Editorial Projects
The Oxford Art Online database hosts the Grove®Dictionary of Art, the Benezit® Dictionary of Artists, and other Oxford art reference works. The site updates throughout the year, with new and updated articles, tools for navigating content, and improved functionality.
A group of distinguished art historians guide the development of both Grove Art and Benezit. Each resource is led by an Editor in Chief, who works closely with the publishing editors at Oxford University Press. In addition to our EIC and board leadership, we work with advising scholars in areas under active commissioning. These specialists oversee subjects in their field of study, and they supervise OAO’s editorial development, whether for a targeted project with 20 articles or for a discipline-wide effort involving thousands of essays. While we commission across all subjects in our dictionaries (and welcome reader suggestions), our current efforts focus on several areas in particular. Explore the menu at left for more information on these and other recent areas of editorial development.
For Benezit, our 2018 commissioning focuses on women artists and artists of nonconforming gender, with updates to auction and exhibition listings for artists with a strong presence in the contemporary art market.
For Grove Art, our commissioning is divided among several major projects:
- Dr. Tom Cummins of Harvard University supervises a major ongoing project on Latin American art and architecture, together with its editorial board. In addition to hundreds of new entries, this project covers updates to every existing Grove article on Latin American art, and the material will publish online, enriching the OAO database as the texts move through production.
- Dr. Sonya Lee of USC leads our project on Asian art and architecture, together with its editorial board, which involves the review of the over 3,000 existing articles in this field and will publish online.
- Dr. Darius Spieth of LSU oversees our multi-year project on art markets and economics, which will be published in print in the forthcoming Grove Guide to Art Markets.
- Grove’s Editor in Chief, Dr. Judith Rodenbeck, leads Grove’s ongoing commissioning work on modern and contemporary art and oversees the UpdateGAO program, through which existing articles from all specialties are updated in collaboration with their original authors.
- In addition to these broader initiatives, extensive commissioning work is underway for projects on art conservation and architecture.
