The African American Art History Initiative is an ambitious program to establish the Getty Research Institute as a major center for the study of African American art history. As part of the project, the GRI is initiating collaborations with partner institutions and scholars, including Andrianna Campbell–a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center–Kellie Jones, Mark Godfrey, Bridget Cooks, Erin Christovale, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.
In addition to acquiring archives and related original sources, the initiative will establish a dedicated curatorship in African American Art History, a bibliographer with a specialty in the subject, annual research graduate and post-graduate fellowships, a program to conduct oral histories of notable African American artists, scholars, critics, collectors and art dealers, and partnerships with other institutions to digitize existing archival collections and collaborate on joint conferences, publications, and research projects
Andrianna Campbell is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she specializes in American art in the modern and contemporary period. Her doctoral research focuses on Norman Lewis and Abstract Expressionism. Alongside her scholarly research, she is the author of essays and reviews on contemporary art for Artforum, Art in America, and Frieze. In 2016, Campbell was a co-editor of Shift: A Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture and a special edition of the International Review of African American Art dedicated to Norman Lewis. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including the Dean K. Harrison Fellowship, the Preservation of American Modernists Award, the Library Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Dia Art Foundation, the Dissertation Writing Fellowship at the New York Public Library and the CASVA Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellowship from the National Gallery of Art for 2016-2017.
