Celebrating Black History Month with Watson Library’s Growing Collection of African American Publications

When the Museum announced its “Commitments to Anti-Racism, Diversity, and a Stronger Community” in June 2020, one of the points made was to strengthen and diversify The Met’s collections and programming. At the same time, Watson Library was also making a commitment to expand our collections of books and reference materials that support The Met’s curatorial staff and research community to include more diverse artists and authors.

Librarian Jared Ash developed a system to identify books by and about African-American artists that were not already held by the library (read more about it in this recent post), as well as a public-facing artist index. For the past few months, we have been working with several other librarians to purchase these books and add them to the library’s collection. For this project, we have been purchasing close to a hundred titles per month. Additionally, in a year when the library has seen significant budget cuts, we were fortunate enough to be aided in building this collection of books by and about African-American artists by the donation of funds specifically for this purpose.

Another of the Museum’s commitments is to increase diversity among the thousands of vendors and suppliers used by The Met. To ensure that our suppliers reflect our community, the Museum has developed a “Supplier Diversity Policy.” For the Museum, a “diverse supplier” is one that has “at least 51% ownership by BIPOC, women, LGBTQ, disabled, and/or veterans.” The policy includes methods to help ensure that our existing suppliers can let us know if they already meet our diversity requirements (I should note that no one is turned away if they do not meet the Museum’s diversity thresholds). The library had already started making inroads in this direction through our mission to acquire books from around the world. However, we are always interested in discovering new sources for reference materials. In the past year, we have sought out POC-owned bookstores and smaller online book vendors to find titles as a way of supporting diverse businesses.

In addition to actively buying more books by and about BIPOC artists, we are also pursuing other means of developing the diversity of our collections. For more than a century, art galleries from around the world have sent their catalogs to Watson Library. In June, parallel to the African American Artists Project, the library launched an initiative to enhance our holdings of African American catalogs by reaching out to over eighty black-owned galleries and to galleries that represent African American artists. Thanks to the generosity of many galleries, we have acquired over 150 publications, including forty digitized catalogs providing researchers with a broad range of contemporary African-American art.

We are especially grateful to Stella Jones Gallery (New Orleans) for the donation of twelve catalogs published between 1997 and 2020, as well as to June Kelly Gallery (New York) for the donation of fifty-seven publications.

We also appreciate the donation of twelve digital catalogs by M. Hanks Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), three digital catalogs from donated by Weiss Berlin (Berlin, Germany); and multiple catalogs donated by Ben Brown Fine Arts (London, England), Skot Foreman Fine Art (New York, NY), Richard Gray Gallery (New York, NY), Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago, IL), Bill Hodges Gallery (New York, NY), Galerie Noir d’Ivoire (Paris, France), Maruani Mercier Gallery (Brussels, Belgium), Galerie Myrtis (Baltimore, MD), and Michael Rosenfeld (New York, NY), among others representing known and lesser known modern and contemporary African American artists.

All of these books are available to request through Watsonline to view in the library when we reopen. We look forward to your visit.