Joy Bivins, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Photo credit: Jonathan Blanc

It’s been four years since LJ spoke with Joy Bivins when she first stepped into her role as director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research division of New York Public Library (NYPL). During that time, Bivins has thoughtfully grown the collections and expanded programming, and this year’s Centennial exhibit and celebration have given her the chance to flex still further. Launched on May 8, 100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity spotlights key pieces from the 11-million-item collection, ranging from a selection of rare books collected by Arturo Schomburg to historical photos of the Schomburg Center and its home base Harlem through the years to a selection of art, sculpture, and memorabilia. Visitors can get a special-edition Schomburg centennial card (or sign up for a new card online), and a full season of programming, beginning with the all-day Centennial Festival held on June 14, promises to bring in library users, researchers, and community members throughout the year.

LJ caught up with Bivins to hear her thoughts on collecting, the importance of archiving with an eye to the future, and what goes into celebrating 100 years of cultural heritage.

LJ : How has your work at the Schomburg, and your mission, changed since July 2021?

Joy Bivins: I don’t think that there’s been much change in the mission. There may be change in the execution of it, because I have more information. Because I started in the pandemic, it was still very difficult to see the full machinations of the Schomburg, the way in which it intersects and interacts with the larger New York Public Library. So, while I remain committed to what my initial thoughts were, because the collections are at the core of the work, I now know things that I did not know then, and that shifts the way I might approach something in this particular moment.

It was very much a moment when you took on the directorship—the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement were shaping a lot of public discourse. How did that affect your work?

The nature of the work and the nature of the institution have always been centering Black experiences and traditions—intellectual, artistic, and otherwise—from both the American or homegrown vantage point and also thinking of it globally. In 2021 we were coming out of the pandemic, but we were still very much in the Black Lives Matter movement, and living in the wake of the loss of George Floyd and other Black citizens to police violence. That was very much top of mind. I don’t know that the position of Black people in the United States is ever safe. It’s always a bit precarious, and I think it remains precarious in this moment. But that never stops the work from happening. It is part of the ways in which we interpret what we do. If we were scared of the moment, we would never do anything. So, I take great solace and inspiration from the ways in which we reacted then and acted then, and the ways in which we’ve reacted and built in the past as well.

How do you integrate contemporary acquisitions with the heritage collection?

Our collecting is alive. It is contemporary in the sense that we collect from people who are producing work now, and also work that’s been produced in the past. We are always in between those two modes of thinking about what is happening now that would be useful for scholars in the future, and what is still relevant from the past that’s useful for scholars now. What makes us unique is our collections, and the fact that we are continuing to collect, and that we’re really thinking, at least in the time I’ve been here, about how can we collect more women creators? How can we lean more into the diasporic nature of our collection? We’ve done contemporary Afro-Mexican photographers. We’ve collected Black women artists and writers. There’s been some really exciting collecting that’s happened in the last decade around culture, music, literature, and the like.

When I started, I asked the curators what was it that they were most interested in, and what did they think were the gaps in the collections that they wanted to address. That’s where women creators came up. Thinking about what I had seen us collecting in the past five years before I got here, it seemed like we really needed to think more diasporically. And because we had this Home to Harlem Initiative—that’s where we got Sonny Rollins and James Baldwin and all the folks who are Harlem-grown—we wanted to expand that a bit more, and we’ve been doing that over the last few years. I would say there’s always a conversation going on between the creators in our collections, because new work is being produced based on the archival material that we hold here.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot—how do these collections really speak to Black intellectual traditions? There are multiple Black intellectual traditions that are represented, whether that be organizational and institution-building, a certain kind of vantage point on scholarship, labor, or poetry. I think there’s that throughline that is in all of our collections, which is: how do we create in spaces where we might not be at the center of the conversation? We may be on the margins, and yet folks are still making work, and they’re still developing ideas that are useful today.

Is there a particular philosophy that you’ve adopted around collecting?

If you’re still using it, you should keep it. I’ve told people that about things that are in their families. I think it’s important for families and individuals to keep things that are meaningful to them.

I don’t think collecting has to be grand, and it is something that most people do. You tend to collect things that do something for you—emotionally, intellectually. In terms of institutions, though, yes, I think that collecting has to be grounded in understanding what you have and what you need to help you to tell a fuller story, maybe not about a particular thing, but about a particular community.

Some of the things that I’ve been reading from my curators have to do with how are we collecting disability? How are we collecting the carceral state? How are we collecting gender beyond some of our traditional ways of thinking about it? At the end of the day, collecting in institutions should be reflecting a fuller understanding of humanity and who might be missing. Because I do think that reading collections are a way to understand who is at the center and who is at the margin.

How did you go about choosing work for the Centennial Exhibition?

Many hands make for light work, as they say. There were certain things I knew immediately that needed to be there that were very much foundational to the beginnings of the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints, which then became the Schomburg Collection, which then became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. There are papers that reach back to our founding, or before we opened to the public, that I knew needed to be there, and then there’s the intellectual foundation of the moment in which the Harlem Renaissance was happening that needed to be reflected as well. I have always thought about the Schomburg Center as being born out of a very particular cultural moment, and that is the intellectual work that was going on during the mid part of the 1920s.

We knew we wanted every collection to be represented. And then there was a part of me that also just kind of wanted to show off. So, there are very rare books, including [Olaudah] Equiano’s Narrative and the Phillis Wheatley first edition [Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral]. And then there’s James Weldon Johnson and Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence, and even some of our newer acquisitions that I knew we wanted to have space for. The three words that follow the colon [in the exhibit title]—collections, community, and creativity—are the ways in which we wanted to center the materials that we chose for the exhibition, and they reflect the core, which is our collections. Obviously, we’re in Harlem, so we wanted to center our neighborhood, and then we wanted to talk a little bit about what’s possible, because of these collections and because of this place, and that’s the creativity of the artwork and the literature that is on display as well.

The exhibition will be open through May of 2026, so make sure you come down and check it out, and keep your eye on the website to see what new programs are coming. We have a lot planned for the fall, including our first annual Jean Blackwell Hutson lecture and award. Jean Blackwell Hutson was our longtime Chief Librarian and curator who made the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture possible. We want to honor her legacy during the centennial year.

Today we are hosting an eighth-grade graduation, and we will be doing that all week long. I think the fact that our neighborhood sees us as a place where they can both come to learn and to celebrate big events in the lives of young people is really important. Not everybody is going to come do research, but through our programming and our exhibitions and other kinds of outreach, that’s how we let folks know what’s here and that they’re welcome, too.

Circling back to the idea of being in a moment, we’re in another now. Over the years, some have defined archiving as an act of resistance—to erasure, to silencing, to forgetting. How do you see it as being important for the Schomburg to be gathering Black American material, putting it together, and bringing it to the community?

I think at its heart archiving is future-oriented act. We tend to think of it as being about the past, because it’s the documents of what happened. But if you spend some time with it, it really is for people who were not there at the moment, whether that is physically or across time. There has to be a level of seriousness with which one understands their own work, or their own life, or their institution’s life, that causes them to say things—and say things, perhaps, as instruction for people who follow them. That is why one could frame it as an act of resistance, because you are centering the self. You are centering the organization. You are saying, “This is important enough for me to keep it for a tomorrow I may never see.” It goes back to this notion of planting trees you may never sit under. I feel like it’s a very affirming act. And for me, when I think about Black people saving anything and affirming themselves, I’m blown away—particularly 100 years ago, 150 years ago. The realities that people were living in were so much different than right now, but that they thought about us is impressive, special.