"Bowl with Human Feet", pottery from predynastic Egypt (circa 3700–3450 BCE). Currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All images of public domain works in the Met's collection are themselves in the public domain as a part of their Open Access policy. More public-domain predynastic Egyptian works can be found on the Wikimedia Commons.
Terracotta mask of an unidentified animal (suggested as "a fox, dog, or bat") from Cyprus, circa 600-480 BCE. Now in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More ancient Cypriot art can be found in their collection and on the Wikimedia Commons.
Photograph of In Bloom, a street art piece by Nicole Ashton (Instagram) in Reno Nevada. Photo by Flickr user Scott Hart, shared on the Night Images group (feed available at ![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
nightpix_flickr_feed).
"External Muscles of the Horse," image from The Natural History of Horses, an 1841 publication in the collection of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. They have scanned many of the illustrations and engravings within their collection onto their Flickr pages under the public domain.
Composition X by Wassily Kandinsky, 1939. More of Kandinsky's work can be found on his gallery page on WikiArt. WikiArt has a large collection of works in the public domain, including this one, and per its Public Domain policy "allows unlimited copying, distributing and displaying of the images of public domain artworks."
I am unfortunately unable to find the name for this piece by Polish surrealist Rafał Olbiński, but it is wonderful. If anyone is aware, please do let me know. More of the artist's work is available via the fineartphotographyvideoart Blogspot gallery, and I originally discovered this artist via the sharing of this piece on the 70s Sci-Fi Art Tumblr (feed via 70sscifiart_feed, also in longer-form on Ghost/70s_sci_fi_ghost_feed).
Photo by Flickr user Lato-Pictures on the Night Images group, available via RSS as nightpix_flickr_feed.
Mosaic artist Jim Bachor keeps taking his art to the streets in a very literal fashion, filling potholes in multiple cities' roadways with guerilla art installations of all sorts - from overt political messages to simple expressions of beauty. More of the artist's work can be found on his site, including a full gallery of his pothole installations.
Calligraphic graffiti from Chicago, Illinois. Originally posted by Radical Graffiti on Twitter, now on multiple social media pages.
VOTE!, 2024 sculpture by Matthew Mazzota for the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections in Florida. Per the artist's statement:
At the heart of our voting process, we are a collection of unique individuals with a diverse range of experiences, but together we make the world we live in. Voting shapes day-to-day life in the US, however, the actions and policies of America extend to all reaches of the globe. As we become more and more aware of how interconnected we all are, we see the direct implications of our decisions on a global level, impacting all living creatures around the world. VOTE! urges us to consider the weight of voting on behalf of the people and beings who cannot vote but are affected by what we decide, for example, what would be on Nature's mind if it had a chance to vote?
Opalized wood from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's Gem and Mineral collection, photographed by Flickr user Stan Celestian. More pictures from this photographer of the NHMLA's collection can be found in his album.
The National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has released what it describes as "2,000+ science and medical art visuals" into the public domain as a part of its "BioArt source" beta. These constitute vector images of everything from people to cell organelles, and (at least in my opinion) would be amazing in contribution to either digital or physical collage.
This vintage Halloween postcard is a part of the Middlebury College Special Collections on the Internet Archive. Additional public domain Halloween cards can be found on the Wikimedia Commons.
The Child Sleeps, 2014, by Jessica Shirley. More of the artist's work is also available on her Instagram.
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art description on this piece:
The priestess Tagerem was God's Wife of the god Re in Sakhebu in the southwestern Delta, a temple functionary of special order, intimate of the god.
From the Ptolemaic Period, circa 300–250 BCE. More pieces are available as a part of the Met's Egyptian collection. This piece was found via No Brash Festivity on Tumblr, and is in the public domain as a part of the Met's Open Access program.
The Nazca culture flourished from 100 BCE to 800 CE in what is now southern Peru. While most famous for their massive earthwork glyphs, the Nazca Lines, they also made brightly-colored pottery.
Pottery with characters that look as if they could be in modern memes. I'm not kidding, this is not a specifically-plucked outlier. About half of the humanoid figures on Nazca pottery artifacts I've seen look as if they could receive either subtitles or word-bubbles and go directly on social media. Check out the Nazca collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the collection of Nazca Pottery on the Wikimedia Commons for more examples.
There's something just so... relatable about these.
Example of a stone sphere from the pre-Columbian Diquís people of what is now modern-day Costa Rica, currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Additional pieces by the Diquís can be found in their Met collection and on the Wikimedia Commons. This particular image, as with all Diquís artifacts in their collection, is in the public domain per the Met's Open Access policies. (Wikimedia images vary in permissions, but are typically under Creative Commons licenses by the creators.)
Image from the book Astronomy for Amateurs, written by Nicolas Camille Flammarion and Frances Alice Welby and published 1904. Image scanned by The Internet Archive and uploaded to their Flickr as a part of the Internet Archive Book Images collection. In case the Internet Archive is down at the time of reading, Astronomy for Amateurs is also available from the Wikimedia Commons.
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