About TFAO

Traditional Fine Arts Organization

About us

Mission

We provide education concerning - and nurture understanding of - American representational art among student and adult populations through publication, grants to nonprofit arts organizations and related activities.

Advocacy

Expanding and archiving online exhibit information by institutions

Conservation of art collections

Exhibition and touring of private collections

Grants

We provide grants to nonprofit institutions for programming.

(right: Abby Rockefeller, 1900, Photograph, George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons* Ms. Rockefeller's exceptional philanthropy is enormously aspirational. Our current grant making ability is robust yet small in comparison.)

Educational support

In recent years it has become increasingly difficult for university students to justify a major or minor in art history from an economic point of view. Since familiarity with the liberal arts is beneficial for a well-rounded education, we provide an alternate in-depth resource which may be accessed at leisure during an individual's lifetime. All programs are provided without charge.

Organization

We are recognized as a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization by the Internal Revenue Service. Articles of Incorporation were approved by the Arizona Corporation Commissioner on August 5, 2003 as an Arizona nonprofit corporation. We are alternately referred to as TFAO or TFAOI. For further information about us please see our site guide, how we maintain pages and our vision of the future. To review financial information, please click here and for volunteer time contribution click here.

Privacy of users

User tracking cookies are not installed on our website. A benefit of this policy is that users access pages very quickly. You may wish to go to pingdom.com for an access speed measurement. For more information please see our privacy policy.

Summary of accomplishments and history

Tens of thousands of individuals, including students, scholars, teachers and others, view educational and informative materials every month on our site, which is structured as a digital library.

Our website is the world's most valued and visited site devoted to American representational art. Inspiration for our focus was provided by a myriad of artists living and deceased, Peter and Elaine Adams, John and Barbara Hazeltine, Gerald J. Miller and Jean Stern. (left: JP Hazeltine, Director and President).

In 2003 we acquired an online publication devoted to education and understanding of American representational art founded in 1997 named Resource Library Magazine. In 2004 we changed the name of the publication to Resource Library, which remains the current name. The publication, since inception provided without charge as a public service, contains 1,300+ articles and essays written by hundreds of named authors, plus thousands of other texts, all providing educational and informational content to students, scholars, teachers and others. Published materials related to exhibitions frequently contain texts from exhibition brochures or catalogues, magazine or journal articles, gallery guides, wall panels, labels, audio tour scripts, checklists and news releases, plus related images. Resource Library also provides free publicity to hundreds of American nonprofit art venues including museums and cultural centers, the source of almost all of Resource Library's content.

Go here to view an estimate of our total quantity of image and text files and here for recent site traffic. We also publish Catalogues, National Calendar of Exhibitions and Reports and Studies.

How to find content on our site:

Conduct searches within Resource Library, a collection of articles and essays honoring the American experience through its art, using the advanced search feature of these search engines:

Google

Yahoo

or before entering keywords in a basic search, enter site:tfaoi.org

Also see Indexes and information retrieval for more information.

Contact information

Please send email to:

*Tag for expired US copyright of object image:

Links to sources of information outside of our web site are provided only as referrals for your further consideration. Please use due diligence in judging the quality of information contained in these and all other web sites. Information from linked sources may be inaccurate or out of date. TFAO neither recommends or endorses these referenced organizations. Although TFAO includes links to other web sites, it takes no responsibility for the content or information contained on those other sites, nor exerts any editorial or other control over them. For more information on evaluating web pages see TFAO's General Resources section in Online Resources for Collectors and Students of Art History.