The public can access works in the Hammer Museum’s collections via a new online platform. (photo by Iwan Baan)

The Hammer Museum at UCLA announced on Aug. 13 the launch of Hammer Online Collections, a platform for students, educators and online visitors to discover and interact with 50,000 artworks in the museum’s collection.

The digital portal includes works from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, the Grunwald Center Collection, Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, Armand Hammer Daumier and Contemporaries Collections, and the Armand Hammer Collection. The new website is a milestone in a multiyear initiative to digitize the Hammer’s collections, funded by grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Perenchio Foundation.

“Last year, we celebrated the culmination of our building transformation, which included new permanent galleries for works on paper as well as the largest temporary exhibition of our Hammer Contemporary Collection,” Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin said. As part of the grant initiative, the museum commissioned new photography of many works in the collection, including nearly 300 newly digitized paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures from the Hammer Contemporary Collection and the Grunwald Center Collection. Additional works will be documented and digitized over the next two years.

Developed in partnership with U.K.-based digital agency Cogapp, Hammer Online Collections is the latest digital initiative committed to forging new ways of interacting with the community. It joins Hammer Channel, an online video library that allows users to watch, search, clip and share videos from more than 1,000 of the museum’s public programs and exhibitions since 2005, and the Hammer’s participation in Bloomberg Connects, a digital museum guide that features exclusive audio commentary from artists and curators, and video profiles.

The Hammer Museum is located at 10899 Wilshire Blvd. For information and to access the collections, visit collections.hammer.ucla.edu.