The curated list provided here is intended to facilitate faculty selection of an OER text in lieu of a commercial text. There are textbooks in this list as well as other resources. There are also museums in this collection.
The following courseware includes resources copyrighted and openly licensed by third parties under a Creative Commons license. Click "Licenses and Attributions" at the bottom of each page for copyright information and license specific to the material on that page.
This textbook, designed specifically for C-ID ARTH 110 and produced by a team of art historians working within the CCC system, curates scholarly resources into a coherent textbook with chapter introductions, a comprehensive glossary, and explanatory editors’ notes.
Art history studies culture and people’s development through time using multiple art disciplines. Visual arts are one of the oldest forms of communication between humans and the fundamental beliefs of their culture.
Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning offers a comprehensive introduction to the world of Art. Authored by four USG faculty members with advance degrees in the arts, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. It includes over 400 high-quality images illustrating the history of art.
Most Museums allow educators to use their images for free. These are representative of the art available. Please check the copyright for images at these museums.
This was developed by Lumen Learning and has a glossary. All modules/resources are available under CC0 (No rights reserved) which means the text is in the public domain by the author's choice. Please check each page to verify the type of CC licensing for each module/resource.
This is a series of courses. However, any third-party materials featured within it are used with permission but check the copyright on those third-party materials, they may be copywritten.
A begging guide for a studio Ceramics course with breakdowns of studio equipment, methods of making, imagery and text breakdowns and demonstrations, and assignments.
Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR) is a peer-populated platform for art history teachers. AHTR is home to a constantly evolving and collectively authored online repository of art history teaching content including, but not limited to, lesson plans, video introductions to museums, book reviews, image clusters, and classroom and museum activities.
ArtxHistory is an education resource of commonly available images, videos, mini-lectures and scholarship of the decades which influenced or defined the mid-century through contemporary art.
Image Manipulation for Graphic Artists is an open source textbook formatted using Google Slides so that it can be embedded into the Canvas (digital) version of our own courses.
Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online is a free and open-access online platform of digital resources to aid the teaching of Islamic art, architecture, and visual culture. It has received financial support from UM’s Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC), through a grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and UM’s History of Art Department.
Reviewer’s note: It is unfortunate that this textbook is branded as AP, as the level is appropriate for college learners, but the label might be off-putting.