Grants Awarded

Amistad Research Center
The Amistad Research Center (ARC) is the nation’s oldest, largest, and most comprehensive independent repository of original source materials on Black history, the African Diaspora, and civil rights. ARC’s archivists are processing the papers of four prominent artists represented in their collections: Harlem Renaissance sculptor Richmond Barthé; printmaker, sculptor, teacher, and activist Elizabeth Catlett; cartographer and founding member of the Harlem Artists Guild Louise E. Jefferson; and pioneering sculptor and performance artist Senga Nengudi. The group is separating original artworks from the files, enhancing description and metadata of documents, and publishing new online finding aids to make artworks and manuscript materials more discoverable to researchers. ARC will plan an online exhibition based on their findings and share the project at major conferences, in alignment with its commitment to collecting, preserving, and providing open access to these important records.
Grant awarded: $275,000 (2025)

Cal State LA
Cal State LA University Library
The Compton Communicative Arts Academy (CCAA) archive at Cal State LA documents the history of the Compton arts scene at one of the most important community centers for Black visual art in Los Angeles. At its peak in the 1970s, CCAA brought visual art, performance, and cinema instruction to hundreds in the community. Currently, only 10% of the collection is processed, leaving 90% of the materials unsearchable and undiscoverable to researchers. CSULA is digitizing slides, negatives, and photographs in the collection, enhancing metadata, producing a new finding aid, rehousing some of the materials, and performing a conservation assessment on the collection. The university will work with current Compton-based artists and arts organizations to develop on-campus programming to further activate the archive.
Grant awarded: $265,000 (2025)

Chicago Public Library
Vivian G. Harsh Research Center
Chicago Public Library (CPL)’s Vivian G. Harsh Research Center is the largest African American history and literature collection in the Midwestern United States. Named after the city’s first Black librarian, Vivian Harsh, the center contains hundreds of collections with artwork from the Black Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement by artists including Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and Jacob Lawrence. A Getty grant will support a two-year project to enhance the discoverability of CPL’s archival collections pertaining to the mid-20th century Chicago Black Renaissance and its impact on subsequent artistic movements. A group of archivists, librarians, and graduate students are surveying and processing archives containing artworks by African American artists and cataloging processed papers of Chicago civic leaders and institutions. The goal is to create an open-access catalogue with detailed descriptions that will aid researchers in identifying African American art historical materials within the special collections.
Grant awarded: $200,000 (2023)

Clark Atlanta University
Clark Atlanta University Art Museum
To increase the discoverability and accessibility of Clark Atlanta University Art Museum (CAUAM)’s institutional archive, staff are inventorying and assessing significant records related to the museum’s history, with particular focus on Atlanta Art Annual juried exhibition artists. The project will create the museum’s first comprehensive inventory of paper records, which will be published on CAUAM’s website and disseminated through the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Consortium’s networks. The archive team is also rehousing the museum’s paper records (which have previously been stored in non-archival filing cabinets) in a centralized, secure, and climate-controlled study room. A cumulative exhibition designed by the CAUAM curator featuring archival materials from CAUAM and the AUC Woodruff Library will further increase the visibility of these records to the research community at the AUC and the greater Atlanta area.
Grant awarded: $140,000 (2025)

Emory University
Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library
The Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library houses one of the largest African American collections in the Southeastern United States. A Getty grant is supporting the processing and creation of a comprehensive, searchable online finding aid for the archive of Jim Alexander, a documentary photographer known for capturing the Black Arts Movement in Atlanta, including multidisciplinary arts hub Neighborhood Arts Center. The newly surfaced information will allow scholars and community researchers to tell a more complete, nuanced history spanning more than six decades of events, venues, and cultural leaders (such as Dizzy Gillespie, Maya Angelou, and Spike Lee) that shaped the Black Arts Movement and its lasting impact on the visual arts. An interview with Alexander ahead of his 90th birthday, conducted in collaboration with the Emory Oral History Program, will create new contextual information for scholars surrounding the photographer’s style, works, and personal and professional networks.
Grant awarded: $280,000 (2025)

Fisk University
Fisk University Galleries
The Fisk University Galleries archive is one of the United States’ greatest repositories documenting African Americans’ contribution to modern art history in addition to documentation of the gallery’s early procedures and campus arts events. To ensure its collections are catalogued, inventoried, and processed to archival standards, a project-based archivist is conducting a high-level catalogue of its materials, working with existing staff to organize them into collections, and providing descriptions usable to researchers. The Galleries will also build a connection to the main campus library and archive, which is fully organized on existing archive management software, to ensure that materials will become publicly discoverable. This inventory also will be used to identify future conservation priorities and prepare the way for enhanced accessibility through finding aids and digitization.
Grant awarded: $290,000 (2023)

