The Getty Foundation has awarded $2.6 million in grants to 12 libraries, museums and universities across the United States to preserve and expand access to archives of Black visual art, the organization announced this week. The funding comes through Getty’s Black Visual Arts Archives initiative, a multi-year program focused on digitization, cataloging and public engagement.
“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.”
Individual awards range from about $100,000 to $310,000. This year’s recipients include Chicago Public Library; the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans; California State University, Los Angeles; Clark Atlanta University and Emory University in Atlanta; Fisk University in Nashville; Lincoln University in Pennsylvania; and Visual AIDS in New York.
At Cal State LA, a $265,000 award will help process and make public the Compton Communicative Arts Academy archive. This landmark collection documents late-1960s Black arts and community organizing in Southern California, according to the Cal State LA Newsroom.
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Launched in 2022, the initiative continues to support several pilot grantees while adding new partners. Recent projects include the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where a digital zine and its first finding aid for artist archives were created; Temple University, where approximately 30,000 negatives were processed and a virtual-reality game was developed to interpret its collections; and the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, which accelerated digitization efforts.
Getty amplified the awards on social media, noting the grants are intended to “increase access to important archival collections across the country with work by Black artists” through cataloging, digitization and creative activations.
