Edith Halpert and some of her artists featured in Life magazine in 1952

The Terra Foundation for American Art recently donated $3.1 million to the Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution.

Fund are slated to support digitization of the archive’s collections over the next five years. The gift also supports a new full-time position to develop educational initiatives with the collections.

The archives have so far digitized about ten percent of its holdings. The inevitable plug: I depended on the archives’ records while researching and writing Edith Halpert’s biography, The Girl with the Gallery, based on the archives’ Downtown Gallery records.