This exhibition is organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Carol S. Eliel, Senior Curator of Modern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The coordinating curator at the Morgan Library & Museum is Rachel Federman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings.

Betye Saar: Call and Response is made possible with lead corporate support from Morgan Stanley and lead support from the Ford Foundation. Additional support is provided by Agnes Gund; Louisa Stude Sarofim; The Lunder Foundation – Peter and Paula Lunder family; Francis H. Williams and Keris Salmon; the Terra Foundation for American Art; and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

An exhibition organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in collaboration with the artist and the Morgan Library & Museum.

David Hockney: Drawing from Life is made possible by Mr. and Mrs. Robert King Steel and Katharine J. Rayner. Additional support is provided by the Rita Markus Fund for Exhibitions, with assistance from Dian Woodner and David and Tanya Wells.

Poetry and Patronage: The Laubespine-Villeroy Library Rediscovered is made possible by T. Kimball Brooker, with assistance from Roland and Mary Ann Folter; Jamie Kleinberg Kamph, Stonehouse Bindery; Jonathan and Megumi Hill; Martha J. Fleischman; and Professor and Mrs. Eugene S. Flamm.

Conversations in Drawing: Seven Centuries of Art from the Gray Collection was organized by The Art Institute of Chicago in cooperation with the Morgan Library & Museum.

The exhibition is made possible by an anonymous donor, with additional support from the Charles E. Pierce, Jr. Fund for Exhibitions, and assistance from Mr. and Mrs. Clement C. Moore II and Hubert and Mireille Goldschmidt.

The Morgan Book Project, collaboratively developed by Morgan Education staff and the New York City Department of Education, was offered for the eleventh year. The program served approximately eight hundred students from twenty-four schools. Thanks to a generous grant from Marina Kellen French and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, the program was offered free of charge to students from public schools.

The Morgan Book Project hosted two Summer Institutes for Teachers and a Technical Support Meeting. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the annual awards ceremony could not be held at the museum. However, participating students were celebrated with a video compilation of highlights of their artwork and visits to the Morgan, as well as a blog post, both of which were shared on the Morgan’s website and social media platforms.

The Morgan Book Project is made possible by a generous grant from Marina Kellen French and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

The Morgan’s public programs feature distinguished artists, writers, and scholars in conversation with curators, conservators, and other staff. These programs illuminate our collections, exhibitions, and DEAI initiatives. In fiscal year 2021, these programs were offered virtually and reached over eighteen thousand households.

On Monday, December 7, 2020, the Morgan’s Director, Dr. Colin B. Bailey, joined Dr. Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, for a discussion moderated by Philip S. Palmer, Robert H. Taylor Curator and Department Head of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. Dr. Bailey and Dr. Hayden discussed the genesis of their institutions’ collections and current missions; the challenges of physical custodianship in a digital age; and the roles played by the various directors of each institution, notably the Morgan’s inaugural Director, the African American librarian and scholar Belle da Costa Greene.

This discussion is one highlight from the many programs offered in fiscal year 2021. For a more complete list of programs, visit the Morgan’s website and YouTube channel.

The Morgan’s music program features concerts ranging from early to contemporary music performed by internationally renowned and emerging artists. Offered virtually this fiscal year, many performances were recorded in the Gilder Lehrman Hall and shared with the Morgan’s digital audience.

The Morgan’s relationship with Young Concert Artists is an important component of our music program. Young Concert Artists is a New York–based nonprofit dedicated to supporting and launching the careers of talented young musicians from around the world. In this performance, recorded on February 23, 2021, in the Gilder Lehrman Hall, YCA pianist Maxim Lando performs the rarely heard Jean Sibelius Piano Sonata in F Major, Op. 12, and Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Sonata in E-flat Major. This is one highlight from a number of YCA performances hosted at the Morgan; for more, see the Young Concert Artists playlist on the Morgan’s YouTube channel.

Every Friday, the Morgan welcomes visitors to enjoy exhibitions, concerts, lectures, and more free of charge. The Free Fridays program brings thousands of visitors to the Morgan each year, and plays an important role in the Morgan’s efforts to increase access to the institution and its offerings.

As soon as the Morgan reopened in September 2020, Free Fridays resumed, welcoming thousands of visitors back to the museum and library. These visitors enjoyed the Morgan’s offerings as well as live jazz music in the Gilbert Court.

In March 2020, the Morgan launched an e-newsletter and corresponding online resource, The Morgan, Connected, to keep in touch with the Morgan community during the pandemic-induced temporary closure. Continuing after the Morgan reopened, the newsletter and digital portal became a way to re-engage with the archives and spotlight the Morgan’s offerings in a new medium. The Morgan, Connected went on to win Apollo magazine’s award for Digital Innovation of the Year in November 2020. The newsletter currently has over fifty thousand subscribers and the online portal was visited by sixty thousand users in fiscal year 2021.

In spite of the unfamiliar conditions imposed by COVID-19, the conservators, fellows, and preparators at the Thaw Conservation Center continued their work to preserve the Morgan’s collections, while making them accessible through exhibition, research, and public outreach. Working remotely from March through mid-August, staff pursued research and database projects, updated and revised essential departmental records and procedures manuals, contributed essays to the Morgan’s blog, and appeared in virtual programs such as lectures, symposia, and social media events. Research, writing, and lectures covered a broad range of topics and works from the collection: the Morgan’s striking fifteenth-century manuscript known as the Black Hours; the drawings of Al Taylor; medieval methods of parchment repair; micro-CT scanning of a sixth-century Coptic manuscript and its binding; and materials and techniques observed in Persian and Indian miniatures.

