Description of the Ralph Fasanella Collection and Archive at the American Folk Art Museum
The Ralph Fasanella Collection and Archive at the American Folk Art Museum
Since the early 1990s, the American Folk Art Museum has acquired more than one hundred works by the self-taught painter Ralph Fasanella, many of them gifts from the artist and his family. In 2005 the Estate of Ralph Fasanella made a donation of seven large-scale paintings to the American Folk Art Museum, augmenting the institution’s holdings with some of the most distinctive examples from the artist’s corpus. Between 2009 and 2013 the estate gave the museum a major gift of 102 preparatory drawings and sketches, along with a significant archive of Fasanella’s papers, establishing the largest public repository of the artist’s work. The archive, a vast resource for scholarship, includes correspondence, sketchbooks, notebooks, photography, professional records of note, source material, audio-visual media, publications, and clippings.
The Ralph Fasanella Collection and Archive preserves and continues the artist’s legacy of social engagement. It is of particular interest to students and scholars who are completing research in the areas of art history, Italian-American culture, labor rights, social activism, and New York City history.
