Overview
BLACC is intended as an institution by and for Black people. BLACC is built to combat the lack of Black representation in the museum and preservation industries in the United States.
According to data from the Mellon Foundation, only 12% of museum professionals in the United States are Black. Of that 12%, only around 4% are curators and conservators. According to the A*CENSUS II All Archivists Survey, only 4% of archivists in archival sectors are Black.
Many Black stories are going untold, unpreserved, or being misrepresented. When it comes to how and when these stories are told, we are not in the room when important decisions are made. BLACC is meant to be a space that trains Black people in conservation, archiving, and curation, fostering the next generation of memory workers and creating a framework for how to decolonize Black archives in predominately white institutions. BLACC doesn’t just save history—it shifts who gets to define it.
Additionally, there is a growing need for spaces that foster the creativity and upward mobility of Black artists, allowing them the room to create with competitive compensation and without censorship. Artists are the storytellers, while archivists, curators, and conservators act as story keepers. We acknowledge that one would not exist without the other, and strive to create a symbiotic relationship between the artist and the preservationist.
Goals
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Digitize and establish the Memorialize the Movement Archive as the basis of our programming with BLACC.
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Decolonizing museum and library studies, curatorial studies, and archival practices by providing a space where Black students can learn from a Black institution that houses a Black archive.
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Creating a fellowship program for college-age Black youth to learn valuable skills in archiving, curation, and conservation informed by cultural practices and lived experiences.
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Fostering the growth of new artists by providing space and funding in the form of an artist residency for them to create new works that will work hand in hand with our fellows in training.
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Provide both artists and fellows with meaningful archival experiences.
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Establish BLACC as a National Hub for Black Protest Archiving and Memory Work.
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Vision
In five years BLACC will be a brick and mortar institution where Black students can learn archival, conservation, and curatorial practices to prepare them for work within these respective fields. The long-term impact would be to change the ways that we educate students in these fields to be more inclusive, decolonized, and take into consideration the experiences and histories of Black people in the United States. With this education, BLACC fellows can go forth and incite radical change both within Black institutions and PWIs. Equipped with the tools to understand Black archives and collections, our hope is that our fellows will lead the work of decolonizing institutions by accurately representing Black history henceforth. Many Black artists lack the tools or resources to archive their work while they are living, resulting in the loss or destruction of their work once they pass on. BLACC intends to address this disparity by pairing artists and fellows, to archive the artists work during the two months of the artist in residency program at BLACC. The outcome will be that the artist gains useful archival resources to help them preserve their work going forward, and the fellows gain one on one experience working with an artist to archive their body of work while they are still living.