Funding Will Preserve Historic Collections, Expand Access to Art and Create More Opportunities to Celebrate the Underrecognized Achievements of Black Artists
Baltimore — Morgan State University has received a $235,000 grant from the Getty Foundation—one of the world’s leading cultural and philanthropic organizations dedicated to advancing the visual arts—to preserve, digitize and expand access to its institutional archives and related historical records documenting the University’s Department of Fine Arts and its first two African-American presidents. The award was granted through the Foundation’s Black Visual Arts Archives initiative, a national multi-year program designed to increase awareness of Black artists and arts organizations by supporting the surveying, processing and digitization of materials related to Black art in the United States.
Morgan State, Maryland’s largest Historically Black College or University, is one of only eight institutions nationwide selected to receive funding as part of the initiative’s latest round of grants, which distributed a total of $1.8 million. The latest grants bring the Getty Foundation’s total investment in the Black Visual Arts Archives initiative to $4.5 million since 2022, supporting 20 projects at libraries, museums and universities nationwide. Morgan’s participation places the University among a distinguished group of institutions working to preserve and elevate Black artistic and cultural history through archival stewardship and public access.
“This award represents an important investment in preserving Morgan’s rich cultural and educational legacy,” said Ida E. Jones, Ph.D., associate director of Special Collections and University archivist at Morgan State University. “By digitizing these collections, we are ensuring that the stories, achievements and contributions of our artists, educators and institutional leaders remain accessible for future generations.”
Morgan has a rich history of artistic achievements that have advanced the Black community. At the time of its inception, in 1946, Morgan’s Department of Fine Arts served as a sanctuary for domestic and international visual and fine artists of varying skill levels; arts patrons and connoisseurs; and budding arts educators for K–12 students in a racially segregated city. Visual and fine arts instruction at Morgan elevated racial pride and spawned works ranging from representations of military service personnel to depictions of prominent Marylanders such as Frederick Douglass.
Located in the University’s Murphy Fine Arts Center, the James E. Lewis Museum of Art — named after a founding departmental instructor at Morgan State — holds the historic distinction of being the first institution in Maryland to promote African and African American artists and serve as a showcase for their work, displaying works by Morgan State faculty, students and guest artists.
Libraries, universities, museums and other public spaces preserve important records of Black contributions to the visual arts in the U.S., ranging from individual artists’ papers to institutional records documenting exhibitions and educational programs. However, many of these archives have been difficult to research, often because the collections are dispersed, hard to find or not yet formally processed.
Through the Getty-funded project, Morgan’s Beulah M. Davis Special Collections will process and digitize the papers of James E. Lewis, as well as the papers of Morgan’s first two African American presidents: Dwight O.W. Holmes (1937–1948) and Martin D. Jenkins (1948–1970), who were instrumental in supplying educators to the Baltimore public school system. The effort will help safeguard historically significant materials while making them more accessible to researchers, scholars and the broader public.
In addition, the archival team is integrating oral histories to offer a fuller narrative of the Fine and Performing Arts Department’s contributions to visual arts education. The project also includes a digital exhibition and LibGuide (a web-based, curated research guide), about the history of visual arts on campus, and a searchable collective access database that will be integrated into the library’s Special Collections website, enabling researchers and the public to explore newly digitized materials.
Once curated, the collection will be housed in the Beulah M. Davis Research Room, located on the third floor of Morgan State’s Earl S. Richardson Library. The Research Room houses all available physical and historical special collections of the University, including rare books; faculty and student publications; faculty document collections; a faculty-donated art, artifacts and sculpture collection; as well as Morgan dissertations and theses.
Over the years, Morgan’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts established a pedagogical foundation that drew upon African folk culture and retentions to foster a distinctive African American artistic expression. Today, it is a degree-granting unit within the College of Liberal Arts, housed in the state-of-the-art Carl J. Murphy Fine Arts Center and offering majors and minors in Music, Musical Theatre, Theatre Arts and Visual Arts.
About Morgan
Morgan State University, founded in 1867, is a Carnegie-classified high research (R2) institution offering more than 150 baccalaureate, master’s degree, doctorate and certificate programs. As Maryland’s Preeminent Public Urban Research University, and the only university to have its entire campus designated as a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Morgan serves a multiethnic and multiracial student body and seeks to ensure that the doors of higher education are opened as wide as possible to as many as possible. For more information about Morgan State University, visit www.morgan.edu.
Media Contacts:
Larry Jones, Dell Jackson or Cheryl Stewart for Morgan State University PR
443-885-3022
