About the Archive

Welcome to Washington Project for the Arts’ Digital Archive!

This online archive has been established to preserve and make publicly accessible the history of WPA’s five decades of trailblazing art and advocacy in Washington, DC. 

The archive centers WPA’s programmatic and institutional history, and will house records of hundreds of exhibitions, commissions, and public art projects, and thousands of performances, screenings, and community programs. Assets include installation photos, performance documentation, video transcripts, research notes, oral histories, pdfs of publications, promotional materials, and institutional documents.

The archive also contains Stories, which provide a platform for artists, curators, and others to produce essays, narratives, online galleries, oral histories and other kinds of original content that further activates assets contained herein. Stories bring past conversations and discoveries into dialogue with artists’ current research and project development, underscoring the many ways in which WPA continues to advance intellectual inquiry and community engagement.

The first phase of launching the archive has focused on transferring WPA’s digital assets. This includes approximately 1,160 records from the website for WPA’s 35th Anniversary exhibition “Catalyst: 35 Years of Washington Project for the Arts” (2010, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center) as well as more than 1,000 records from WPA’s social media (2008-present). The phase also includes archiving recently completed projects that exemplify WPA’s current programming model and future direction. (Work in progress!)

The second phase of developing this archive will focus on processing analog records, including over 200 boxes of materials related to WPA’s programmatic and institutional history, which are housed across public collections at the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art (which has physical materials from 1975-1990s) and another 200 boxes in private storage (1990s-2015). More recent physical materials are kept in-house at WPA offices. During the second phase we will also accept donated materials related to past WPA projects and programs. (For more information on donating materials, see How To Contribute to the Archive below.)

No archive is ever truly complete, of course. In the years to come, the WPA digital archive will continue to grow with new assets from current and future WPA projects, as well as more detailed records and documentation of historic projects. 

WPA Digital Archive Development Team

This site is the product of a year-long collaboration between Washington Project for the Arts and Outright, who also developed our main website. 

Washington Project for the Arts, Archives Team

  • Travis Chamberlain – Director
  • Alexandra Silverthorne – Resident Historian
  • Juno Appel – Research Fellow & Archives Assistant
  • Theo Blacklock – Archives Support
  • Gelila Kassa – Archives Support

How to Use the Archive

Home Page

  • Search Bar: You may type any term into the search bar or browse by clicking the magnifying glass and filtering by category (Year, Person, Location, Project Type, etc.). Any assets that include the words in your search will appear, organized first by Project Type (i.e., exhibition, publication, public program, etc.). If words from your search appear in the title, body, or tags of an asset, those assets will populate to your Search Results. You can use filters to further refine your search.
  • Featured Collections & Stories: Here you will find our most recent Stories, produced by artists, staffers, and other commissioned storytellers. Stories activate assets in the archive and are a creative platform for curated narratives and other kinds of content. Expect interviews, oral histories, timelines, essays, online galleries, video and audio content. 
  • Featured Artists: Here you will find a rotating lineup of past WPA artists, often in tandem with our Featured Collections & Stories. 
  • Browse By: You may also browse by any of a number of preselected terms included at the bottom of the Home Page. 

Search Results

  • After performing a search, you will be presented with Search Results that include your search terms in an asset’s title, body, or tags. These results default to being organized first by Project Type. 
  • You can limit and organize your search results by clicking on any of the drop down menus that appear under your search term. Drop down menus include: Year, People, Role, Project Type, Document Type. Selecting items within these categories narrows your search results to share only those things that match up with your search term and selected criteria. 
  • Drop down menus will only include further refining terms if there are assets that have been tagged with those terms. Otherwise, a dropdown menu may appear empty. 

Hamburger Menu (Home Page)

  • The Hamburger Menu appears in the top right hand corner of the Home page as four small squares arranged to create a larger square. It includes “About the Archive” (which you are reading now) and “People.”
  • ”People” lists known staff and board members at WPA since 1975, organized by year.

How to Contribute to the Archive

Are you an artist or curator who has worked with WPA in the past and have materials you’d like to contribute to the archive for inclusion on this site? Or maybe you are a collector and arts enthusiast and have materials you think would be great to include as well. 

We have partnered with The People’s Archive at MLK Library to accept print materials and other ephemera for public research. Select print materials held at The People’s Archive will be digitized and uploaded to this website as our capacity and resources permit.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for how to contribute:

  1. Fill out this form. This will help us flag your donation for future processing and assist with any necessary followup. 
  2. Make an appointment at The People’s Archive—or just drop by—to donate your materials. (901 G St. NW, 4th Floor East, Washington, D.C. Call 202-727-1213 or email peoples.archive@dc.gov)
    1. Artists and curators will create an Artist File to hold any materials related to your work with WPA (and anywhere else in the District, too). 
    2. Let The People’s Archive staff know you would like to crossfile your WPA-related materials to our Org File. They will add a note in WPA’s intake folder to ensure cross-referencing.
    3. Please make copies of materials that you are crossfiling into our Org Folder and make a note on the back to indicate that the originals are in your Artist File. If multiple pages, you may include the most relevant page(s) and make a note of how many pages total are in the original document. (You can also put originals in our Org Intake Folder if you like).
  3. When you’ve completed Step 2, send an email to archives@wpadc.org to let us know your materials have been deposited. 
  4. We’ll review materials, digitize, and upload those materials to this site as our capacity and resources permit.

People