Lincoln University
The Langston Hughes Memorial Library
Lincoln University’s The Langston Hughes Memorial Library is creating a searchable inventory of archival records related to African American art at the university with the support of a Getty grant. While some of these records have previously been kept as bound print copies for consultation only by library staff, the new item-level inventory will enable more students and researchers to access information related to the Langston Hughes papers containing over 1,000 documents and photographs linked to the poet and his involvement in the Harlem Renaissance; the university’s internal records about its Visual Art department, art collections, and notable alumni artists; the Horace Mann Bond papers detailing the longstanding relationship between art students at Lincoln and the Barnes Foundation; and the book collection of essayist Larry Neal. A capstone closed-door archival study day in collaboration with the Barnes will bring together regional experts to discuss project findings, establish future art historical research priorities for the collections, and explore connections to other Philadelphia-area archives. Course curricula for undergraduates interested in African American art history and library science developed by project leads will further engage students with the archives.
Grant awarded: $125,000 (2025)

New York Public Library
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
A Getty grant is supporting the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s survey of its foundational Art and Artifacts (A&A) division archives to provide online access to more of its collection leading up to the center's centennial celebration in 2025. Updated resources with improved descriptions will allow scholars and researchers to more easily discover the archival records of the A&A art collection, which houses 15,000 objects by artists such as Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jacob Lawrence. The institution will also reconstruct the first-ever history of the Schomburg Center’s exhibitions. At the conclusion of the project, the Schomburg will share the surfaced materials in a public program currently slated to coincide with the Schomburg Center Literary Festival, a weekend of activities, panel discussions, and workshops highlighting Black creativity.
Grant awarded: $235,000 (2022)

Smithsonian Institution
Anacostia Community Museum
As the first Smithsonian Institution devoted to African American history and culture, the Anacostia Community Museum (ACM) possesses deep archives documenting its history as an important exhibition and educational venue for Black artists from the 1960s to today. An initial grant supported the surveying, describing, and digitizing of ACM archival records, including the District of Columbia Art Association (DCAA) files, curator Edith Martin’s personal correspondence, and the ACM exhibition records to make records more fully accessible to scholars and the public. In addition to creating robust finding aids, archivists digitized select materials to make them available online. ACM leveraged findings from records surfaced to inform A Bold and Beautiful Vision: A Century of Black Arts Education in Washington, DC, 1900-2000, a large public exhibition displaying the art and archival materials that retrace the history of Black arts educators and students in the region. With a second grant, ACM is surfacing its records related to key exhibitions of Black artists, cataloguing and creating a finding aid for the papers of the Registry of Artists and Photographers, and processing, transcribing, and transferring 50 original audio and video recordings of Washington artists and art-related materials discovered during the first phase of the Getty grant. The team will also conduct oral history interviews with living artists in the DC area and engage a scholar or artist to work with these archives for the museum’s first limited-term research fellowship.
Grants awarded: $210,000 (2022), $310,000 (2025)

Temple University
Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection
The John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, housed within the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University, is the most comprehensive visual record of Philadelphia’s Black social, intellectual, and cultural life in the 20th century. A Getty-supported project will make these rarely seen photographs and related materials discoverable and accessible to scholarly and public audiences by processing approximately 30,000 negatives in accordance with up-to-date metadata standards and completing a finding aid. As the photographs are digitized, they will simultaneously be made ready for computational analysis by The Scholars Studio, a digital humanities incubator on Temple’s campus. The Scholars Studio will publish a virtual reality game and teaching toolkit based on these newly digitized archival materials. The focus of these materials will be on the annual art exhibitions organized at the Pyramid Club, a private social organization for Philadelphia’s African American elites where Mosley served as art director and official photographer.
Grant awarded: $250,000 (2023)

Visual AIDS
Visual AIDS, a contemporary arts organization based in New York City that collects and preserves the papers of artists with HIV and AIDS, is using a Getty grant to increase the discoverability and visibility of Black artists in their collection. The project is creating more detailed records related to the contributions of artists including Darrel Ellis, Frederick Watson, Reverend Joyce McDonald, and Kia LaBeija, whose work is now being collected by major American museums. Enhanced metadata descriptions, a thematic research guide documenting at least fifteen Black artists (some of whom are not yet listed in the organization’s online Artist Registry), and targeted interviews with surviving family of artists where possible will surface more detailed records for researchers and raise further awareness of the prominence of these artists in the historical narrative of the AIDS crisis.
Grant awarded: $100,000 (2025)