Description
Summary: Founded in 1941, the Indiana University Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art ranks among the top ten university art museums in the country, with a collection numbering over 45,000 objects and an annual audience of over 35,000 visitors. In 1982 the museum moved into an I.M. Pei-designed building with three floors of permanent-collection galleries devoted to African, American, Asian, Classical, and European art. The museum closed to the public in 2017 for a $30 million renovation that will result in improved collection facilities, digitally-enhanced galleries, and customized educational spaces including a Works-on-Paper Center. The reopening is planned for the fall of 2019.
The Eskenazi has a significant record of exhibitions, research, and publications in the field of photography. Its first photographic exhibition, billed as an Annual National Photography Show, was held in 1948, one year after the camera-less photography pioneer Henry Holmes Smith (1909-1986) came to Indiana University and the same year in which he launched one of the first courses on the history of photography to be taught in a U.S. college art department. By the time the museum acquired its first photographs in 1963, Smith had already established an Archives of Contemporary Photography, which figured significantly in his teaching throughout his thirty-year tenure at IU. Close to one third of the Eskenazi’s present photography collection was acquired with the purchase of the Archives in 1979.
The Eskenazi now proposes a major effort to fully catalogue and document the Henry Holmes Smith Archive, the largest holding of work by Smith in a public collection, and one of the museum’s most significant sub-collections. Smith was an innovator, theorist, and pivotal figure in fine art photography education, founding the first MFA program in photography at Indiana University. Smith’s pedagogy was informed by a prior stint on the faculty of the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) in Chicago. He was a founder of the Society for Photographic Education, and trained a generation of photography professors including Jack Welpott, Betty Hahn, and Jerry Uelsmann. The Smith Archive, numbering over 5,000 objects, includes the artist’s early drawings, refraction and dye transfer prints, negatives, and matrices. Works collected by Smith range from nineteenth-century photographs and New Deal era prints amassed by Farm Security Administration director Roy Stryker, to photographic prints by Smith’s contemporaries and friends, including Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Ansel Adams.
The Smith Archive project would support a four-year, post-doctoral position for an Assistant Curator of Photography, who would be charged with cataloguing and conducting extensive archival research on the collection under the mentorship of Nanette Brewer, the Eskenazi’s Curator of Works on Paper. In the fourth year of the project, the assistant curator would begin preparatory work on a major retrospective exhibition with the production of a checklist, catalogue proposal, grant materials, and essay draft. Other funded positions for the Smith Archive project would include a student photographer and a student registrar’s assistant, who would be trained by museum staff to accomplish the digitization of the archive and uploading of digital materials into an asset management system and linked, accessible website.
The Smith Archive project would allow the Eskenazi to explore, document and widely share a highly significant feature of its permanent holdings, and lay the groundwork for a seminal exhibition. Creating enhanced academic and public access to the collection will likely spur new interest and scholarship on Smith’s work and career, and his contributions to the study and practice of photography, which have been only superficially acknowledged to date. The project would come at a moment of renewed interest and debate around photographic pedagogy and the role of arts education. It would coincide as well with a resurgence of interest among contemporary artists in alternative and experimental photographic processes.
The proposed grant would underwrite the three project positions, as well as costs related to staff support, digital equipment, and research travel.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a four-year grant of $250,000 to the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University for a Henry Holmes Smith photography collection project.