LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Hammer Museum at UCLA announced today the launch of Hammer Online Collections, a premier platform for students, educators, and online visitors to discover and interact with 50,000 artworks in the museum’s collection, spanning from the Renaissance to the present. The digital portal includes works from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, the Grunwald Center Collection, the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, the Armand Hammer Daumier and Contemporaries Collections, and the Armand Hammer Collection. The new website is a milestone in a multi-year initiative to digitize the Hammer’s collections, funded by grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Perenchio Foundation.

Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin said, “Last year we celebrated the culmination of our building transformation, which included new permanent galleries for works on paper as well as the largest temporary exhibition of our Hammer Contemporary Collection. The new Hammer Online Collections continues our drive to share the museum’s permanent collection with audiences far and wide. The depth of materials and thoughtful tools will make this website an important resource for UCLA students and faculty, curators and researchers worldwide, and general audiences looking to learn more about what the Hammer offers. We are incredibly grateful to the Mellon Foundation and Perenchio Foundation for enabling us to bring this project, many years in the making, to fruition.”

As part of the grant initiative, the museum commissioned new photography of many works in collection, including nearly 300 newly digitized paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures from the Hammer Contemporary Collection and the Grunwald Center Collection, with more to be documented and digitized over the next two years.

Developed in partnership with UK-based digital agency Cogapp, Hammer Online Collections is the latest digital initiative committed to forging new ways of interacting with the community. It joins Hammer Channel, an online video library that allows users to watch, search, clip and share videos from more than 1,000 of the museum’s public programs and exhibitions since 2005, and the Hammer’s participation in Bloomberg Connects, a digital museum guide that features exclusive audio commentary from artists and curators, video profiles, and more.

Hammer Online Collections: Use cases and capabilities

• Users can conduct advanced queries into the collections’ search and generate their own checklists, referred to as My Collections, which are fully customizable boards based on the visitor’s needs

• Users can download over 6,000 open-source images, including artworks by Van Gogh, Henri Tolouse-Lautrec, and Rembrandt van Rijn, among others

• Users can search for artworks currently on view in the galleries

• Docents, academics, and museum members can use the portal as a comprehensive resource to locate artwork information, study the Hammer exhibition history, and more

• Deep integration with the institution’s streaming archive, Hammer Channel, offering a plethora of video recordings of past artist programs and lectures

• Press members and publishers can locate artwork images and captions to guide their research and seek permission for usage

Hammer Online Collections will continue to grow and add new capabilities as it matures. Extended accessibility features and transformative capabilities aimed at integrating further resources from the Hammer and UCLA at large are just some of the features stored in the pipeline for future implementation.