Exhibition Catalogue

What is an exhibition catalogue?

An exhibition catalogue is an accompanying printed publication for a temporary exhibition or installation at an art gallery and documents the contents of an exhibition, often providing a forum for dialogue between curators, artists and critics.  Exhibition catalogues are invaluable resources because they typically provide interpretive text for each piece as well as scholarly essays not published elsewhere.  

Most catalogues share a number of components, including:

Table of Content page from the exhibition
catalogue of The Lost World of Old Europe
 exhibition at NYU in 2010

• List of the exhibition schedule (travel itinerary, exhibition's funders and sponsors)
• Content's page (often where names of authors who wrote catalogue entries are listed)
• Sponsor's statement
• Lenders to the exhibition
• List of trustees
• Funders
• Director's forward
• Acknowledgements
• Essay(s)
• Catalogue entries
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index

The catalogue entries themselves have several components:

• Catalogue number

  

  Example of entries in an exhibition catalogue

• Artist
• Nationality
• Dates
• Title of work
• Where piece was created
• Material/medium
• Dimensions
• Signature/inscription information
• Accession Number
• Text
• Provenance
• Bibliography or references
• Condition
• Related works
• Remarks

Exhibition catalogues are more than books, but can be a work of art in their own right.  Design is an equally important aspect and offer an opportunity to showcase the creativity and spirit of the exhibition.   

The Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association presents awards for the best exhibition catalogues based on design and intellectual content, offering a great bibliographic resource of the best catalogues published each year.  

To view an example of a digitized exhibition catalogue, click here. 

Where can I find copies?

Cover of the exhibition catalogue for the
Arts & Crafts Exhibition society

Copies of exhibition catalogues can be found on most major institutions websites under the "Publications" tab, including the Met, MoMA, Musée d'Orsay, even the Auckland Art Gallery. Not all exhibition catalogues are available for purchase.  Many sites offer online viewing or digital downloads for older "notable" catalogues.  

Visiting individual sites can be time-consuming; however, a few sites specialize in bringing together exhibition catalogues, such as Worldwide Books, and ArtBook.  

What does this mean for libraries?

When cataloging exhibition catalogs, librarians encounter conflicting goals- are we cataloging a publication or an exhibition? 

Authorship Problems

First, a librarian must ask who is responsible for the intellectual and artistic content?  Should it be cataloged under the organizer of the show (curator) or writers of the catalog (artists)?  Past practice has been to identify the corporate body as the author but the increasing number of co-organized exhibitions has forced librarians to abandon that tradition.  The Library of Congress advises using "the person who wrote the catalogue if he or she is represented as the author of the catalogue in the chief source of information."  However, this is not always clear and librarians must rely on common sense when cataloging.  

Publication Problems

Past practice has been to record the museum or art gallery where the exhibition was held as the publisher.  Now, more museums are entering joint arrangements with commercial publishers, making who published the exhibition catalogue unclear.  Also, publishers may distribute different versions of an exhibition catalogue.  For example, an exhibition catalogue of a German collection may have an English translation that may or may not contain all of the content found in the original version, and including a cataloging note may clear up questions about its publication history.  

For help with cataloging exhibition catalogs, the Library of Congress distributed a helpful "Best Practices" guide.  

References

"Association of Art Editors Style Guide." Association of Art Editors. Accessed September 25, 2013. http://www.artedit.org/styleguide.htm#exhibitcat.

Berger, Sidney E.  ""The Design and Evaluation of Exhibition Catalogs."  Rare Books & Manuscript Librarianship.  Volume 7: Number 1, 45-60.  

"Exhibition Catalogue." Wikipedia. Accessed September 17, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhibition_catalogue. 

Starr, Daniel. "Some Comments on the Cataloging of Exhibition Catalogues, or, Who was the Author of that Exhibition?"  Art Documentation. Volume 15: Number 1, 11-16.