library

The Clark Library's Special Collections comprise an eclectic range of materials that span several centuries and represent every kind of art from many areas of the world.

Since 2007, the Clark library has had an ongoing program to document as comprehensively as possible the activity of sanctioned national, collateral, and special project participants of the Venice Biennale. The collection includes catalogs, brochures, DVDs, flash drives, press kits, and other physical ephemera, digitized material, and an extensive web archive of pavilion websites, blogs, videos, and social media accounts in the Venice Biennale on the Web collection. The collection stands at over 2,500 physical items, 10,500 digital items, and almost 3 terabytes of web archived data.

A thoughtful and thought-provoking artist, photographer, filmmaker, writer, and teacher, Alan Sekula amassed over decades a library that informed his prolific body of work and reflected his wide-ranging personal and professional interests in such topics as contemporary art and photography, social justice, economic disparities, consumerism, the history of the workers’ movement, and the destruction of natural and built environments. In 2015, the Clark library acquired the 15,000-volume library through the generous gift of the artist’s widow, art historian and professor Sally Stein. The collection, as shelved in the Manton Research Center Reading Room, is both an archive that maintains Sekula’s organization of the material in his personal and work spaces and a visually stunning art installation that allows varying levels of interpretation of format and content.
Use the link below to explore the collection via the library’s online catalog. Materials with the location “Rare Book Room” can be made available on demand. Materials with the location “Reading Room” are in an area that can be seen but not accessed by the public; however, most of these titles are commonly available in other libraries.  
Search the library catalog list of all titles.

The David A. Hanson Collection of the History of Photomechanical Reproduction spans all aspects of photographic images produced in printer’s ink, from the first heliographic etchings in 1826 through the perfection of three-color printing in the early twentieth century. All major intaglio, planotype, and relief printing methods are represented. The collection includes examples of virtually all categories of photographically illustrated books, reports, accounts, treatises, catalogues, pamphlets, and ephemera.
View digitized images from this collection.
Search the library catalog's list of all titles in this collection.