- The Black Artist Archive was launched to preserve and celebrate Black art and visual culture.

The nonprofit organization is building a digital and physical repository that documents, collects, and safeguards the legacies of Black artists from Detroit in the Midwest region.

Here to tell us more is the archive's founding Executive Director and CEO, Dr. Kelli Morgan.

Welcome to "American Black Journal."

- Thank you, Stephen.

It's a pleasure to be here.

- What a wonderful idea.

Tell us where you came up with this.

- So it's been brewing for about really and truly my entire career to be honest, yeah.

And I've worked at various museums over the last 11 years.

I came home in '23 primarily because my mother and my aunt are aging and need handles, right?

And I worked at the Wright for about six or seven months, and while there, doing oral histories of so many of the older artists in the city.

And in having those conversations, would come up all the time.

Kelli, can you help me catalog or do you know anybody that can help me digitize?

So by the time five, six people ask, I was like, huh.

- There's an unmet need here, right?

- There's something here.

And I said I have a wide enough network nationally.

I said I think I can get it off the ground.

And so I went to Neil and I was like, "I love you dearly," right?

- Neil at the museum.

- Yeah, I said, "I'm gonna try to do this."

And he was just like, okay.

And so we are a little under a year old.

And it's tough, but we're trudging along.

- And the idea of course is not just to archive, but I would imagine to commemorate and celebrate in some way all of this material that we've created here.

I mean there's something about Detroit and our history that I think distinguishes us in some ways from other places in terms of the people who are here and what they've done.

- Yeah, very much so.

The way I call it like a professional genealogy, so the way people like Dr. Klee Taylor or Marian Stevens, even Dr. Shirley, right?

Who was on earlier went into the schools and just created this demographic, like this critical mass of people who are also doing really well in the arts across the different mediums.

And I kept getting conversations, or not conversations, questions, requests.

Dr. Morgan, I'm looking up this particular artist who was working in Detroit from 1957 and either the Wright had a very small file or no file at all, nothing at the Bentley, nothing at DIA.

And then the more I talked to Ms. Woodson and the more I talked to other artists, I was like oh, the work or the archives, like the evidence, primary sources, right?

Are in these storage units, are in people's homes, which would make sense.

Because people are still alive.

And so I said, "Well how can I create something that actually like delineates that out where people can actually trace these professional ancestors?"

- What do you imagine the end product here?

Where does it live and is it something that just ordinary people will be able to access?

- Yes, so we're in the process of building a very robust website that will actually integrate the database.

So anybody, yes, will be able to search it.

We do want a building.

Yeah.

We're thinking of doing a capital campaign next year because I have my eye on a couple of buildings around the city, yeah, because right now what we're doing is really taking our skillset and the framework to people with archives.

When we are contacted with people who have archives that aren't necessarily in the proper storage space, then I just kind of direct them to the right places that they can get it stored.

But hopefully, it will be a physical repository where people can actually come and see the materials themselves.

- I'm really curious about the interactions with the artists to try to help them organize these things.

Or maybe in some cases they are organized, I guess.

But just that moment of discovery of the value and the importance of what they have I think has gotta be really cool.

- They know.

- They already know, right?

- They super do, Stephen, they already know.

A really good example I can use is I see our partner Ali Wheeler and Alima Wheeler Trap.

They're the stewards of the Black Canon.

And they are the children of James Wheeler, who was a very well known activist historian.

And it's so interesting because they're totally aware, again, of how important the collection is.

But there are certain things that their dad had that they're just like, "that's just junk."

And I'm like, "Don't throw it that away," because they're trying to refine it so that their kids aren't kind of overwhelmed with it.

They're like, "We gotta get this stuff in order."

And I was like, "Don't throw that away."

So there was like this old tobacco can for instance.

And Alima was just like, "That's dad's old swill."

And I was like, "No, it gives people a sense of like who he was."

And she was just like, "Whatever, Kelli."

And so it's so interesting to have those kind kinds of conversations.

In the Black Canon case with descendants, you know.

But then we've been in conversation with Shirley Woodson and (indistinct) Reed about some of Mrs. Woodson's archive.

And actually we were talking just yesterday, and (indistinct) was like, "I got four boxes just of photographs."

And I said, "We can digitize them."

Yeah, and I said we can name it in honor of his father Edsel Reed.

And people can just look through because a lot of times you see like in the Black Canon collection, the candid photography, which has been really cool.

Mr. Wheeler was an actor in "Concept East."

So there are, again, candid photographs of some of the performances with Dr. Wright's mobile museum right there.

- Oh, you're kidding.

- Yeah, it's like, it's so amazing.

Yeah, and so Alima and I, I mean, it's been slow because we have other things, but we're gonna work on a show of that photography to really explain to your point earlier how often Detroit artists were working across genre, across medium.

- With each other, right?

- Yes, in neighborhoods.

- All of this came out of a community, not just individuals.

So very cool project.

We look forward to being able to dig through it.

Yeah, thanks for being here with us.

- Thank you for having me.