Grant Projects

The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art announced that it has received a $575,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to support a three-year African American Collecting Initiative. While the Archives has collected the papers and oral histories of important figures in African American art from its founding in 1954, the grant will advance the process of building and strengthening the collection. 

A collection of 400 oral history interviews with artists and arts administrators involved in aspects of government sponsorship of the arts in the 1930s.

A collection of thirty interviews of people who had firsthand knowledge of Mark Rothko.

An initiative to collect oral history interviews of twelve individuals in the circle of Viola Frey.

Image: Viola Frey with monumental figures and paintings in her studio, Oakland, CA, 1987. Image courtesy of M. Lee Fatherree; artworks by Viola Frey © Artists' Legacy Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY 

An initiative to collect twenty-five oral history interviews with visual artists, art writers, curators, and other key figures in the art world who were active at the height of the AIDS epidemic.