Although Avery Library is closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our librarians and archivists are still busy at work providing reference services, supporting teaching, and processing collections. Most recently, Archivist Pamela Casey in Avery’s Drawings & Archives department published the finding aid for the Project Photographs collection in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. This collection represents the bulk of the photography in the archive, with over 32,500 photographs, negatives, slides and other image materials documenting nearly 500 architectural projects by the renowned American architect. It documents Wright’s built work, unbuilt projects, architectural exhibitions, and the architecture of his home and studios such as Taliesin in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona.

Since the acquisition of the archive in 2012 by Columbia University and The Museum of Modern Art from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Avery archivists have been hard at work processing its vast collections. Given its size and scope, the archive was divided into distinct collections by format type. Collections currently open for research include the Architectural Drawings, Books and Publications, Correspondence, Exhibition Files, Fellowship Talk Transcripts, Wright’s Manuscripts, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright’s papers, Project Specifications, Taliesin Associated Architects (TAA) records, TAA Projects in Iran, and most recently, the Project Photographs. Finding aids for these collections are findable in CLIO and on the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archival Collections overview, and material can be consulted in person in our Drawings & Archives reading room, once we are back on site and able to welcome patrons once more.

In addition, the audio-visual material in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, including the Films and Oral Histories, are in various stages of digitization. We hope to make these and the remaining collections still in process, including the Personal and Taliesin Fellowship Photographs collection, which contains over 10,700 photographic items depicting Wright’s friends, family, and collaborators, as well as the life of the Taliesin Fellowship, available to researchers later in 2020 and in 2021.