Digital Labs
The Digital Labs of the School of Art (http://art.yale.edu/DigLab) consist of Mac-based facilities for undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the School. Each area of graduate study has its own computer lab for graduate work, and there are computers available for all-school use as well. For general course use there is a computer classroom with attached scanners and networked printers.
Painting and printmaking students have an Epson printer set up for digital printing and transparencies for printmaking processes. Sculpture students have both monochrome and color laser printers as well as video editing stations. Graphic design students can use Ricoh laser printers for proofs, smaller work, and books, and HP Designjet wide-format printers and a Ricoh engineering plotter for poster production. Photography students have an Imacon scanner for digitally scanning negatives and Epson printers for digital photo printing. All-school facilities include Ricoh laser printing, HP Designjet wide-format inkjet printing, and Dremel 3-D printers.
The graduate facilities include 11 x 17 scanners and additional equipment based on the needs of the students in the department, including laser printers, PC computers, and slide scanners.
Digital projectors, cameras, displays, audio recording, a black-box production studio, and other equipment are available for short-term loan during the academic year. All students who work digitally are expected to have their own portable hard drive to store personal work.
All computer facilities are available to students twenty-four hours a day; departmental access is required for some labs. The labs are supported by digital technology team members and have individual student monitors as well.
Center for Collaborative Arts and Media
The Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at 149 York Street is an interdisciplinary arts research center that fosters critical inquiry at the intersections of visual art, design, film, music/sound, performance, and computer science. Its programs and faculty-led staff promote interdisciplinary inquiry, discourse, production, and research across expanding fields of arts practice. The center, which is open to all Yale students, has a motion studio equipped with a state-of-the-art 1,400-square-foot motion capture analysis system, an eight-channel interactive projection system, and an integrated XR experience platform; a black-box production studio equipped with various video and audio recording instruments, studio lighting, green screen, and an integrated XR experience platform; a variety of creative suites for individual use with such resources as video and audio recording instruments, animation copy stands and drawing tablets, mixers and editing instruments, integrated XR production tools, and powerful computing resources equipped to handle most 2-D and 3-D computer graphics needs; and a media lab featuring a variety of fabrication resources including wide-format inkjet printing, direct-to-substrate UV printing, 3-D prototyping, laser-cutting, vinyl-cutting, drawing tablets, scanners, and traditional bookbinding instruments.
Ralph Mayer Learning Center
Through the generosity of the late Bena Mayer, a painter and the widow of Ralph Mayer, author of The Artist’s Handbook of Techniques and Materials, The Painter’s Craft, and A Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques, archives related to her husband’s research and writings have been given to the Yale School of Art for the establishment of the Ralph Mayer Learning Center. The purpose of the center is to support research and writing on the use of materials, and for the study of artists’ techniques in the field of drawing and painting. A course on materials and techniques, part of the curriculum of the Yale School of Art for more than fifty years, is augmented by the center.
Original Mayer manuscripts and memorabilia are included in the collection of the Haas Family Arts Library and are available on a noncirculating basis to members of the Yale community and the public. The School offers to answer in writing inquiries regarding the use of artists’ materials. Requests for information about this service should be addressed to Samuel Messer, Associate Dean, Yale School of Art, Ralph Mayer Learning Center, PO Box 208339, New Haven CT 06520-8339.
Yale University Art Gallery
The Yale University Art Gallery is the oldest college art museum in the United States, having been founded in 1832 when the patriot-artist John Trumbull gave more than one hundred of his paintings to Yale College. Since then its collections have grown to more than 250,000 objects ranging in date from ancient times to the present. In addition to its world-renowned collections of American paintings and decorative arts, the gallery is noted for outstanding collections of Greek and Roman art, including artifacts from the ancient Roman city of Dura-Europos; collections of early Italian paintings; the Société Anonyme Collection of twentieth-century European and American art; modern and contemporary art and design; Asian art; African art; art of the ancient Americas; and Indo-Pacific art.
In December 2012 the gallery completed a comprehensive expansion and renovation project. The expanded museum unites all three buildings—the landmark Louis Kahn building (1953), the Old Yale Art Gallery (1928), and Street Hall (1866)—into a cohesive whole with a rooftop addition by Ennead Architects (2012).
The gallery is both a collecting and an educational institution, and all activities are aimed at providing an invaluable resource and experience for Yale faculty, staff, and students, as well as for the general public. For more information, please visit http://artgallery.yale.edu.
Yale Center for British Art
The Yale Center for British Art is a public art museum and research institute that houses the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. Presented to the University by Paul Mellon (Yale College, Class of 1929), the collection reflects the development of British art and culture from the Elizabethan period onward. The center’s collections include more than 2,000 paintings, 250 sculptures, 20,000 drawings and watercolors, 6,000 photographs, 40,000 prints, and 35,000 rare books and manuscripts. More than 40,000 volumes supporting research in British art and related fields are available in the center’s reference library.
In May 2016 the center reopened to the public following the completion of a multiyear project to conserve one of its greatest treasures, the building itself. Opened to the public in 1977, the Yale Center for British Art is the last building designed by internationally acclaimed American architect Louis I. Kahn. It stands across the street from Kahn’s first major commission, the Yale University Art Gallery (1953).
An affiliated institution in London, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, awards grants and fellowships, publishes academic titles, and sponsors Yale’s only credit-granting undergraduate study abroad program, Yale in London.
For more information, please visit http://britishart.yale.edu.
Libraries
The Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library is part of the Yale University Library, which comprises fifteen million print and electronic volumes in more than a dozen different libraries and locations. The Arts Library, linking the ground floors of Rudolph Hall and the Loria Center at 180 and 190 York Street, serves as the primary collection for the study of art, architecture, and drama at Yale. The Arts Library contains approximately 150,000 on-site volumes including important reference works, monographs, exhibition catalogs, and print periodicals, and a growing complement of digital resources, including online periodicals, article indexes, and databases. It also includes Arts Library Special Collections, which features artists’ books and volumes on the book arts, fine printing, typography, and illustration, as well as archival materials and thesis projects from the Schools of Art, Architecture, and Drama. The Arts Library’s digital collections contain more than 370,000 images to support teaching and research across a range of disciplines in the arts and humanities. In addition, more than 200,000 visual arts titles are available for delivery to Haas, or any other Yale library, from the Library Shelving Facility (LSF). More than 100,000 titles are housed at Sterling Memorial Library, the Classics Library, and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Yale University Library system makes related collections in archaeology, anthropology, fashion, film, history, and literature readily accessible to arts scholars and practitioners. To learn more, visit http://web.library.yale.edu/arts.