Peter L'Official Receives Graham Foundation Grant

Peter L'Official, associate professor of literature and director of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard, has been awarded a 2026 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The grant will support his project, Invisible Plan: W. Joseph Black’s Black Arts Movement, which uses biography as a method to explore how an unsung Black American architect, W. Joseph Black, navigated the structural impediments that even today confront American architects identifying as Black. The project draws on archival architectural and literary sources to reconstruct not only a life, but the broad, interdisciplinary scope of Black’s unrealized works, which included transformative design plans for Harlem as well as field-altering historical texts chronicling the history of Black builders in America, and which reveal Black’s work as an unacknowledged architectural arm of the multidisciplinary Black Arts Movement. Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts bestows project-based grants to support the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

The American and Indigenous Studies Program at Bard offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of culture and society in the United States. Students take courses in a wide range of fields with the aim of learning how to study this complex subject in a sensitive and responsible way. 
 

Post Date: 06-16-2026