The Getty Foundation recently awarded $1.8 million for eight grants through its Black Visual Arts Archive Initiative, a national, multi-year program dedicated to enhancing access to archival collections related to Black artists and arts organizations. Three of the eight grants were awarded to projects at universities.
The Beulah M. Davis Special Collections Department at historically Black Morgan State University in Baltimore was awarded $235,000 to process, digitize, and produce finding aids for archival collections related to the founder of the HBCU’s department of fine and performing arts, James E. Lewis, and the university’s first and second African American presidents, Dwight O.W. Holmes and Martin D. Jenkins. The research team at Morgan State will also develop a digital exhibition and curated research guide on the history of visual arts on campus.
The University of Chicago received $170,000 to support its South Side Home Movie Project, which preserves and digitizes home movies created by residents of Chicago’s South Side. Over the next two years, the funding from Getty will be used to identify, digitize, and make publicly accessible rare moving image documentation of mid-twentieth-century Black visual arts.
The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland received $225,000 to process, digitize, and create finding aids for five collections. These archives contain records relating to West Coast painter Dewer Crumpler, curator Robert L. Hall, Philadelphia collector Lewis Tanner Moore, Where We At Black Women Artists, Inc., and feminist artist Dindga McCannon. The team at Maryland is also planning a pop-up exhibition and public programs to increase the awareness of these collections.
