Grants & Acquisitions

Ann-Christe Galloway

Ed. note: Send your grants and acquisitions to Ann-Christe Galloway, production editor, C&RL News, at email: agalloway@ala.org.

The George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida (UF) received a grant award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to expand newspaper digitization efforts and continue participating in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). This is the fifth NDNP award the libraries have received since 2013, bringing the combined project total to nearly $1.5 million. The NEH award will fund the Ethnic Florida & U.S. Caribbean Region Digital Newspaper Project, building on work from previous project phases. During the eight-year period from 2013 to 2021, more than 400,000 pages of historical newspapers published in Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands were digitized and made publicly available online. Over the next two years, the UF project team will continue to collaborate with partners at the University of the Virgin Islands libraries to digitize an additional 100,000 pages from newspapers published between 1800 to 1963. Selected content will include ethnic newspapers published in Florida and the Panama Canal Zone newspapers, and newspapers from the U.S. Virgin Islands. The project will run from September 2021 to August 2023. All digitized content will be text-searchable and freely accessible in the University of Florida Digital Collections (www.ufdc.ufl.edu/ufndnp) and Chronicling America (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/), a site created and maintained by the Library of Congress for the National Digital Newspaper Program.

The Amistad Research Center (Amistad), in partnership with the Rivers Institute of Contemporary Art and Thought (Rivers), has received an award of $500,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support artist archival research residencies at Amistad and the development of new work that circulates material history. Beginning in August 2021 and ending in December 2023, the co-organized artist research residencies will welcome five international artists to New Orleans research. American-born artist and 2020 Mohn Award recipient Kandis Williams uses collage, performance, writing, publishing, and curation in her artistic practice. She explores and deconstructs critical theory around race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism. Founder of Cinémathèque de Tanger, Moroccan-French artist Yto Barrada is recognized for her multidisciplinary investigations into cultural phenomena and historical narratives. British artist Helen Cammock probes social histories through film, photography, print, text, song, and performance to question mainstream historical narratives around blackness, womanhood, wealth, power, poverty, and vulnerability. Alia Farid, a Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican visual artist, works at the intersection of art and architecture to give visibility to narratives that are obscured by hegemonic power. American collage artist Troy Montes-Michie works in assemblage and juxtaposition to engage Black consciousness, the Latinx experience, immigration, and queerness to subvert dominant narratives by placing past and present in confrontation. Additional information about the collaborating institutions can be found at Amistad Research Center at https://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/ and the Rivers Institute of Contemporary Art and Thought at https://riversinstitute.org/.

An image of work by Alia Farid from the Amistad Research Center.