The Getty Foundation has given a total of $2.6m to libraries, museums and archives throughout the US as part of its Black Visual Arts Archives initiative. The programme, which launched in 2022, is devoted to preserving and increasing access to the archives and works of Black artists through exhibitions, community programming and digitisation.
“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,” Miguel de Baca, a senior programme officer at the Getty, 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.”
Five of the 12 projects selected to receive the funding were already awarded their grants as part of the 2022 pilot programme and have made major strides in organising their archives and making them more accessible to the public.
The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, created both a digital zine and its first “finding aid” for its artist archives. Temple University in Philadelphia, meanwhile, is creating a virtual-reality (VR) game about its archives and has processed around 30,000 negatives from its collection of 20th-century photography documenting the city’s Black communities. And in Washington, DC, the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, a key institution for Black arts in the region since the 1960s, has used its funding to digitise its archives.
Individual grants range from $100,000 to $310,000. Grant recipients also include the Chicago Public Library, the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, California State University in Los Angeles, Atlanta’s Clark Atlanta University and Emory University, Fisk University in Nashville, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Visual Aids in New York City.
“This funding will help us continue our mission to preserve and honour the legacies of artists impacted by HIV and Aids, particularly Black artists in the US whose voices and contributions to the visual arts have been historically overlooked,” Kyle Croft, the executive director of Visual Aids, said in a statement to The Art Newspaper. “Through Getty support, we will better understand the Black artists in our collection and produce updated biographies, original scholarship and a research guide that will all serve to bring the work of an under-represented community to a much larger audience.”
The Getty is partnering with an archivist and consultant who specialises in Black archives to help grantees with their projects. Other Getty initiatives that promote Black arts and culture include the architecture preservation project Conserving Black Modernism and the African American Art History Initiative, which has led to the acquisitions of the archives of artists including Maren Hassinger and Betye Saar.