Digital Art History
The Kress Foundation was an early leader in advancing the use of digital technologies in the field of art history, establishing the Digital Art History (DAH) grant program in 2008. The program was created in response to the Foundation’s recognition that, while digital technologies were poised to transform scholarship, teaching, and learning across the humanities, the field of art history had yet to fully embrace these new innovations and methodologies then.
Between 2008 and 2025, the Foundation awarded more than 200 grants within the DAH program, providing over $9 million in support to projects that have helped define and expand the digital future of the discipline. In 2016, the Foundation published a report on the first decade of the DAH program. To learn more about the program’s history and impact, including information on specific projects, please see Digital Resources for the History of Art Grant Program, A Report 2007 – 2016.
Featured Digital Art History Grants
Middlebury College, Visualizing Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market (2021, 2022)
The central component of this ongoing digital art history initiative is an online Visual Glossary of historic textiles, available online at The Dutch Textile Trade Project website. The Kress Foundation supported this initiative in 2021 and 2022, providing funding for crucial scholarly contributions.
“This project aims to understand the circulation of globally-sourced textiles on Dutch ships around the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by examining data drawn from trade records alongside samples of textiles and visual culture depicting textiles in use.” ("About," dutchtextiletrade.org)
For more on Visualizing Textile Circulation, read the following interview with the project’s manager, Jennifer Henel: Kress Grantee Spotlight: Jennifer Hene
Smarthistory (2008 – present)
Since 2008, the Kress Foundation has supported Smarthistory, the most visited art history resource in the world, with 60 million site views in 2025 alone. Co-directed and founded by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory is an open educational resource with more than 4000 essays and videos spanning the breadth of art historical study. Kress has supported Smarthistory from its early development to the present, through website design and infrastructural improvements, expanded access to images, and fellowship funding.
“Smarthistory is a tiny not-for-profit that collaborates with more than eight hundred art historians, curators, archaeologists, knowledge-bearers, and artists committed to making the history of art accessible to more people, in more places, than any other publisher. We work hard to make our essays and videos engaging while retaining depth, nuance, and analytic rigor.” ("Our mission," smarthistory.org)
For more on Smarthistory and its long relationship with Kress, read the following interview with Drs. Harris and Zucker: Kress Grantee Spotlight: Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory
Smithsonian Institute, Teaching with Primary Sources (2022, 2024)
The Kress Foundation has supported multiple iterations of Teaching with Primary Sources (TWPS), a virtual fellowship program for undergraduate art history faculty. The program is designed to foster new forms of teaching and learning centered on digitized primary sources through a collaborative, cohort-based model. The 2024-25 TWPS program focused on the use of primary sources for provenance research, using the Jacques Seligmann & Co. records (digitized with Kress support) as a case study.
“Primary sources offer students the opportunity to directly encounter the ‘raw data’ of history while fostering valuable lifelong skills, including information literacy, critical thinking, close reading, active reading, reading against the grain, and creative problem solving.” ("Teaching with Primary Sources," aaa.si.edu)
Digitization and Accessibility
For more on Kress-sponsored online resources, please see: Sponsored Resources