The “Arts of the United States,” a joint project between the Lamar Dodd School of ArtUniversity of Georgia, the University of Georgia Libraries and Yale University Libraries, contains more than 4,000 images. Artstor has collaborated with the partners to publish the entire collection.

The collection represents American architecture from Colonial to Modern, design and decorative arts, graphic arts, Native American art objects and artifacts, more than 1,200 paintings, photography, sculpture and other media – selected by experts. In slide form the collection has been widely used in teaching American Studies for many years.

In 1956, Lamar Dodd, then chairman of the University of Georgia School of Art, initiated the “Study of Arts of the United States” with funding from the Carnegie Corporation. The objective was to employ technology to create an image collection that would support the teaching of American art and history. Dodd recruited an advisory board of six scholars, who in turn enlisted 17 specialists to select monuments, paintings, objects,and other representations of culture and the arts in the United States. Dodd then commissioned new color photography of the objects, dispersed among leading museums, archives, and libraries. Two sets of transparencies were made, one for slides for educational distribution, and the second for the archives. When distribution of the Carnegie slides ceased, both the archival and production sets of negatives and their distribution rights reverted to the University of Georgia. The archival set was digitized for distribution within Artstor. The libraries of the University of Georgia and Yale University have jointly prepared online cataloging information for each image.