Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky

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.

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