The records comprise oral histories conducted with postwar African American artists under the auspices of the Getty Research Institute's African American Art History Initiative. Records date from 2018 to 2022 and will accrue over the duration of the Initiative. Records include digital video interviews of individual artists conducted by the Oral History Center at the University of California, Berkeley and group interviews facilitated by the Getty Research Institute. Contracts, digital and physical transcripts, and images for select interviews are also included.

The Getty Research Institute (GRI) is an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, a not-for-profit educational, cultural and philanthropic organization dedicated to the visual arts. Originally established in 1983 as the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (GCHAH), the objective of the GCHAH was to foster advanced research in art, its history, diversity, and meaning in culture by engaging scholars from various disciplines in the humanities. In 1996, in order to avoid confusion with the soon-to-open Getty Center, the GCHAH was renamed the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities and in 2000, the program's name was shortened to the Getty Research Institute (GRI).

423 GB (1302 files)

The records described in accessions 2020.IA.27, 2021.IA.08, and 2022.IA.50 are available for use by qualified researchers. The following types of records are permanently closed: records containing personal information, records that compromise security or operations, legal communications, legal work product, and records related to donors. The J. Paul Getty Trust reserves the right to restrict access to any records held by the Institutional Archives.