The Getty Foundation has awarded $1.5 million in grants to seven libraries, museums, and universities across the United States as part of its ongoing Black Visual Arts Archives program.
This year’s recipients are the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, California State University Los Angeles, Clark Atlanta University, Emory University in Atlanta, Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum in Washington D.C., and Visual AIDS in New York. To assist with this year’s projects, Getty partnered with Dominique Luster, an archivist and consultant who specializes in Black archives.
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This new round brings the Getty’s total funding for the initiative $2.6 million, with it having previously awarded grants in 2022, as part of a pilot program, to the Anacostia, the Chicago Public Library, Fisk University in Nashville, the New York Public Library, and Temple University in Philadelphia.
The multi-year initiative aims to increase access to archival collections, particularly those with information about work created by Black artists. The program provides archivists with more opportunities to organize, catalog, and digitize these materials and a chance to bring together often difficult to research or disparate records, some of which may have not yet been processed. (Grant application inquiries are accepted on an ongoing basis.)
Emory’s grant, for example, will allow for the university to hire a dedicated processing archivist for a period of three years to focus on the work of photographer Jim Alexander, who will also create an oral history as part of the project to “offer important context to his images and legacy,” N’Kosi Oates, Emory’s curator of African American collections, told ARTnews. “We value the opportunity to help keep this revered Atlanta documentary photographer’s collection an active resource for education, research, and community engagement.”
From the initial processing and digitization of archival records, several accompanying projects, like exhibitions and programming, have emerged from this research. The New York Public Library, for example, used Getty funds to create a digital zine that presents the history of art exhibitions curated by its library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Temple University has been working on a virtual reality game that simulates the process of archival researching as players learn about historic exhibitions organized by the the Pyramid Club, which was at one time Philadelphia’s only Black-owned art gallery and social club.
Presentations of the results from the program’s first iteration will be presented during the annual Society of American Archivists conference in Anaheim, California, which runs August 24–27.
The Getty’s commitment to funding the Black Visual Arts Archives program also comes at a time when initiatives such as these have been under attack by the current presidential administration. It is also one of several efforts started by the Getty that supports Black cultural heritage, including Conserving Black Modernism, African American Historic Places Los Angeles, African American Art History Initiative, and its joint acquisition of the archive of 20th-century architect Paul R. Williams.
“We need a fuller understanding of the influence of Black artists, architects, and cultural institutions to tell a more complete history of American art and culture, and we can work towards achieving this by investing in Black archives,” Miguel de Baca, senior program officer at the Getty Foundation, said in a statement. “Black Visual Arts Archives delivers critical support to make these archives and the stories of creativity, resiliency, and community they hold more accessible to researchers and the general public.”