Contextual Research
What does the image mean? What does it say about the artist’s ideas, the time period, the community or country, or the social issues of the time?
The analyst’s job is not complete until they delve deeper into the often-murky meaning behind an artistic work. That’s why in this essay you will need to research the context (i.e., the meaning and relevance) of your image by finding, using, and citing one article from JSTOR, a multidisciplinary database. Visit Using JSTOR to Start Your Research to find out more about database features and online discovery.
Citing Sources
In-Text Citation
Once you locate a relevant article in JSTOR, you will document your use of the source. This is called citation.
In the text of the essay, you will use what is called in-text citation. MLA style, employed mostly by the humanities, uses last name and page number in-between parenthesis to document sources in the text.
An in-text citation in MLA style looks like this:
These artists studied how light reflected on water and “began using different colors placed against one another rather than relying on dark colors to create shadows” (Venturi 35).
Alternatively, you can perform an in-text citation with a signal phrase (i.e., name of author) followed by the page number at the end. It would look like this:
According to Venturi, these artists studied how light reflected on water and “began using different colors placed against one another rather than relying on dark colors to create shadows” (35).
End Citations
In addition to internal citation, you will also need to include end citation, called a Works Cited page in MLA style. Learn how to format your Works Cited page and how to cite from an online database, such as JSTOR (scroll down a bit).
You will also need to cite your selected art piece. The suggested MLA citation for a work of art from Google Arts & Culture is as follows:
The artist’s name. The title of the artwork in italics. The date of composition. The name of the institution that houses the artwork. The name of the website, URL.
An example of an end citation for a work of art would look like this:
Monet, Claude. Woman with a Parasol: Madame Monet and Her Son. 1875. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Google Arts & Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/woman-with-a-parasol-madame-monet-and-her-son-claude-monet/EwHxeymQQnprMg