NEW YORK, NY.- Today, Hauser & Wirth Institute announced three projects for their In-House Archiving Program, working with the archives of organizations The Drawing Center and Dieu Donné, and artist Jesse Murry.

The In-House Archiving Program is one of the ways Hauser & Wirth Institute commits to making artists’ archives more accessible. Through the program, the Institute provides cataloging, preservation and selected digitization of archives as a free service for artists and art organizations. The goal is to significantly increase public access to archival materials. After processing is completed, the archiving partners will either make their archives freely available through their own programs and systems, or donate their archives to a collecting institution that offers robust public access.

“We all know that arts collectives and small arts organizations do vital work to support artists and bring their works to the public,” says Lisa Darms, Executive Director of Hauser & Wirth Institute. “But these organizations are also the holders of important stories and archives. Similarly, individuals often take it upon themselves to care for the archives of artists who have passed away. Our in-house program recognizes this crucial, if often overlooked, caretaking role, and offers free services to help these custodians activate legacies for a broader public.”

Dieu Donné

The Institute will process the institutional archives of Brooklyn-based papermaking organization Dieu Donné. Since 1976, Dieu Donné has been the leading non-profit cultural institution dedicated to serving emerging and established artists through the collaborative creation of contemporary art using the process of hand papermaking. The archive consists of nearly fifty years of records documenting both the organization’s history, and the history of papermaking.

Hauser & Wirth Institute will process the archive in its entirety so that Dieu Donné can make it accessible to researchers.

"As Dieu Donné approaches its 50th anniversary, we have been looking for new ways to preserve our history and share our legacy of hand papermaking in contemporary art,” says Serena Trizzino, Executive Director of Dieu Donné. “We are extremely excited to be selected for Hauser & Wirth Institute’s In-House Archiving program, a much-needed, and perfectly timed initiative that will help us organize decades of Dieu Donné’s documents and ephemera, an archive filled with unique information about our organization and the artists we've worked with over the years. This program will finally enable us to properly share our history with the public."

The Drawing Center

A second project will be to digitize a portion of the institutional archive of The Drawing Center, and facilitate the donation of the full archive to a major research library. The Drawing Center is a nonprofit exhibition space in Manhattan that focuses on the presentation of drawings, both historical and contemporary. The archive comprises historical material that spans from the opening of the institution in 1977 to the present. It includes installation photography, ephemera and press materials from past exhibitions, events and programs that featured significant artists such as Kara Walker, Sol LeWitt, Antonio Gaudí, and Louise Bourgeois, as well as documentation of groundbreaking exhibitions like Plains Indians Drawings 1865–1935: Pages from a Visual History, 3 X Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Martin, and Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs.

The Institute will fund a student fellow from Pratt Institute to help prepare and organize archival exhibition materials for digitization. The Institute will complete the digitization on behalf of The Drawing Center, who will make this vital history available on their own platform in time for their 50th anniversary in 2027.

“The Drawing Center is one of a group of nonprofit arts institutions that have been contributing to the contemporary art conversation in the city since the late 1970s,” comments Laura Hoptman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center. “We can think of no more appropriate way to celebrate a half a century of provocative, enlightening exhibitions and publications than to archivally preserve our history and make it available to a wider public.”

Jesse Murry

The Institute will also process the small but intimate archive of Jesse Murry, a painter, poet, and art critic, who died in 1993 from AIDS-related illness. Murry came to painting through art criticism, and his writings on art, collected in Painting is a Supreme Fiction, continue to have an impact on students today. These materials, lovingly preserved for decades by his friends, include Murry’s personal writings and documentation of his brief but compelling career as a painter.

Hauser & Wirth Institute will process and selectively digitize the archive, and will support the Jesse Murry Foundation in finding a permanent home for donation of the collection.

"The support, expertise, and guidance from Hauser & Wirth Institute ensures that Jesse Murry's legacy will be preserved, and will continue to inspire future generations of artists, writers and scholars," says Peter Stevens, President of The Jesse Murry Foundation. "The archive, though small, will stand as an important contextualizing resource for the rich body of work that he created in his tragically short, yet extraordinary life."

“Jesse Murry was a generous and brilliant writer, painter, teacher, and philosopher,” says artist and Secretary of The Jesse Murry Foundation Lisa Yuskavage. “His spirited nature now being preserved by Hauser & Wirth Institute is so important for the future generations of young minds that will want to know more about his legacy.”

The In-House Archiving program is a natural complement to Hauser & Wirth Institute’s Grants to Organizations. While the grants support community groups and arts organizations to expand access to their archives on their own terms by enabling them to keep materials within their own communities, the Institute recognizes that not everyone has the time, space or resources to do this work themselves. The In-House program also acknowledges that the institutions that collect are also in need of support. Even the largest research libraries can have significant processing backlogs, which hinders access to important materials. By stepping in to offer these services, the Institute accelerates access and draws awareness to the need for more philanthropy to support the fundamental workflows of memory work.