New Grant to Explore Black Print Culture Collections

A project exploring print cultures of the African diaspora was awarded a $20,000 seed grant from the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2) at Washington University. “Black Paper: Book Arts and Print Culture in the African Diaspora” examines the formations of Black print cultures in the United States and Africa through the collections of WashU Libraries. Black Paper is an exhibition project slated to open in the Thomas Gallery in John M. Olin Library in January 2029.

Led by Chris Dingwall, assistant professor at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and Themba Mbatha, assistant professor in the Departments of African and African American Studies and English (by courtesy), the exhibition project will span the era of transatlantic slavery to the present and showcase a wide range of print forms from abolitionist publications to mass-marketed magazines such as Ebony and Drum. Dingwall and Mbatha will collaborate with Cassie Brand, the curator of rare books in the Libraries, to identify and survey Black-made books and prints held across the Rare Books Collections, Olin Library, and the Dowd Illustration Research Archive. Addison Conn, a doctoral candidate in the English Department, will serve as a research assistant on the project. Materials from the Libraries’ collections published during the era of decolonization will be a key feature of the exhibition. These include Black literature from the Broadside Press in Detroit and the Heinemann African Writers Series based in London.

“At its core, Black Paper is imagined as a reparative and generative exhibition project. It presents several opportunities for collections and curriculum development, scholarly and public programming, and publication,” write professors Dingwall and Mbatha.

This multidisciplinary collaboration with the Libraries will result in an in-depth bibliographic inventory of Black print culture holdings across WashU and other activities that will support the Libraries’ ongoing efforts to highlight and preserve Black book arts while identifying areas of strength for development through digitization and book purchases.

“We are very excited to collaborate on this grant project. The research done by Professors Dingwall and Mbatha will not only allow us to learn more about our collection, but will also be used by the Libraries to enhance catalog records and therefore the findability of Black authors, designers, and book makers,” said Brand.