Grants and Acquisitions

David Free

Grants

The Library of Congress (LoC) recently announced that six awards totaling nearly $400,000 have been awarded from the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative through a program available to higher education institutions and libraries, archives, and museums. The program is part of the Of the People: Widening the Path initiative. The 2024 awardees will use these funds to create projects that offer creative approaches to the library’s digital collections and center on Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic or Latino studies.

Recipients include Angelo State University ($69,999.06) for the project “All History Is Local: Celebrating the People of West Texas,” the University of Houston-Downtown ($69,084.67) for “Discovering Afro-Latino Heritage: A Reflective Story Map Project to Enhance Student Belongingness and Learning,” Trustees of Indiana University ($68,154.48) to fund “Connecting Collections: Indigenous Identities in Edward Curtis and Joseph Dixon Materials,” and more.

Launched in January 2021, Of the People: Widening the Path is a multiyear initiative to connect LoC more deeply with Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and other communities of color. Supported through a gift from the Mellon Foundation, it provides new opportunities for more Americans to engage with the library and add their perspectives to the library’s collections. Learn more at https://www.loc.gov/programs/of-the-people/.

Acquisitions

The Beauford Delaney Papers, acquired by the University of Tennessee Libraries in 2022, are now available to researchers. The collection consists of family, personal, and professional correspondence; photographs; sketchbooks and notebooks; artwork; exhibition material; biographical records; and printed material created or collected by the Knoxville-born, African American artist Beauford Delaney (1901–1979). He is widely regarded as one of the major modernist painters of his time. His brother is Joseph Delaney, another well-known modernist painter.

In addition to material related to the production of Delaney’s artwork, the collection includes correspondence with influential artists and gallerists such as Palmer Hayden, Lawrence Calcagno, James LeGros, Dorothy Block, Darthea Speyer, and Joseph Delaney; the writers James Baldwin, Henry Miller, and James Jones; and other cultural figures. Researchers can learn more about the collection and use a finding aid at https://scout.lib.utk.edu/repositories/2/resources/5353.