Funding for the grant project, entitled “Visual Edge: Sustaining Art as Special Collection,” was announced by the N.C. State Library on June 2. Guilford College’s Art Gallery is co-located in Hege Library and, as of 2020, a component of Quaker Archives and Special Collections. These recent organizational changes provide an opportunity to intentionally invest toward the future within the context of campus priorities and evolving practices within cultural institutions.
The grant project will develop a new strategy for incorporating art as a special collection, prioritizing visual literacy and curricular engagement. This includes attention to collection development and management of current art collections and future priorities aligned with institutional planning under way in 2022-23.
As a part of this work, artist and curator Julie Lohnes will visit Guilford to review current operations and offer feedback to assist the College in this process. Her experience as the Director and Curator of Art Collections and Exhibitions at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., provides a useful comparative model. Grant funding supports a paid internship for a Guilford student to directly assist in this process. The project also includes relevant institutional site visits for librarians and teaching faculty and campus conversations to envision a sustainable future for visual arts in the library inclusive of our increasingly diverse campus community.
LSTA grant awards are made possible by funding from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) as administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources (IMLS grant number LS-252476-OLS-22). LSTA grants are awarded in response to specific needs of public, academic, and community college libraries.
These federal funds are investments that help libraries deliver relevant and up-to-date services to their communities.