Brooklyn Academy of Music Launches Digital Archive
Image by wikimedia
Thanks to a million dollar grant from the Leon Levy Foundation, the Brooklyn Academy of Music has been able to digitize their archive. According to the new archive website “The Archives contain approximately 3,000 linear feet of materials dating from 1857 to the present, including newspaper clippings, photographs, books, playbills, promotional material, video, architectural plans, posters, administrative records, production elements, art, and other materials” which translates to over 70,000 items, per The New York Times.
Not all of the archive is available online – the audio and video recordings and the records of former BAM president Harvey Lichtenstein, for instance – but the archive still contains enough interesting material to get lost in. Available for online viewing are posters designed by the likes of Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Harring, Sherrie Levine. There are also playbills, photographs, and promotional materials from the 19th century advertising lost oddities like the “Charles H. Rivers Annual Exhibition of Fancy Dances.”
The archive is likely of more interest to researchers than to the casual viewer, but, for those interested in some ephemera from one of America’s most vital artistic institutions, the archive can be accessed here.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Dive In
-
Fast Forward Is the Passover Seder Zionist?
-
Fast Forward David Sassoon, the Jewish royal designer who dressed Princess Diana, dies at 92
-
Fast Forward For a second straight Passover, Jews mark Festival of Freedom while hostages remain in Gaza
-
Fast Forward Plane carrying freed Israeli hostages and US lawmakers clipped at DC airport
Most Popular
- 1
Opinion My Jewish moms group ousted me because I work for J Street. Is this what communal life has come to?
- 2
Opinion Trump’s Israel tariffs are a BDS dream come true — can Netanyahu make him rethink them?
- 3
Opinion I co-wrote Biden’s antisemitism strategy. Trump is making the threat worse
- 4
Film & TV How Marlene Dietrich saved me — or maybe my twin sister — and helped inspire me to become a lifelong activist
In Case You Missed It
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.