• The Open Arts Archive is a major website and archive, hosted by the Art History Department at the Open University, which provides open access to a wealth of artistic, cultural and educational resources, featuring work from the ancient to the modern period. These resources include seminars, study days, artist interviews, research projects, curator’s talks and exhibition archives produced by a wide national network of museums and galleries in collaboration with the Open University.
• The Art History Department at the Open University is marked out from others in the sector by the scale and nature of its collaborations with national museums and galleries. As practitioners of public, gallery based events we are using the Open Arts Archive to promote knowledge transfer with multiple aims and objectives, benefiting our student constituency, practitioners and students of art and art history and a much broader public audience.
• The Open Arts Archive provides access to a range of educational and artistic resources provided by the Open University and at least fourteen collaborating partners. It also enables cross-fertilisation and knowledge-exchange between partners, and provides portals to activities and archives located within each institution/organisation. The search mechanism allows visitors to the site to search under relevant categories.
• The Open Arts Archive stores recordings of temporal events (including lectures, interviews, exhibitions, seminars and performances) which provide an invaluable resource for students, researchers, artists and interested punters. An e-journal, the Open Arts Journal, which will include contributions from our collaborators, and will be peer-reviewed, is also to be accessed on the site in from early 2012. We also have a Twitter feed (@openartsarchive) and are currently preparing an iPhone application for the site in 2011.
• The Open Arts Archive trails all future events, artist interviews and exhibitions planned with collaborating partners. So far we have recorded events with Tate Modern (since 2002), the V&A, the Walker Art Gallery, Milton Keynes Gallery, the Barbican, Baltic, the Herbert Museum Coventry, the Arts Council Collection, Mima Middlesbrough, the Bowes Museum, Artangel, the National Portrait Gallery, Ruthin Craft Centre and Birmingham Art Gallery. Events are also being planned with Norwich Castle Museum, Leeds Museum and Art Gallery, the National Gallery and Kettle’s Yard. Many critics, curators, art historians and artists have contributed to collaborative events thus far. Events archived so far include Study Days on ‘Avant-Gardes’, ‘Art and Climate Change’, ‘Art and Globalisation’, ‘Constructivism and the Art of Every Day’, ‘Gender and Performance’, ‘Abstraction’, ‘Renaissance Art in the Walker Art Gallery’, ‘What is the Surreal House’, ‘Gauguin and the Myth of the Artist’. Artists who have been involved in interviews and talks so far include Gilberto Zorio, Polly Apfelbaum, Cornelia Parker, Ackroyd and Harvey, the Guerrilla Girls, Bridget Riley, Grayson Perry and Lawrence Weiner, among many others.
• The Open University is a non-profit making institution which continues to be (and strives to be) an exemplar of higher education in the 21st century. We are committed to continue to develop the potential of the internet to enable the dissemination of high-quality research, learning and cultural resources. The Open Arts Archive is an example of our use of web- technology to improve access to and knowledge of art, art practice, art history, exhibitions and outreach programmes across the country. We are also committed to maintain quality control of all recordings which are to be made available on the site.
• The Open Arts Archive is funded by The Open University and The Museums Libraries and Archives Council. The site went live on 27 March, 2010.
Professor Gill Perry
The Open University,
February, 2011
