Ina Archer, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Summer 2016
My 2016 NYU summer semester was spent as an inaugural Moving Image Archiving and Preservation intern at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). I was happy to share the time fellow MIAP intern, Manon Gray, working with NMAAHC’s Media Conservation Team (and MIAP alumni), supervisor Walter Forsberg (Media Archivist), Jasmyn Castro (Film Conservation and Digitization Associate) and Blake McDowell (Video Conservation and Digitization Assistant).
Established by an act of Congress in 2003, The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture is the 16th venue of the Smithsonian Museum complex. It is the first national museum that prioritizes African American (and diasporic) experience, art, history and culture as the primary lens with which to view the full American story. As the NMAAHC website lede states: “AFRICAN AMERICAN History is OUR HISTORY”.
For the internship period we worked mainly with the Pearl Bowser Collection. The multifaceted Ms. Bower is a cinema historian, film and television maker, author, curator and collector specializing in African American film and video. Bowser was central in the rediscovery and revaluation of vintage African American silent and sound filmmaking but she was also active as a producer and a supporter of contemporaneous black independent film and television production. Bowser has amassed a large collection of films and videotapes, equipment, objects and documents pertinent to black film and media that the museum acquired in 2012.
Our internship was designed with professional development in mind and training that would both anticipate and augment our second year coursework in film and video preservation. By individually shadowing and assisting Jasmyn Castro and Blake McDowell in their respective labs, we had the opportunity to participate at all different points in the workflow for both film and for video, observing the digitization process from beginning to end.
Among other new experiences, we were also given a fantastic and revealing opportunity to participate in the curatorial process by being assigned to write the justification for two 35mm feature show prints, Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee, by William Klein and Killer Of Sheep, directed by Charles Burnett that CAAMA hoped to acquire. Ultimately, not only did we get to attend the justification meeting, we were surprised to be asked to present the justification to the group.The committee motioned and voted overwhelmingly to accept the donation and to add the prints to the NMAAHC education collection!