Joseph Fiore, Black Mountain Lake Eden, 1954, watercolor on paper, 12 ⅝ × 18 inches. Black Mountain College Collection, gift of the Falcon Foundation, 2012.53.01.22. © The Falcon Foundation
The Asheville Art Museum has received a major grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to digitize the Museum’s hidden Black Mountain College (BMC) Collection materials and create the Digital BMC Collection and Interconnective Timeline. This is one of 18 projects funded by CLIR for the 2019 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards.
The $163,694 award supports this 24-month project. The web-based timeline will provide:
- An object-centric history of BMC and the lasting legacy of its influence through interconnected stories of artists, works, ideas, and place.
- Public access to hundreds of never-before-seen BMC archival documents and literature, works of art, furniture, and more.
- A unique digital resource for scholars, students, and the public, worldwide.
“We are thrilled to receive this award,” says Asheville Art Museum Executive Director Pamela L. Myers. “It’s important to us as an institution to make our Collection as accessible as possible, and this project plays a pivotal role in these efforts.”
At the completion of the project, the Museum will host a webinar symposium that will feature presentations about the newly digitized BMC materials from scholars across the globe and encourage scholastic collaboration across academic disciplines and borders.
The Asheville Art Museum is one of 58 institutions located in 17 U.S. states and Canada that will be involved in the projects, which cover subjects ranging from natural history and biodiversity to indigenous history, public media, and modern art.
This is the fifth group of projects supported by the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards program, which is generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Digitizing Hidden Collections program, successor to the Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives program, supports the creation of digital representations of unique content of high scholarly significance that will be discoverable and usable as elements of a coherent national collection.
