Research Guides: The Arts in Shanghai: Fine Arts, Visual Arts, and Architecture: Articles & Databases

Journals in our collection

ArtAsiaPacific
Promotes fresh dialogue on the contemporary visual arts of the Asia/Pacific region & provides analysis & comment on the contemporary issues & art practices of the region.
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ISSN 1039-3625

Available in print and electronically
Artforum international
An international contemporary art magazine covering sculpture, painting, mixed media, and installation works, as well as architecture, music, and popular culture. Includes artist interviews and reviews of individual artists and/or galleries; reviews of film, books, and music; and an international arts calendar. For collectors and curators of contemporary art and general audiences with an interest in art.
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ISSN 1086-7058

Available in print and online
Art in America
Features articles on major achievements & events throughout the art world, particularly in painting, sculpture, photography and prints.
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ISSN 0004-3214

Available in print and electronically
ARTNews
Founded in 1902, ARTnews is the oldest and most widely circulated art magazine in the world. ARTnews reports on the art, personalities, issues, trends and events shaping the international art world. In clear, well-crafted language that is as comprehensible to the novice as it is to the expert, the magazine offers a lively, provocative, and visually stimulating package that informs as well as entertains with news dispatches from a worldwide network of correspondents, hard-hitting investigative reports, criticism, and opinion.
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ISSN 0004-3273

Available in print and electronically
Contemporary artists (當代美術家 Dang dai mei shu jia)
Leap (艺术界)
LEAP is the bilingual art magazine of contemporary China. Published six times a year in Chinese and English, it presents a winning mix of contemporary art coverage and cultural commentary from the cutting edge of the Chinese art scene.

Available electronically. Print copies available at the Shanghai Public Library
Yishu: Journal of contemporary Chinese art.
The first English language journal to focus on Chinese contemporary art and culture. Each bi-monthly issue features scholarly essays on topical issues, interviews with artists and curators, conference proceedings, and critical commentary on exhibitions and books.
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ISSN 1683-3082

Available in print and online
Modern Sketch (1934-1937)
A digital and comprehensive archive of issues from this rare Chinese periodical. Modern Sketch (Shi Dai Man Hua)for 1934 to 1937 contains caricatures, cartoons, and humorous writing that defined the golden era of Shanghai’s comic art during the mid-1930’s.

In a related digital collaboration, John A. Crespi, Colgate's Luce Associate Professor of Chinese, provides scholarly analysis combined with full-color, high-resolution images from Modern Sketch at MIT’s Visualizing Cultures.

Art-Specific Databases

Artists of the World Online
Artists of the World Online contains reference works on artists' biographies. It includes content from Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon Online (AKL) and essays on visual artists, architects, and designers active from antiquity through the present day. Scroll down on database homepage to access PDF version of abbreviation key.
Art and Architecture Source
Art & Architecture Source is an essential research database for peer-reviewed, full-text art and architecture journals with coverage dating back to 1914. Subjects include fine, decorative, and commercial art, as well as architecture, landscape, urban planning, and architectural design. With strong international coverage, including periodicals published in French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch, it offers hundreds of full-text art journals, magazines, and books, plus detailed indexing and abstracts, and thousands of images. It also includes the contents of Art Index Retrospective (1929-1984), formerly called Art Source.
Commercial Pattern Archive (CoPA)
The Commercial Pattern Archive database (CoPA) provides a unique tool for researchers and designers to recreate or date clothing from 1868 to 2000. The cornerstone of CoPA is the Betty Williams Collection. Betty Williams, a theatrical costumer in New York City, pioneered research on commercial patterns in the early 1980s. The Betty Williams Collection is now housed at the University of Rhode Island and is combined with the URI and Joy Spanabel Emery Collections in the Commercial Pattern Archive in URI Library Special Collections.
This resource requires a login. The username is: nyulibs and the password is UCRMBx2
Index to 19th Century American Art Periodicals
Index to 19th Century American Art Periodicals indexes the articles, reviews, illustrations, poems and advertisements found in 42 fine art periodicals published in the United States during the 19th century.
ProQuest Art, Design and Architecture Collection
A comprehensive survey of current publications in the fields of visual and applied arts, the Art, Design & Architecture Collection includes ProQuest's specialist indexes ARTbibliographies Modern (ABM) (covering modern and contemporary art), Design & Applied Arts Index (DAAI) (for all aspects of design and crafts), and International Bibliography of Art (IBA) (covering scholarship on western art history), together with a complementary collection of current full-text journals from ProQuest's Arts & Humanities Database.

General & Multidisciplinary Databases

Searching in General/Multidisciplinary Databases:

These are powerful, massive databases which cover research materials in a wide variety of topics. Although helpful for interdisciplinary research projects, try using careful search strategies and Boolean search terms to get focused, manageable results.

Arts & Humanities Database
Arts & Humanities Database features hundreds of titles covering Art, Architecture, Design, History, Philosophy, Music, Literature, Theatre and Cultural Studies.
JSTOR
JSTOR provides access to scholarly journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to journal articles, users can access book chapters, ebooks, and primary source documents.
EBSCO Discovery Service
EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) encompasses articles in databases across many disciplines. Users can locate peer reviewed articles, videos, audio files, images, and more from a range of subjects.

Full download of DRM-protected ebooks requires EBSCO account registration and Adobe Digital Editions.
Note: NYU Libraries is retiring EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) in June 2025. The Catalog Search replaces EDS as the tool for searching across multiple publishers’ databases and platforms. You can also use EBSCOhost to search across the full set of EBSCO-only databases.
ProQuest Central
ProQuest Central is a large, multidisciplinary database with over 11,000 titles, with over 8,000 titles in full-text. It serves as the central resource for researchers at all levels in all markets. Over 160 subjects areas are covered extensively in this product including business and economics, health and medical, news and world affairs, technology, social sciences and more.

Searching Newspapers & Popular Periodicals

Newspapers can also be a valuable source of information on events in the art world, too! In particular, this can be useful for finding reviews of art shows and trends in the art world

Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
Global Newsstream
Global Newsstream contains the html full text of hundreds of U.S. and international news sources. Coverage dates vary from title to title, but generally span the most recent five to ten years.
Access World News
Access World News provides the html full text and, for some titles, the pdf "as printed" visual representation, of articles from a variety of national and international news sources, including newspapers, digital-native news websites, television and radio transcripts, blogs, college and university newspapers, journals, magazines, and some audio and video. Most international titles are English language. Dates of coverage vary from title to title, but primarily span the late 20th century to present.
Duxiu
Duxiu (Du xiu, 读秀) is a comprehensive index to Chinese books and articles from periodicals, newspapers, theses, and conference proceedings. Full text is available for some of the items.