The Black Cultural Research Project: Constructing a Black Arts Archive

Two years after the Oakland Museum opened “New Perspectives in Black Art,” another Bay Area institution inaugurated a project dedicated to the work of black American artists. Proposed in 1970 as part of a “UC Berkeley Black Cultural Center,” the project was intended to create a visual archive of African American creative production since the 17th century. The “Black Cultural Research Project” was to be a comprehensive collection of slides, which would serve as part of the Cultural Center’s library. While the Cultural Center—imagined as a lively, wide-ranging campus focal-point for black visual and performing arts—never came to fruition, its Black Arts Movement commitments lived on in the slide collection project. This paper emerges from archival work completed over the past year with the slides and documents of the Black Cultural Research Project collection. Illuminating a moment of energy and interest in black artists in the early 1970s, this paper also considers institutional frameworks that frustrated the larger project, as well as collaborations that brought the collection into being. Art historian Irene Sawyer, the collection’s compiler, traveled widely, and had contact with artists (Samella Lewis, Romare Bearden), art educators, and archives both independent and affiliated with historically black colleges and universities (Atlanta University, Fisk University). The slide was an important technology in this project of making black art history visible. The slide’s copy-of-a-copy status allowed it to be shared, bringing the personal collections of black artists into the wider archive the Black Arts Movement made it critical to imagine.