Driskell Center's Archives Receives Gift of Influential Artist and Art Historian Michael D. Harris' Archive, the Michael D. Harris Collection
February 03, 2023
The Driskell Center is proud to announce that the Driskell Center's Archives will be home to the Michael D. Harris Collection, a gift from the Estate of Michael D. Harris.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Mr. David Conway
Title: Archivist
Phone: 301-405-2984, Email: dconway@umd.edu
DAVID C. DRISKELL CENTER ARCHIVES RECEIVES GIFT OF INFLUENTIAL
ARTIST AND ART HISTORIAN MICHAEL D. HARRIS’ ARCHIVE,
THE MICHAEL D. HARRIS COLLECTION
COLLEGE PARK, MD. – The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, is proud to announce that the Driskell Center’s Archives will be home to the Michael D. Harris Collection, a gift of the Estate of Michael D. Harris, in keeping with the mission of the Center to celebrate the legacies of African American artists and to ensure that they become part of the American art canon. The Driskell Center received a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support this initiative.
ABOUT THE COLLECTION: The acquisition of the Michael D. Harris Collection, the archive of artist, art historian and curator, Michael D. Harris, brings a new dimension to the Driskell Center’s Archives and represents a significant expansion of the research potential the Center offers.
Michael DeHart Harris was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 14, 1948. He received his B.S. in Education, with an Art Major, from Bowling Green State University in 1971. In 1979, the same year he joined AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), Harris received his M.F.A. (Painting) from Howard University. At Yale University, he was awarded three more master’s degrees before receiving his Ph.D. in 1996. It was at Yale that Dr. Harris established his expertise in African Art. His master’s thesis and dissertation focused on the kanaga mask of the Dogon peoples and contemporary Yoruba art, respectively. Dr. Harris was a scholar of the Yoruba language as well and was known to some by his Yoruba name “Olusina,” which means “the Lord opens the way.”
Dr. Harris retired from Emory University in Atlanta in 2020, where he had taught art history in the Department of African American Studies since 2007. Prior to teaching at Emory, Dr. Harris had held posts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Georgia State University, Morehouse College, and Atlanta Junior College. Dr. Harris published widely on topics in African American and African art history in an academic career that spanned four decades. David C. Driskell praised his Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) as “the most comprehensive book ever published on the subject of race images, negative and positive, that examines the African American experience and its relationship to visual media.” Harris was a photographer, and his mixed media art and quilt and shrine-based work often included photographic images that were, at times, autobiographical. His Dear Grandaddy (1996) includes photographs and letters. It references his grandfather, William DeHart Hubbard, the first African American athlete to win an Olympic gold medal in an individual event (the long jump at the Paris Games in 1924). Dr. Harris had many curatorial achievements to his credit, most recently Visible Man: Art and Black Male Subjectivity, which opened at his alma mater, Bowling Green State University in September 2021 before traveling to the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, N.C., in 2022. Dr. Michael D. Harris passed on July 11, 2022.
The Michael D. Harris Collection measures approximately twenty-four linear feet with an additional 90 GB of digital files. The collection includes correspondence; taped interviews and transcriptions; photographic prints and 35mm slides; field notes from Harris’ study in Ile-Ife, Nigeria; publications and unpublished writings by and about Harris, including his poetry; records of his curation and participation in AfriCOBRA; books; newspaper clippings; and ephemera. The collection documents Harris’ development as a scholar, artist, and curator across five decades and two continents.
Furthermore, the Michael D. Harris Collection will be the focus of a field study/practicum for two graduate students from the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies during the Spring 2023 semester. The students will be helping Driskell Center Archives staff by conducting an inventory of the physical and digital items in the collection and working toward the development of an arrangement of the collection, a finding aid, and a virtual exhibition devoted to the collection. This forms a unique opportunity for two students to gain experience in their intended field, working with primary materials of enduring value to art historians and students of African American and African diasporic experience in the arts.
ABOUT THE DAVID C. DRISKELL CENTER AND THE CENTER’S ARCHIVES
The David C. Driskell Center honors the legacy of David C. Driskell—a Distinguished University Professor of Art, Artist, Art Historian, Collector, Curator, and Philanthropist—by preserving the rich heritage of African American visual art and culture. The Driskell Center is committed to preserving, documenting, and presenting African American art, as well as replenishing and expanding the field of African American art. All programs at the David C. Driskell Center are free and open to the public. The facility is wheelchair accessible. For further information regarding exhibitions and activities at the Driskell Center, please call 301-314-2615 or visit driskellcenter.umd.edu. The Driskell Center’s programming is supported in part by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council and private donors.
Since 2001, the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, 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 American and African descent. That 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 would eventually donate to the Center in 2011. The Driskell Center’s Archives has grown to house multiple collections, including the Faith Ringgold Study Room Collection, the Harmon Foundation Papers, the Hayes-Benjamin Papers on African American Art and Artists, the Alonzo Davis Collection, and now the Michael D. Harris Collection.