Du Bois Institute’s Image of the Black in Western Art added to ARTstor

The W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
(Harvard University) and ARTstor are pleased to announce that they have
reached an agreement to collaborate on the distribution through the ARTstor
Digital Library of approximately 30,000 high quality digital images from
the Du Bois Institute’s Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project
and Photo Archive. Spanning nearly 5,000 years and documenting virtually
all artistic media, the Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project
and Photo Archive is an unprecedented research initiative devoted to the
systematic investigation of how people of African descent have been
perceived and represented in art.

Jean and Dominique de Ménil started the archive in 1960 in reaction to
segregation in the United States. Today, the Archive contains photographs
of nearly 30,000 works of art, each one of which is extensively documented
by the Archive's staff. For the first thirty years of the project's
existence, it focused on the production of a prize-winning, four-volume
series of generously illustrated books, The Image of the Black in Western
Art. Since moving to Harvard University in 1994, the project has focused
on production of the final volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art
and expanding access to the Archive itself.

This collaboration between ARTstor and the Du Bois Institute will make this
rich body of visual material and related scholarship available
electronically for the first time. The audience for these materials will
include not only art historians but also scholars, teachers, and students
throughout the humanities and social sciences, who will value having the
ability to access, browse, and make rich educational and scholarly uses of
this unique corpus of images. In reaching this agreement, Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., and James Shulman, Executive Director of ARTstor, expressed
their enthusiasm in collaborating to use digital technologies to make this
important scholarly resource more broadly available for noncommercial
pedagogical and scholarly purposes. “The Image of the Black Archive has
been known too little for too long,” said Professor Gates, the W. E. B. Du
Bois Professor of the Humanities, Chair of the Department of African and
African American Studies, and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute
for African and African American Research, Harvard University. “We at the
Du Bois Institute are delighted to work with ARTstor to make this essential
archive more widely available to scholars and students in the arts,
humanities, and social sciences.” James Shulman adds, “The Image of the
Black Archive contains thousands of images that could not be made available
in the splendid published volumes devoted to this important subject. This
research project embodies an unusually thoughtful approach to
interdisciplinary visual research. This collaboration should therefore
produce an exceptionally significant resource for scholars, teachers and
students in a wide range of fields. ARTstor is delighted to be able to
play a part in making it available for scholarly and educational
purposes.”