This year all of our major archives were placed in institutions where they will be cared for and be accessible for study. The Helen Balfour Morrison Collection and the Sybil Shearer Collection were gifted to the NEWBERRY LIBRARY and were featured in The Newberry Magazine, Spring/Summer 2019 issue. The Morrison Collection contains hundreds of portraits of “Great Americans,” Chicagoans, and African-Americans in rural Kentucky hamlets, as well as Helen’s papers.
The Shearer Collection includes concert programs, correspondence, memorabilia, costumes, and hundreds of photos of Sybil, both formal and informal, taken by Morrison over their forty-year artistic collaboration. Newberry staff are pleased to have both collections, preserving the interconnectedness of the careers and lives of these two modernist women.
The Morrison-Shearer Film Collection has been placed with CHICAGO FILM ARCHIVES, where for more than ten years MSF films and sound recordings have been carefully restored and preserved. NANCY WATROUS of CFA has been a superb partner, seeking grants and opportunities for showing our films.
Nancy Watrous, Chicago Film Archives
Right: Tracy Goldberg
With her work done, our ARCHIVIST, TRACY GOLDBERG (right), retired at the end of September. How fortunate MSF was when she answered its ad on VolunteerMatch.org eight years ago! She came with related experience and soon became MSF’s archivist. She and her husband have moved to Boulder, Colorado.