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As the bankruptcy of the University of the Arts and the fallout of its sudden closure last year continue to play out, its institutional records have found a permanent home.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has acquired roughly 1 million items from the UArts archive, including administrative paperwork, correspondence, legal agreements, photographs, student records and a smattering of artwork going back 150 years.

“It’s an extremely important history in the cultural landscape of Philadelphia,” said HSP President and CEO David Brigham. “It goes back to the Centennial celebration in 1876 and it informs dance, music, design, visual art, photography, so much of the art and cultural life of Philadelphia.”

“The footprint of the university is extremely large,” he said.

The physical footprint of the UArts archive is also extremely large: about 650 boxes representing almost 1,000 linear feet of storage space. It is the largest single collection in HSP’s historic inventory.

“We’ve been collecting for over 200 years, so to say that we’re bringing in the largest collection in our entire history is really something substantial,” Brigham said.

Brigham said he and his staff have been working to secure and preserve the UArts archive since almost the moment its board announced the school would close in May 2024. Tentative arrangements had been made with UArts trustees and former staff members, which were later confirmed by a judge’s decision in bankruptcy court.

“In March, the bankruptcy court in Wilmington issued a court order basically liquidating the collection, in a statement which was slightly terrifying in its language,” Brigham said. “It gave the trustees the authority to basically put it all in the dumpster if they chose to do so.”

“We were named in the court order as a likely recipient of the collection,” he said. “So, thankfully, that is what happened.”

Unboxing UArts

Brigham is not sure exactly what is in the collection or even precisely how big it is. His estimates are based on guesswork of how much a typical box can hold. He said HSP will hire two full-time staff members who will likely work for two years to sort it out.

Brigham laid out a few items of interest already discovered in the boxes.

The collection contains mockup mosaic flooring by Edna Andrade, a prominent op art artist who used geometric patterning to create abstract optical manipulations. Andrade taught at UArts for decades.

The sudden closure of UArts sent the Harvard Art Museums into a slight panic, as they had arranged to borrow Andrade works from the UArts archive for an exhibition. Once HSP became the legal steward of the collection that prearranged loan could go through. Those borrowed Andrade items are now part of Harvard’s “Edna Andrade: Imagination Is Never Static” exhibition.

Brigham also showed off a document read to state legislators in the early 1970s by George D. Culler, president of the Philadelphia College of Art, the precursor to UArts.

Culler addressed lawmakers to pitch job training for critical careers in art and design.

“These exacting skills — in graphic design, industrial design, environmental design, photography, film and television, illustration, the fine arts and crafts — are needed by business and industry and by the people of Philadelphia,” Culler wrote. “Now more than ever.”

“He says that we know institutions like ours are vulnerable,” Brigham said. “You might say, ‘Oh, of course he’s saying things like that.’ But now here we are, a year after the demise of this great institution, and we realize that those words are not empty. These concerns are real.”

The roots of UArts spread wide and deep

The widely recognized but unofficial historian of the University of the Arts is Sara MacDonald, who retired from UArts in 2020 as a research librarian. Four years later, when the school shut down, she was not particularly worried about the archive, confident its value would not go unnoticed.

“The school is connected very deeply to the history of the city,” she said. “Because of the art school’s connection to the Centennial, to the city’s manufacturing history, to the industrial drawing education movement and to the cultural fabric of the city.”

MacDonald said most people do not understand that UArts’ roots go back to the 1876 Centennial World Expo and are inextricably tied to the origins of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Then, they were both the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art.

Over the next century and a half, the school split off from the museum and went through a long lineage of changes and mergers before becoming UArts.

MacDonald said that, for some, is a hard pill to swallow.

“People just look at me and I can tell they don’t believe me. They were never housed in the same building, but you can look at the annual reports. They were one institution until 1964, when the art school separated from the museum,” she said. “I think the Philadelphia Museum of Art swept their industrial art beginnings under the rug for quite a long time once they became a fine art museum.”

As the institutions that would become UArts developed, they absorbed arts organizations to turn them into academic departments.

The Philadelphia Dance Academy, for example, was founded by Nadia Chilkovsky in 1944. In 1977, it was absorbed into the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts. The PCPA then merged with the Philadelphia College of the Arts in 1985, which became UArts in 1987.

MacDonald said even the Philadelphia Orchestra is historically connected to UArts, whose music department’s roots went back to the city’s 19th-century music schools, the Philadelphia Musical Academy, founded in 1870, and the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, founded in 1877. They were competitors until merging in 1962, and later became UArts’ music department.

“The Philadelphia Orchestra wasn’t founded until 1900,” MacDonald said. “A number of its members came from the Philadelphia Musical Academy and the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, who had been around for 30 years before the orchestra was founded.“

“I mean, there’s just connections, connections, connections,” she said.

On Nov. 8, HSP will host an open house for former UArts students and faculty, as well as the general public, to show off selections from the archive. The event will include talks, including by Sara MacDonald, and performances.