A History of Island Press
The Kemper Art Museum holds a comprehensive collection of the artistic production from Island Press, the College of Art's collaborative print workshop, thanks to a longstanding arrangement between the Press and the Museum. Artists whose Island Press work is included in the Museum's collection include Hung Liu, Annette Lemieux, Juan Sanchez, and Nick Cave. With the Museum's spring 2000 exhibition Island Press: Innovation at Washington University as a starting point, the Museum undertook a major cataloging project that culminated in the creation of a website documenting the artists and artwork of Island Press. The website includes a short history of Island Press, biographies of the artists who have worked there, and images of the artwork created.
Women Artists in the Washington University Collections
The Women Artists website was the result of a 2001–2002 collaboration between students, faculty, and staff, using funds from the Sam Fox Arts Center (now the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts). It highlights the work of women artists represented in the Museum's collection and the University Library's Special Collections, and includes artist biographies, artwork information, and images.
Carlson French Caricature Collection
In 2000 the Kemper Art Museum received a gift of over 450 19th-century French caricatures, which were given by Eric G. Carlson in honor of professor Elizabeth C. Childs. The collection includes woodcuts, engravings, and lithographs from publications such as La Caricature and Le Charivari, and from the series Au Bal Masqué, Actualités, and Voyages et Voyageurs, among dozens of others. Childs, an expert on 19th-century French caricature, wrote her dissertation on Daumier, whose work is represented in the collection, and more recently authored the book Daumier and Exoticism: Satirizing the French and the Foreign (2004).
The Washington University community can access Caricature Collection information and images through Artstor.
University Archives: Museum-related holdings
Washington University Archives holds two small collections of materials relating to the history of the Museum. For a finding aid to records (1960–2004) of the Gallery of Art (now Kemper Art Museum), click here. For the guide to older records, including the records of the School of Fine Arts and the Saint Louis Museum of Fine Arts, click here.
University Archives are available for use by appointment only.