Aloe Corry and Dr. Rob McFarland, Department of German and Russian

If you Google the name of the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, you will find every bit as much information as you would find about Frieda Kahlo or Georgia O’Keefe. But if you attempt to move beyond a major figure like Kollwitz, the resources become scarce. As Margaret Rennolds (1987) has argued, women artists have traditionally been excluded from the canon of visual arts, with artists like Kollwitz and O’Keefe serving as notable exceptions. Yes, there are lists of women artists on Wikipedia and on the websites of various German, Swiss and Austrian museums, but even the Frauenmuseum (Museum of Women) in Bonn, Germany has limited online resources, especially when it comes to texts written by the artists themselves.

With the help of our 2014 ORCA Mentored Research Grant, my mentor and I researched and compiled an extensive online bibliography of visual and textual works by women artists from German-speaking countries. At this point, it is in the process of being reviewed, edited, and published. Our bibliography will form the core of the new art research collection of the internationally recognized Sophie Digital Library (http://Sophie.byu.edu/).

To conduct my research, I used both print and digital sources to compile information. Important print sources included Margaret B. Rennolds’ National Museum of Women in the Arts (1987), Delia Gaze’s Concise Dictionary of Women Artists (2001), Cornelia H. Butler’s Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art (2010), and Uta Grosenick’s Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century (2001). In the process of my research, I found that detailed information on each artist was scarce, and I needed to compile information from multiple sources to form a cohesive biography.

During the course of this project, I researched and found over 180 names of Germanspeaking women artists. This exceeded my original goal of 120 names. I then began the long process of gathering biographic information for each artist, synthesizing this information, and writing each a biography. At this point in time, over 26 complete biographies have been submitted to the Sophie Library for review, and far more are incoming.

As scholars Diaz (2012) and Crowther (et al., 2008) have explained, digital archives, even when they are available and extensive, have not yet been fully integrated into research and teaching methodology. However, this is slowly changing, and In order to access works by German-speaking women, many scholars have come to rely on the various collections of BYU’s digital archive titled Sophie: A Digital Library of Texts by German Speaking Women. While the advent of digital archives have revolutionized the discipline of Women’s Studies, the current online offerings of visual and textual works by German-speaking women artists lag far behind the digital collections of their English-, French-, and Spanish-language contemporaries. Brigham Young University’s Sophie Digital Library project is the largest and most-used online archive of works by German women, but its collections have until recently focused only on literature, music and science. This year, my mentor and I rounded out the archive’s collection with an extensive digital archive of visual and textual works by German-speaking women. We believe that this new resource will help to fulfill the scholarly needs of visual arts students and professionals and bring a wider awareness of the indelible impact of German-speaking women in the arts.