A privately held research archive

African and diasporic modernism through networks, institutions, and exchange, 1930–1980.

This archive reads modernism as a system produced through journals, publishers, correspondence, conferences, performance, exhibitions and the movement of objects between people and institutions.

The public site presents selected records from a larger controlled census. High-resolution access, rights status and private acquisition data remain governed separately.

Enter the archive

Selected evidence

Objects as infrastructure

Each record is interpreted by the historical work it performs within the network.

Method

“The question asked of each object is not simply ‘what is it?’ but ‘what does it make visible about the network?’”
Read the research framework