In 2025 the Library moved into a fully renovated space and changed how it works. What had been a closed-stack collection, where books were requested and retrieved one at a time, became an open-shelf environment where readers move through the collection themselves — browsing, comparing, and finding things they were not looking for.

The collection covers art history, painting, graphics, design, composition, and anatomy, alongside related fields across the humanities. It continues to grow through purchase, donation, and partnership: recent years have brought volumes transferred from the National Library of Armenia, titles acquired through the Erasmus+ DeSIRe project, and gifts from artists, scholars, and friends of the Academy.

The reading room is arranged to hold more than one kind of work at once. There are places to sit alone with a book for an afternoon, tables where a group can spread out around a project, and space that clears for an evening event without the room ceasing to be a library.

This is deliberate. The Library is at its best when a student researching a thesis, a seminar meeting around a table, and an audience arriving for a screening all belong in the same room on the same day.

The Library’s catalog runs on Koha, the open-source library system, and is being built out through an ongoing digitization program. The catalog is searchable, and it does not stop at the Academy’s own shelves: it connects to the consortium catalogs of partner institutions, including the National Library of Armenia and the Matenadaran, so that a search begun here can continue into some of the country’s most significant collections.

For students working on a thesis or a diploma project, the librarians can help build a search, trace a source, and request material held elsewhere. This is the part of the Library that is easiest to overlook and most worth using.

The Library’s book club meets in the reading room to read and argue about one book at a time — art history and theory, criticism, artists’ writing, and the occasional novel that turns out to be about looking.

It is open to students, staff, and readers from outside the Academy, and no preparation is expected beyond having read the book. Sessions are led by a different member each time, and the reading is chosen together.

Meetings are announced in advance, and copies of the current book are held at the Library for members to borrow.

The collection has grown substantially through donation, and gifts from artists, scholars, teachers, publishers, and alumni remain one of the most important ways it expands. A single well-chosen book can change what a student is able to write about.

Tell us what you have and the librarians will confirm what can be accepted before anything is delivered. Donors are acknowledged in the catalog record unless they prefer otherwise.

The Library works with institutions and individuals whose interests overlap with its own, and is open to proposals. That includes libraries and archives interested in shared cataloging and reciprocal access; galleries, museums, and cultural organizations planning exhibitions or public programs; publishers and translators working in art literature; and researchers, curators, and artists who would like to present work, convene a reading group, or build a project around the collection.

The Library is at Isahakyan Str. 36, Building A, room A 102, and is open Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 20:00.

It serves the students and staff of the Academy, who may read in the reading room and borrow from the collection. Visitors from outside the Academy are welcome to get in touch, and a project to extend access more widely is in preparation.