Guide to the Papers of African American Artists in the Archives of American Art

• Introduction
  
• Highlights: Ten Collections
  • Charles Henry Alston
  • Edward Mitchell Bannister
  • Romare Bearden
  • James Hampton
  • Palmer Hayden
  • William H. Johnson
  • Horace Pippin
  • Henry Ossawa Tanner
  • Alma Thomas
  • Charles White
• Additional Collections and Oral History Interviews
  

Introduction

The Archives of American Art, founded in 1954, has assembled the world's largest collection of material documenting the visual arts of the United States. Affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution since 1970, the Archives gathers, preserves, and makes available to scholars the original records of American painters, sculptors, craftsmen, collectors, and dealers, as well as those of critics, historians, curators, societies, and institutions concerned with art in America.

Among the Archives' collections are the personal papers of more than fifty African American painters, sculptors, and printmakers from the late 19th century to the present. Included are Horace Pippin's illustrated memoir of his military service in France in World War I, Palmer Hayden's sketchbooks of his studies abroad, William H. Johnson's scrapbook of clippings, photographs of Alma Thomas, and the correspondence and writings of Henry Ossawa Tanner, Romare Bearden, and Charles White. The Archives also has more than seventy tape-recorded interviews from 1964 to the present of such artists as Sargent Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Hughie Lee-Smith, Howardena Pindell, and Richard Hunt.

At the Archives of American Art the struggles, accomplishments, and contributions of African American artists are revealed in the records of galleries and organizations and in artists' papers. Such subjects as the expatriate experience, racial discrimination in the arts, the exploration of an African heritage, mainstream success, and the impact of New Deal art patronage are well documented.

Augusta Savage with her sculpture Realization done for the Federal Art Project, ca. 1938. Photograph by Herman. Photographs of Artists Collection One.

The following ten collections and succeeding lists of papers and oral history interviews represent a sampling of primary sources at the Archives of American Art.

Microfilm is available at the Archives of American Art's' Research Centers, as well as through interlibrary loan. Papers that have not been microfilmed are available only by appointment at the Washington office. Oral history interviews may be consulted at the Washington office with advance notice, at any regional center, or through interlibrary loan. Go to Ask US for more information or to contact AAA's Reference Staff.

–Liza Kirwin