PITTSBURGH, PA.- As part of a grant program to preserve and create access to humanities collections, the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Carnegie Museum of Art $340,000 to conserve, catalogue, and archivally store approximately 26,400 negatives in the Teenie Harris collection, and to scan 33,850 negatives. Carnegie Museum of Art's proposal was one of 33 grants awarded in the Preserving and Creating Access to Humanities Collections program from a field of 240 applicants.

The project work constitutes phase one of an overall plan to preserve the life's work of African American photojournalist Charles "Teenie" Harris, which Carnegie Museum of Art purchased in 2001 through the Heinz Family Fund. The Harris archive contains approximately 80,000 negatives and is considered the largest and most complete portrait of African-American urban life in existence. The archive documents historic and daily events of Pittsburgh's Black community between 1936 and 1975. The grant will expedite the preservation of those negatives and images at the greatest risk of deterioration.

In addition, this funding will enable the museum to step up its efforts to identify the people, places, and activities in the photographs. The individuals who are the key sources of this information are elderly, and efforts to communicate with them in a timely manner are crucial to the project's success. Ultimately, the grant moves the museum closer to its goal of allowing access to the archive by its intended audiences-scholars and historians, teachers, students, media, publishers, museums and other organizations, and the general public. Phase one begins May 1, 2005 and continues through April 30, 2007.

"We are especially gratified that this worthy project has received critical funding through the NEH's rigorous peer-review process; their support acknowledges the importance and value of this archive to scholars and the general public," says Richard Armstrong, the Henry J. Heinz II director of Carnegie Museum of Art. "Over time, appreciation of Teenie Harris's work will affirm his historic status. Preserving and publicizing his work is crucially important."

"We thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for its help in preserving the works of one of the great masters of photography," says Carnegie Museum of Art Board Chairman Marcia Gumberg.

Teenie Harris was the freelance and staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, at one time the nation's largest Black newspaper. Photographing everything from Negro League baseball to the civil rights movement, Teenie Harris recorded the personalities and events during a period of momentous change for Black Americans. He also captured the lives of thousands of ordinary people at work and at play.

From July through September 2003, Carnegie Museum of Art invited the community, both locally and through the Internet, to help identify the content of approximately 3,700 Teenie Harris images that were on view at the museum, in six branches of the Carnegie Library, and on the museum's web site. More than 1,000 identifications were gathered from that initiative. From August 6, 2005 through January 8, 2006, the museum will ask the community to help identify an additional 3500 photographs; part two of the archive project will be shown at the museum or online at www.cmoa.org.