Our impact
Preserving, connecting, and opening access to art-historical knowledge
Art history helps people understand how images, ideas, and cultural identities move across time and place. Yet the records that support this knowledge are often dispersed across archives, books, databases, and collections.
Navigating.art is a nonprofit that develops digital platforms for preserving, connecting, and publishing art-historical data, alongside educational resources that support research teams. Our work makes evidence easier to examine, expands access to reliable knowledge, and supports future scholarship.
How our work creates public value
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Art-historical projects can extend across generations, institutions, and periods of funding. Navigating.art helps organizations maintain research records, sources, images, and scholarly conclusions so that this work remains available beyond the life of an individual project.
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Artwork gains meaning through their relationships with people, exhibitions, collections, archival documents, and historical events. Our work makes these connections easier to follow across projects and institutions while keeping the source of each contribution visible.
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Art historians should be able to participate in decisions about the technologies used in research and publication. Our educational resources explain digital methods and give researchers guidance for developing responsible digital projects.
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Digital publication can make selected research available beyond physical collections, specialist libraries, and institutional reading rooms. Navigating.art supports organizations in publishing scholarship online while retaining control over copyrighted, sensitive, or unfinished material.
Research and cultural heritage supported by our work
60,000
Artwork documentation records
321,000
Archival resources documented
14.8m
Files supporting research & publication
The Open Art Register: Connecting art-historical evidence across institutions
An artwork’s history is often divided among collection records, exhibition histories, auction catalogues, publications, and specialist research. The Open Art Register connects essential, source-attributed information from these sources, making relationships easier to follow without losing sight of where each account comes from.
Each registered artwork, exhibition, auction, publication, person, and organization receives a stable identifier. Contributions remain visibly attributed, differing accounts can appear side by side, and readers can continue to fuller documentation held by the contributing institution or scholar.
The Open Art Register is distinct from the Navigating.art platform and is intended to complement the catalogues, archives, museum databases, and research projects on which it depends.
Explore current digital publications
These catalogue raisonné, archive, and research projects use the Navigating.art platform to organize research data and publish selected scholarship online.
Who benefits from our work
Our work serves art historians, catalogue raisonné teams, artist foundations, archives, museums, collections, educators, students, and readers seeking reliable information about art and its histories.
Research organizations gain ways to preserve and publish their work. Scholars gain access to evidence and sources. Students and readers gain opportunities to examine art-historical knowledge that might otherwise remain difficult to find or consult.
Help preserve and share art-historical research
Are you developing a digital catalogue raisonné, archive, or scholarly publication that should remain accessible and useful over time?
Tell us about the research, the data and sources your team is working with, and what you want readers to be able to discover.
We envision a world where art historical knowledge is preserved, interconnected, and accessible to support scholarly research and engage art enthusiasts.