Preservation Assessment for Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists' Residency

FAIN: PG-280800-21

OxBow (Saugatuck, MI 49453-0216)
Shannon Stratton (Project Director: January 2021 to May 2023)

A preservation assessment, rehousing and preservation plan, and recommendations for training in support of the archival collections of the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, the oldest art school in the Midwest. The collections are housed in three locations in Michigan and Chicago and include photography of student life at Ox-Bow from 1910 to the present; handmade posters, brochures, zines, and ephemera from students such as Jenny Holzer and Martin Puryear; correspondence, notes, journals, and papers from founders Frederick Fursman and Walter Marshall-Clute and directors Ellen Lanyon and Elsa Ulbricht; and paintings, prints, drawings, glass work, and sculpture by artists such as Rudy Pozzatti, Vera Klement, Mike Glier, and Peter Mars. Collections are currently used in courses as well as exhibitions on site. Following the improvements to preservation and collections management that this award would support, the organization plans to make the collections further accessible to researchers and scholars outside the Ox-Bow community. The project would also include the purchase of basic preservation and rehousing materials.

The purpose of this project, if chosen and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation Assistance Grant, is to assess and evaluate the archives of the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency (Ox-Bow), through a Preservation Assessment for organizational purposes of moving, rehousing, preservation, and preparation for possible future disposition, display, and scholarship. This project aims to provide best practice guidance on structuring Ox-Bow’s archives to consider past and future collecting practices, a thorough and thoughtful condition assessment, and subsequent strategic planning to map a larger trajectory for the archives including the development of training. This project will honor the valuable and important archival documents created by students, faculty, artists, and programs at Ox-Bow within the greater context of arts education in the United States.