Libraries & Special Collections
Students and faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have access to the rich collections of both the museum and the school, which support teaching and learning at SAIC. Our collections include traditional library and archival collections along with nontraditional, interdisciplinary, multimedia and site-specific resources.
Main Collections
The John M. Flaxman Library provides services and resources to encourage critical thinking and creative practices. Library staff collaborate to support teaching, learning, and research across the entire curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Our collections offer access to hundreds of thousands of books, magazines, movies, and sound recordings on a variety of topics that reflect the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art and design, and the pedagogical approaches to education at SAIC.
Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection
The Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection (JFABC) is a rich collection of artists’ publications available in Flaxman Library Special Collections. The JFABC brings together over twelvethousand artists’ publications in all formats and media including: books, zines, multiples, video, and audio recordings, digital works, periodicals, and other unique works of art created by artists of local, national, and international significance. Focusing on materials published from the 1960s to the present, it is complemented by collections of reference works and exhibition catalogs to support in-depth research on artists’ publishing.
Archives & Other Collections
The Flaxman Library Special Collections holds unique primary source materials in the Randolph Street Gallery Archives, Goat Island Archives, Threewalls Gallery Archives, Tony Zwicker Archives, Audiovisual Archives and more. These collections include images, documents, artifacts, audiovisual recordings and other materials which can be made available for research and teaching.
Fashion Resource Center
The Fashion Resource Center is a hybrid research hub for faculty and students within SAIC’s Fashion Department as well as the school’s larger community. Its unique collection of late twentieth and twenty-first century designer garments and accessories represent innovations in construction, materials, and embellishments. As a study collection, visitors are able to handle garments and objects, while referencing the FRC’s extensive visual, print and fabric libraries that support and illuminate the physical garments and accessories. These combined resources provide students and researchers with a creative and educational environment to explore the most progressive achievements in the world of fashion.
Roger Brown Study Collection
The Roger Brown Study Collection is a house museum and archive, located in renowned artist and SAIC alumnus Roger Brown's former home and studio in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. This Artists' Museum features works by Chicago Imagists, self-taught, folk, and international artists, objects from popular culture, costumes, textiles, furniture, travel souvenirs, and a Ford Mustang in the garage. The building and collection function as an objects lab where the SAIC community may engage with an extensive collection of art and artifacts in a 19th-century storefront building.
Textile Resource Center
The Textile Resource Center (TRC), part of SAIC's network of Special Collections, offers hands-on study of global textiles dating from pre-Columbian to contemporary times to the SAIC community. Visitors engage with textiles and books reflecting the broad array of materials, processes, patterns, designs, approaches, and cultures representing innovative historical and contemporary textile practices as well as exploring conceptual approaches in the making of textiles throughout the world.
Video Data Bank
Founded at SAIC in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, Video Data Bank (VDB) is the leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. The VDB’s collection has grown to include the work of more than 600 video artists — from early pioneers of the form to the latest contemporary makers — and 6,000 titles, which are available to the SAIC community for research and study. VDB also promotes the collection to museums, cultural institutions, and educators worldwide through a far-reaching national and international distribution service, providing both opportunities and royalties for artists.
Art Institute of Chicago Museum Research Collections
The Art Institute invites scholars, students, teachers, the curious and inspired, and learners of all sorts to take advantage of our world-class library and archives and make use of our research tools, study rooms, and opportunities to learn.