Before I Let Go: Archiving and Legacy Preservation for Artists

Before I Let Go is an archiving and legacy preservation series for artists, providing a hands-on overview of three different methods of preservation: physical, digital and legacy. Led by archivists Tonika Berkley (Billie Holliday Center for Liberation Arts) and MacKenzie River Foy (Valerie J. Maynard Foundation), each session can be taken individually or all together for a more comprehensive introduction to artwork archiving.

• The basics of artist legacy preservation practices
• How to apply archival methods to your own archive
• Where to find resources locally to continue archiving long-term

Tonika Berkley is an archivist, curator, digital humanist, and museum professional based in Baltimore, MD. Tonika is the Lead Archivist for Curating and Archiving Black Baltimore, a collaboration between Special Collections Department at JHU Sheridan Libraries and the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts, as well as the Director of the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts Digital Humanities Lab/Mobile Digitization Lab. She has worked for over 20 years in various African-American cultural heritage and preservation programs and initiatives, including at Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, and The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture in Baltimore. For the past ten years, Tonika has provided research and archival support to several artists that utilize historical frameworks and archives as an additional layer to their artistic practice, such as Paul Rucker, Nicoletta Darita de la Brown, Shodekeh, and strikeWare Collective. 

MacKenzie River Foy is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and culture worker based in Baltimore, MD and raised in Teaneck, NJ. As an archivist at the Valerie J. Maynard Foundation, MacKenzie preserves 20th century Black artworks, documents and ephemera. Her arts criticism, photojournalism and reporting are published by local and international institutions from Momus Art to the Baltimore Beat. She is also the social media manager at Critical Minded, a grant making initiative supporting critics and journalists of color. MacKenzie’s creative writing and visual art practices are community-based, developing free public programs like Oleander School for Negro Publishers, Perfect Memory Radio, and writing workshops at Red Emma’s Free School.

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