years, is augmented by the Center.

Original Mayer manuscripts and memorabilia are included in the collection of the Yale University Arts Library and available on a noncirculating basis to members of the Yale community and the public. The School offers to answer in writing inquiries regarding the use of artists’ materials. Requests for information about this service should be addressed to Richard Benson, Dean, Yale University School of Art, Ralph Mayer Learning Center, PO Box 208339, New Haven CT 06520-8339.

YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY

The Yale University Art Gallery at 1111 Chapel Street is the oldest university art museum in the Western hemisphere, having been founded in 1832 when the patriot-artist John Trumbull gave more than one hundred of his paintings to Yale. Since then its collections have grown to number over eighty thousand objects from all periods of the history of art from ancient Egyptian times to the present.

Highlights include masterpieces by van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Picasso, Homer, and Eakins, as well as the distinguished Société Anonyme collection of early modernist art. There are notable collections of Etruscan and Greek vases; early Italian paintings; African art; and Chinese paintings, ceramics, bronzes, and textiles; as well as a comprehensive collection of master prints, drawings, and photographs. The Art Gallery’s collection of American paintings and decorative arts is considered one of the finest in the world.

The main building of the Yale Art Gallery, designed by the distinguished American architect Louis I. Kahn, was completed in 1953. Although it was the first modern-style building on the Yale campus, it harmonizes with Egerton Swartwout’s Italian gothic Art Gallery of 1928, with which it is connected on the first and third floors.

The Kahn building will be closed for renovation until late 2006. The hub of the museum’s activities will be the adjacent Swartwout building, housing Yale’s world-renowned collections of American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts, as well as a selection of masterworks from all other departments.

While focusing on its role as a center for scholarly research in the history of art and museum training for graduate and undergraduate students at Yale, the Art Gallery also maintains an active schedule of public education programming.

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART

Presented to the University by Paul Mellon (Class of 1929), the Yale Center for British Art at 1080 Chapel Street houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts reflects the development of British art, life, and thought from the Elizabethan period onward. On view are masterpieces by leading artists such as William Hogarth, J. M. W. Turner, Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, William Blake, and Richard Parkes Bonington, as well as major figures from Europe and America who lived and worked in Britain. British sporting art, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Camden Town School, and the Bloomsbury Group are also well represented, together with more recent twentieth-century artists.

One of the Center’s greatest treasures is the building itself. Opened to the public in 1977, the Yale Center for British Art is the final building designed by internationally acclaimed American architect Louis I. Kahn. The structure integrates the dual functions of study center and gallery while providing an environment for works of art that is appropriately simple and dignified. It stands across the street from Kahn’s first major commission, the Yale University Art Gallery (1953).

The Center offers a year-round schedule of exhibitions and educational programs, including films, concerts, lectures, tours, and special events. It also provides numerous opportunities for scholarly research, such as residential fellowships. Academic resources of the Center include a reference library of 20,000 volumes, accessible on Orbis; a photo archive of 200,000 photographs, with a computerized index; a conservation laboratory; and a study room for examining prints, drawings, rare books, and manuscripts from the collection.

An affiliated institution in London, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, awards grants and fellowships, publishes academic titles, and sponsors Yale’s first credit-granting undergraduate study abroad program, Yale-in-London.

LIBRARIES

The Arts Library, which was established soon after 1868, will be temporarily housed at 270 Crown Street from June 2006 until August 2008, when it will return to the first floor at 180 York Street. It contains more than 100,000 volumes on architecture, painting, sculpture, graphic design, urban planning, and the history of art and architecture. It serves as the working library for the schools of Art and Architecture, the History of Art department, and the Yale University Art Gallery, and as adjunct library for the Yale Center for British Art. The collection offers basic reference works, monographs, exhibition catalogues, and other scholarly works in the fields of art and architecture; periodicals, including nearly 500 current subscriptions; and a growing suite of networked digital library resources.

Sterling Memorial Library contains approximately 90,000 additional volumes on art and architecture, as well as related collections in such fields as archaeology, anthropology, film, history, and literature.

The Arts Library Visual Resources Collection, on the first floor of Street Hall, contains approximately 325,000 slides, 200,000 mounted photographs, and a growing collection of several thousand digital images of cultural heritage objects.

Also organizationally part of the Arts Library is the Arts of the Book Collection at Sterling Memorial Library, which has rich collections on the book arts, fine printing, typography, and book illustration. The Classics Library at Phelps Gate and the Drama Library in the University Theater complex are also affiliated organizationally with the Arts Library.

The Yale University Library consists of the central campus libraries—Sterling Memorial Library, Cross Campus Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Seeley G. Mudd Library—and thirty school and departmental libraries, as well as a Library Shelving Facility in Hamden, Connecticut. Among the top-ranked university libraries in the country, the Yale University Library contains more than 10,800,000 volumes. Students have access to the collections and services of all the Yale libraries.

The Arts Library provides instructional and reference services in art and architecture. Its staff is eager to assist students and faculty in exploring the rich library resources of Yale University.