From March through July, when the Morgan was closed to the public and most staff, conservators visited the campus regularly to check on physical conditions in the galleries and vaults, while also monitoring environmental conditions remotely through our web-based datalogger system.

In mid-August, with the necessary safety protocols in place, conservation staff resumed on-site work in anticipation of fall gallery installations Betye Saar: Call and Response and Poetry and Patronage: The Laubespine-Villeroy Library Rediscovered, as well as to prepare collection items for outgoing loan. Work continued on a long-term collections preservation project, the rehousing of the Maurice Sendak bequest, which comprises drawings and set design models for five operas, including The Magic Flute, The Nutcracker, and Where The Wild Things Are. As always, new acquisitions from all curatorial departments were examined, documented, treated, and safely stored, in readiness for future exhibition and research.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, from March through September 2020, the Sherman Fairchild Reading Room transformed its in-person operation to provide research services remotely to scholars across the globe. During these difficult times, the Morgan’s librarians swiftly adapted to working from home and continued to fulfill a myriad of researchers’ needs.

Librarians responded to numerous inquiries from academics, curators, students, artists, writers, and independent researchers regarding collection items across all curatorial departments. Notable research topics included the culture of winemaking in the Middle Ages; original musical compositions inspired by African American poetry; the life and works of American fashion and commercial photographer George Platt Lynes; the House of Morgan’s financial and business history during the 1920s–1930s; and nineteenth-century international law in the writings of American lawyer, jurist, and diplomat Henry Wheaton.

After implementing new safety protocols for researchers and staff, the Reading Room reopened with a reduced schedule and limited capacity in September 2020, one of the first reading rooms in New York City to do so.

The Reading Room also welcomed back its CUNY Graduate Center Research Fellows, albeit remotely. The fellows worked on a variety of topics, including unpublished correspondence from John Ruskin; the world of the Ballets Russes; and extra-illustrated memoirs of the life of British actor John Philip Kemble, Esq.

In addition to hosting virtual classes for the Fashion Institute of Technology and Brown University, the Reading Room strengthened its outreach efforts by participating in the Morgan’s first College Career Chats.

As part of our critical cataloging initiative, outlined in the Statement on Critical Cataloging on the Morgan’s website, much work was devoted to the re-examination of collection descriptions in CORSAIR, the Morgan’s collection database. Many updates to records involved word choice, additional access points, and contextual notes that address critical concerns and facilitate research on underrepresented groups. Highlights such as the creation of records for more than eighty titles associated with the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), including items from her personal library, and the cataloging of over five hundred previously uncataloged letters by and to Baroness Marie Blaze de Bury (1813–1894) also reflect our focused attention on cataloging collection items related to women and BIPOC authors and artists.

Digitization highlights include the complete digitization of many works from the collection: a manuscript with prints by Albrecht Dürer for the exhibition Imperial Splendor: The Art of the Book in the Holy Roman Empire, ca. 800–1500 (MS M.1218); a fourteenth-century manuscript of Dante’s Divina commedia for the University of Naples Illuminated Dante Project (MS M.676); a 1481 Hungarian manuscript, the Kálmáncsehi-Liechtenstein codex (MS G.7); the drawing album of Christina Chalon (1984.40:1-106); an autograph manuscript of John Locke’s An essay concerning human understanding (MA 998); William Blake’s The Pickering Manuscript (MA 2879); a twenty-eight-page letter by John Keats (MA 212); and a second edition of Richard I, King of England, a romance printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1528 (PML 20931). A special highlight of the year is the entry of over 1,600 digital images, chiefly beta radiographs, into the Morgan’s digital asset management system.

Despite challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Morgan Library & Museum sustained many of its fellowships during fiscal year 2021. The Morgan’s fellows continued their work and training in a hybrid model throughout the year.

In 2021, the Morgan was proud to launch the Belle da Costa Greene Curatorial Fellowships, the keystone in the Morgan’s multifaceted efforts to build a career pipeline for emerging professionals from groups that have been historically underrepresented in curatorship, librarianship, and art leadership. The fellowships are named after the Morgan’s inaugural Director, Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950), a prominent librarian, scholar, and cultural leader of African American descent. Each full-time, two-year fellowship equips emerging professionals with a strong working knowledge of museum and special collections library operations, together with resources and mentorship to support them in their careers.

Edith Gowin Curatorial Fellowship in Photography
Made possible by a generous grant from Jane P. Watkins

Samuel H. Kress Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the Drawing Institute

Moore Curatorial Fellowship in Drawings and Prints
Made possible by a generous grant from the Indian Point Foundation

Rudin CUNY Undergraduate Internships*
Made possible by a generous grant from the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc.

Sherman Fairchild Foundation Post-Graduate Fellowship in Conservation

Pine Tree Foundation Post-Graduate Fellowship in Book Conservation

Themis Brown Internship in the Sherman Fairchild Reading Room*
Made possible by the Themis Anastasia Brown Memorial Fund

Belle da Costa Greene Curatorial Fellowships
Made possible by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence R. Ricciardi 

* Positions that were vacant during FY21.