NEW YORK, NY.- Today, Hauser & Wirth Institute announced the recipients of their 2023 Grants, the third annual funding initiative aimed at supporting artist communities and organizations in self-documenting, preserving, and activating their own archives. The grantees are EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (New York City); iniva (London); Letterform Archive (San Francisco); and Visual AIDS (New York City).

A nonprofit operating free from commercial interests and independently from their primary funder (Hauser & Wirth Gallery), the Institute’s annual grants build on their mission to make the field of artists’ archives more equitable and accessible by enabling the preservation of self-determined and under-documented histories.

“The fundamental purpose of our grantmaking is to help radically increase access to archives,” said Hauser & Wirth Institute Executive Director Lisa Darms. “This year’s grantees exemplify many creative approaches to opening up the archive, including the creation of an oral history; creating new staff positions for archivists; supporting researchers to use archives of underknown artists, and providing financial support to docent educators who were formerly unpaid. The work of archives is often invisible. It’s our hope that these awards will not only support increased visibility for communities that have been marginalized, but will also shine a light on the labor that goes into preserving and activating these histories.”

Announcement of the 2023 Grantees comes on the eve of Hauser & Wirth Institute’s participation in Independent 20th Century (September 7–10, 2023) where they will present selections from two artists’ archives they’ve recently supported: Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941–1999) and Mary Dill Henry (1913–2009). In 2021, the Institute awarded Asia Art Archive (AAA) a grant to support organizing and digitizing the ul Akhlaq archive, and the selection of the Pakistani artist’s materials for the Institute’s booth at the art fair will be curated by AAA Head of Research John Tain. For more information on Hauser & Wirth Institute’s booth at Independent 20th Century please visit their exhibitor webpage.

The 2023 Grants extend Hauser & Wirth Institute’s support of individual organizations working to preserve and meaningfully increase access to artistic legacies. Since 2021, over $1M has gone to projects now underway at Carolee Schneemann Foundation (New York), Institute of American Indian Arts (New Mexico), South Side Community Art Center (Chicago), Women’s Studio Workshop (Rosendale, NY), The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), Sixty Inches From Center (Chicago), and YVR Art Foundation (Vancouver, BC), in addition to scholarships to Pratt Institute to fund full tuition for BIPOC graduate students entering the three-year, dual-degree Master’s program in Library and Information Science and the History of Art and Design.

2023 GRANTEE PROJECTS

EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop ($50,000)

The longest-running community print shop in the United States, dating back to 1947, EFA RBPMW will use this grant to complete a video-based oral history, Creative Graphic Community: Oral Histories Project, to document founder Robert Blackburn (1920–2003) and the history of the community workshop.

Raised within the Harlem Renaissance and of Jamaican American descent, Blackburn was not only a visionary African American artist but also a pioneering master printmaker and celebrated educator.

EFA RBPMW has over 20,000 prints by over 4,000 artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, Krishna Reddy, Faith Ringgold, Melvin Edwards. A diverse record of printmaking in the United States like no other, the archive reflects the various communities with which Blackburn participated, like the Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, and Caribbean, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, feminist, and ecologically-focused activism.

This oral history will collect narratives of the artists, staff, curators, and others who have been instrumental in the Printmaking Workshop community. Ten narrators, all in their 70s and 80s, will share personal stories that document the socio-historical context in which the community and collective formed, and the cultural collaborations it engendered.

“One of the core values of EFA RBPMW is the spirit of openness and inclusion,” said EFA RBPMW Directors. “This value has been instrumental in our success, both in terms of formal recognition and cultural impact. It is especially significant considering the challenges we have faced under restrictive conditions of segregation and discrimination. Despite these obstacles, EFA RBPMW has thrived and continues to be a vibrant hub for artists from all backgrounds; famous, under-represented, and to-be-discovered.”

iniva ($72,500)

iniva is a UK-based visual arts charity which grew out of the 1980s Black British Arts Movement and is dedicated to nurturing and disseminating a critical counterpoint to Western art historical narratives. The funding will support a professional archivist to catalog and make accessible artist files and slides from iniva’s archive of radical and emergent contemporary artistic practice centering Global Majority, African, Asian, and Caribbean diaspora perspectives between 1994–2005. This project will contribute to wide ranging research and academic knowledge and better demonstrate the legacy of diasporic artist practices to inspire younger generations of artists and curators.

“We are delighted to have received this unique grant from Hauser & Wirth Institute that supports our mission of being a world class center for research, supporting artists, curators and the wider community to know more about Black and International Arts,” said iniva Artistic Director Sepake Angiama. “The Stuart Hall Library and iniva's archive are a hub of our activity and enable us to build community through making these practices visible. With this grant we can concentrate on making our collection of over 4,000 artists slides accessible to a wider public. We are deeply grateful to Hauser & Wirth Institute for seeing the value of this work and as one of the first UK institutions to receive this support, we feel inspired to continue so that future generations can benefit from this wealth of visual arts practices.”

Letterform Archive ($50,000)

Stewards of important design artifacts spanning thousands of years of history, San Francisco’s Letterform Archive will use the grant to make their docents program a paid program in order to improve recruitment, training and retention of educators who are from marginalized communities. The grant will support the organization's commitment to radical access to their library, which makes a curated collection of over 100,000 items related to lettering, typography, calligraphy, and graphic design accessible in-person and remotely.

“Letterform Archive’s Collections and Exhibition Docent Program facilitates our mission of radical access by training local and global letterform enthusiasts in the art of guiding others through our collection and exhibitions,” said Letterform Archive Collections Programming Manager Sair Goetz. “With generous support from Hauser & Wirth Institute, we can now provide stipends to docents, which enables the program to be a more equitable professional and personal development opportunity. Improving access to our docent program has a ripple effect; docents uncover materials that resonate with their own lived experience, and they share that resonance with visitors, thereby bringing more stories from the archive to life for a wider variety of visitors.”

Visual AIDS ($30,000)

Visual AIDS, the contemporary arts organization committed to preserving and honoring the work of artists with HIV/AIDS and the artistic contributions of the AIDS movement, will use this grant to help fund a permanent archivist position. The only resource of its kind, the Visual AIDS Archive Project and Artist Registry collects, preserves, and provides access to the personal papers, audiovisual materials, publications, and ephemera created, dealing with, or collected by artists living with HIV or those who have passed. Their archival holdings constitute the only extant historical materials for many of these artists.

The current archive includes 25,600 physical slides and over 18,600 digital images from 945 living artists and estates. Hauser & Wirth Institute’s support will allow Visual AIDS to maintain an archivist on staff, who will oversee digitization of materials, catalog accessibility, and create more robust collection management and procedures, to ensure equity in their processes.

“The Visual AIDS Archive was created at the height of the AIDS crisis in 1994 as a community-based initiative to preserve the artwork and legacies of HIV-positive artists,” said Visual AIDS Interim Director Kyle Croft. “Over the last thirty years the Archive has been cared for with love and dedication, but only recently have we been able to hire a Project Archivist to begin to properly organize and catalog our collections. Now, with the support of Hauser & Wirth Institute, we are thrilled to be able to establish a permanent Archivist position at Visual AIDS. Our new Archivist will ensure that our existing collections are as accessible as possible and will help develop our collecting policies so that the Archive can continue to grow.”