Visual artist Marilyn Nance has produced exceptional photographs of unique moments in the cultural history of the United States and the African Diaspora, and possesses an archive of images of late 20th-century African American life.

FESTAC 77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos Nigeria, was the largest cultural event ever held on the African continent. Attended by more than 17,000 people from over 50 countries, FESTAC 77 was for African American participants (whose members represented a continuum from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement and beyond), a symbolic reversal of the transatlantic slave trade. Marilyn Nance’s FESTAC ‘77 collection contains negatives, contact sheets, vintage silver gelatin prints, postcards, digital prints, ephemera, correspondence, textiles, CD's, DVD's flash drives, and hard drives related to Marilyn Nance's role as the official photographer for the North American Zone of FESTAC 77 in Lagos, Nigeria.

Scope of Work: Marilyn Nance and I connected in 2020 to discuss her goal of better facilitating the process of fielding research and licensing requests in her archival collections. I conducted an assessment to determine the current condition and arrangement of the FESTAC ‘77 collection. The outcome of the assessment was a report, an item-level inventory of correspondence materials, and a preliminary finding aid for the collection. As we continue to collaborate, our goal is to make the archival collection more discoverable and accessible to researchers and the general public alike and to provide a roadmap for others looking to build and maintain their own archives.

Published in October 2022, Marilyn Nance’s book, LAST DAY IN LAGOS, stages an in-depth encounter with the FESTAC ‘77 photographic archive. For the book, I compiled four thematic bibliographies: 

• Marilyn Nance in Context

• The Black Arts Movement

• African American Photography in the 1970s

• Black Feminist Artistic and Archival Approaches