Stewards of important design artifacts spanning thousands of years, San Francisco’s Letterform Archive will use their grant of 50,000 USD to make their docents program a paid program in order to improve recruitment, training and retention of educators who are from marginalized communities. The grant will support the organization’s commitment to radical access to their library, which makes a curated collection of over 100,000 items related to lettering, typography, calligraphy, and graphic design accessible in-person and remotely.
“Letterform Archive’s Collections and Exhibition Docent Program facilitates our mission of radical access by training local and global letterform enthusiasts in the art of guiding others through our collection and exhibitions,” said Letterform Archive Collections Programming Manager Sair Goetz. “With generous support from Hauser & Wirth Institute, we can now provide stipends to docents, which enables the program to be a more equitable professional and personal development opportunity. Improving access to our docent program has a ripple effect; docents uncover materials that resonate with their own lived experience, and they share that resonance with visitors, thereby bringing more stories from the archive to life for a wider variety of visitors.”
Visit Letterform Archive’s website for more information.