The Leon Levy Foundation Archives and Catalogues Program

The New York Philharmonic is digitizing about 1.3 million pages of material — marked scores, letters, programs, publications, and so on — from its Archives, making them available to scholars and the public over the Internet. The grant covers the “International Era,” from 1943 to 1970, and the materials started becoming available in February, 2011 (here). This is the first phase of a long-range project to digitize almost the entire Philharmonic Archives. This program stemmed from an earlier Foundation grant to the Philharmonic, which supported a project to assess its entire eight million-item collection of paper materials that record the orchestra’s history since its founding in 1842.

With the largest Leon Levy Archives Grant to date, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton has established the Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, which is collecting, processing and making accessible papers of many distinguished scholars who have worked there. Founded in 1930, IAS is an independent academic institution that is regarded as one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry; this institutional archive will allow the papers of its luminaries to remain together.

The Morgan Library & Museum received a three-year grant to upgrade the catalogue of its important collection of historic and literary manuscripts, including works by Edward Gibbons, Charles Dickens,  Teddy Roosevelt, and the Bronte sisters.

At left is a letter written in 1808 by Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra. In it, she says (among many other things) that she is not enjoying Walter Scott’s latest work, Marmion, an epic poem about a sixteenth-century battle between the English and the Scots, although she suspects she should be.

After evaluating the status of archives held by five National Park Service sites in Manhattan, including Federal Hall, with one grant, the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy is using a second Leon Levy Archives Grant to process these collections and make them accessible. The grant will also cover the costs of developing a web catalog and features, like Artifact of the Month, designed to stimulate interest and research in these historical collections. The temporary web portal, the Conservancy’s American History Archives, is live and regularly adding content.

At left is a detail from the deed to the home in Westmoreland Country, Virginia, purchased by George Washington’s grandfather in 1695. Washington was born there in 1732.

The Museum of Modern Art’s archives is being supported by two two-year grants from the Foundation. One paid for the processing of records from the legendary art dealer Paul Rosenberg, who moved to New York from Paris during World War II. Rosenberg handled major works by many of the great artists of the 20th Century, including Picasso, Matisse, Leger, and Braque.

The second grant is allowing MoMA, for the first time, to organize and process the institutional records of P.S. 1, the alternative art space in Queens that has given breakthrough exhibitions to many contemporary artists. It is also supporting MoMA’s efforts to undertake an oral history of P.S. 1. Read about some findings in those archives, about P.S. 1’s earliest days, on the MoMA blog.

 

The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project is using its three-year grant from the Leon Levy Foundation to digitize 80,000 pages of primary-source documents copied from the once-secret archives of Russia, China, Mongolia and former East Bloc countries. Many of these documents have again been blocked to scholars and the public, leaving CWIHP the sole source of a resource critical to the understanding of this important period.

With a three-year grant from the Foundation, the Center for Jewish History, the home of five preeminent Jewish institutions dedicated to history, culture, and art, catalogued some 1,200 linear feet of archives from many collections that document the lives of many Jews in America.

In spring, 2010, the Foundation gave another three-year award that will enable the Center to process thousands of linear feet of its archival collections, to create an institutional archive, and to formally assess the preservation needs of the collections. The grant will create the Shelby White & Leon Levy Archival Processing Laboratory as a dedicated space for this specialized work.

Among the Center’s treasures is the handwritten manuscript of Emma Lazarus’s renowned poem, “The New Colossus” (at left), which is part of the American Jewish Historical Society’s archives at CJH.

 

Poets House used a two-year grant to complete the online cataloguing of its collection of books, literary journals, chapbooks, and other publications that together form the largest, most comprehensive poetry trove available to the public in open stacks anywhere in the U.S.

A second, three-year grant, awarded in spring 2010, allows Poets House to start an institutional archive chronicling its 25-year history, to bring existing catalogue entries up to current standards, and to showcase archival documents in a new exhibition space.

Roundabout Theatre is, for the first time, beginning to assemble and process an archive of its 41-year existence, including productions like “A View from the Bridge,” “Cabaret,” and “Twelve Angry Men” that featured actors like Lynn Redgrave, Jason Robards, and Christopher Plummer.

