Collaborative Agreement Reached Between Timothy W. Drescher and ARTstor 

Timothy W. Drescher, Ph.D., and ARTstor announced today that they had 
reached an agreement to collaborate on the digitization and distribution 
through ARTstor of several thousand high quality digital images from 
Drescher’s unique archive of photographs of community murals. 

As an independent mural historian and photographer, Timothy Drescher has 
been professionally studying, documenting, and campaigning for the 
conservation of community murals throughout the United States – in Los 
Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and elsewhere- for many years. His own 
publications range from the standard study of San Francisco Bay Area 
Murals: Communities Create their Muses, 1904-1997 (3rd ed., 1998) to a 
thoughtful analysis of “Priorities in Conserving Community Murals” (a paper 
presented at a 2003 conference at the Getty Conservation Institute). His 
slides and photographs of Chicano and other community murals have been 
widely published in works by a wide range of scholars. 

Through this collaboration, ARTstor will digitize several thousand slides 
from Timothy Drescher’s archive, as well as selected materials from the 
archives of many muralists and other students of community murals, 
including especially that of the late Eva Sperling Cockroft, co-author 
(with John Pitman Weber and James Cockcroft) of Toward A People's Art: The 
Contemporary Mural Movement (1977)   (for the 1998 revision of which 
Drescher wrote the Afterword update) and (with Holly Barnet-Sanchez), Signs 
from the Heart: California Chicano Murals (1990). Timothy Drescher is 
curating the selection of images for digitization, stressing documentation 
of entire murals as well as details, contextual establishing photographs, 
and selected documentation of mural processes. 

In reaching this agreement, Timothy Drescher and Max Marmor, ARTstor’s 
Director of Collection Development, expressed their shared enthusiasm in 
collaborating to use digital technologies to make these high quality images 
of community mural sites more broadly available for noncommercial 
educational and scholarly purposes. “I’m delighted that ARTstor is making 
these important images available to a large group of students and scholars 
using the same usage criteria that muralists have used interpersonally for 
over three decades,” comments Drescher. “Our new collaboration with Timothy 
Drescher represents an important milestone in ARTstor's ongoing effort to 
provide teachers, scholars and students with high-quality digital images of 
contemporary art in all its richness and diversity.  Tim Drescher’s images 
have been widely consulted by scholars through a range of publications on 
community murals, and we are delighted to help make them available now 
online for non-commercial use in education and research, in the same spirit 
in which muralists themselves have exchanged images over many years,” adds 
Marmor. 

Timothy W. Drescher has, for many years, played a key role in the 
documentation, study and conservation of community murals, including co-
editing Community Murals Magazine from 1976-1987. He works closely with 
other scholars and photographers in this field. 

ARTstor (www.artstor.org) was created in 2001 as a nonprofit initiative of 
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is now an independent non-profit 
organization dedicated to serving education and scholarship in the arts and 
the humanities. Currently, more than 520 non-profit institutions in the 
U.S. and Canada are participating in ARTstor. A pilot distribution is 
underway in the UK and Australia/New Zealand, and further international 
availability is being actively explored. 

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