The Driskell Center Receives $225,000 Grant from Getty

The Driskell Center is proud to announce that the Center has received a $225,000 grant from the Getty Foundation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 NEWS RELEASE
Contact: David Conway
Title: Archivist
Phone: 301-314-2625, Email: archives-driskellcenter@umd.edu

THE DRISKELL CENTER RECEIVES $225,000 GRANT FROM GETTY 

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, is proud to announce that the Center has received a $225,000 grant from the Getty Foundation in support of Radical Legacies, Digital Futures: Preserving Black Art for Global Access.

ABOUT THE AWARD

The $225,000, 18-month grant will support archival processing and digitization across five recently acquired collections in The Driskell Center Archives and an improved web interface designed to expand access to all 17 collections it holds, providing open access to digitized materials, finding aids, and interpretive content. The grant period will culminate in pop-up exhibition programming that brings those 5 collections into dialogue with contemporary audiences. This project is made possible with support from Getty through its Black Visual Arts Archives initiative.

Since its founding in 2001, The Driskell Center has sought to create an intellectual home for scholars seeking a fuller understanding of the American art canon. That understanding can only come about through a reckoning with the outsized accomplishments of artists of African descent. This was David C. Driskell’s lifelong vision and his motivation for assembling an archive, the David C. Driskell Papers, over the course of five decades, that he donated to the Center in 2011. The Driskell Center Archives’ collections include the Faith Ringgold Study Room Collection, Hayes-Benjamin Papers on African American Art and Artists, Alonzo Davis Collection, Michael D. Harris Collection, robin holder collection, Okoe Pyatt and Shelley Inniss Archive of the Weusi Artist Collective, and the Terrie S. Rouse-Rosario Papers. The Driskell Center’s Archives is supported in part by major grants from Getty, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Driskell Center’s five most recent archival acquisitions will be addressed with this funding. Since 2024, The Driskell Center has acquired the Crumpler Collection, the Robert L. Hall Collection, the Lewis Tanner Moore Collection, the Where We At Black Women Artists Archives, and the Dindga McCannon Archives. The Driskell Center’s 17 archival collections span the breadth of African American and African diasporic visual art, created by artists, scholars, foundations, videographers, art collectors, educators, arts collectives, and arts administrators, alongside the Center’s own institutional records documenting 25 years of collections, exhibitions, and programming. These collections are interconnected not merely as documentation of Black visual creativity, but through substantive relationships among artists, institutions, and movements that researchers can trace across our holdings. Getty's support for archival processing, digitization, and access will illuminate these connections, enabling scholars to pursue questions that cross collection boundaries.

ABOUT THE DRISKELL CENTER 

The Driskell Center is a creative incubator dedicated to a world where Black artists exist at its center. We invite inquiry, experimentation, and dialogue to reexamine histories and shape shared futures. All programs at The Driskell Center are free and open to the public. For further information regarding exhibitions and activities at The Driskell Center, please visit driskellcenter.umd.edu or call 301-314-2615. 

Image credit:

David C. Driskell at home in Hyattsville, Maryland, reviewing photographs to be donated to The Driskell Center as part of the David C. Driskell Papers, 2014. Courtesy of The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.