At left are John Mahoney, Dana Ivey, and Patrick Dempsey from the production of “The Subject Was Roses” during the 1990-1991 season.

Roundabout launched its online archive in December, 2011, and more material is being added daily. Read more about the archive in Broadway World.

With a three-year grant, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is revitalizing its institutional archives, starting with efforts to preserve, catalogue and upgrade storage of its historical documents. It is also searching for and acquiring documents that pre-date 1903, when BAM burnt to the ground. 

At left is a picture of Sarah Bernhardt performing in 1916.

 

The Jewish Museum embarked on a multi-year project to research and document the art objects from Islamic lands in its collection, encompassing more than 1,000 works on paper, in metal, textiles, ceramic, and in horn or wood from across the globe, especially Palestine, Syria, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia.

 Among the most heavily used records in the archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are the 27 scrapbooks full of photos, postcards, menus, pressed flowers and other artifacts she collected on her travels throughout the Far East and the Middle East between 1867 and 1895. With a grant from the Foundation, the museum has catalogued, photographed and conserved these volumes, which were the basis of an exhibition in 2009. They are now available to all online.

 

The Leon Levy Archives Grant to the Frick Collection establishes a long-term fellowship for senior scholars who will use the Frick Art Reference Library and other archival resources to do research aligned with the mission of the Frick’s new Center for the History of Collecting.

Recent fellows include Vivian Barnett, a former curator at the Guggenheim Museum who is working on a biography of Arthur Jerome Eddy, the Chicago collector who famously purchased 18 modern paintings at the landmark 1913 Armory Show, and Dr. Lynn Catterson, who in fall 2011 is doing research on Stefano Bardini, a Florentine art dealer who helped shape the American taste for Italian paintings during the Gilded Age. Margaret R. Laster, who is writing about Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, the only female founder of the Metropolitan Museum, begins her fellowship in January, 2012.

The Center for Khmer Studies/National Museum of Cambodia began a multi-year inventory and cataloguing of the 14,000 objects in the museum’s collection, known as the world’s finest collection of Khmer cultural material, including stone, bronze and wood sculptures, textiles, ceramics, and ethnographic material.

The New York Public Library’s research branch is using a multi-year grant to process and preserve several small collections in its Dorot Jewish Division that illuminate the history of Jewish immigrants in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th Century. A second grant allowed the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to purchase and process the institutional archives of Ping Chong & Company, an innovative theater company.

The archives of Andre Emmerich, a prominent New York dealer in contemporary and ancient art, and a former president of the American Association of Art Dealers, are being processed and made available in the online catalogue of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Since 1934, when it was created by George Ballanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, The School of American Ballet has trained more students who go on to become professional dancers than any other school in the United States. A grant from the Foundation is helping to support SAB’s 75th Anniversary Preservation Project, with the funds designated to preserve and digitize the schools video library of classes and performances since 1980.

The Whitney Museum received a grant to help catalogue Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s pre-1931, pre-museum attempts to support and display the work of American artists — mainly through the Whitney Studio, later called the Whitney Galleries, on Eighth Street in Manhattan.

In 2011, the Whitney was awarded a second grant, this time to process and digitize a selection of artists’ letters, photographs, drawings and emphera, dating from 1934 to 2010, in the Whitney Studio Club and Galleries Collection.

The Poetry Society of America received a grant to classify and assess nearly a century’s worth of archival materials chronicling its history, and to prepare a selection for an exhibition in early 2010, the 100th anniversary of the Society’s founding.

The first and largest writers’ colony in New York City, The Writers Room which provides quiet, affordable room to work for 350 writers received a grant to assess 30 years’ worth of materials documenting its history. They are being catalogued to form a permanent institutional archive, including a small on-site exhibit area.

The Shaker Museum and Library is using its grant to finance the organization of a consortium of public institutions with significant Shaker collections that will digitize, label and manage these materials on the Internet via a centralized search engine, thus promoting and facilitating Shaker studies.

A Leon Levy Archives Grant to Hancock Shaker Village financed the completion of a purchase of manuscripts that describe life at the Shaker “City of Peace” and the completion of the cataloguing of the Village’s 12,000-item collection.