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PROJECTS
The Meserve-Kunhardt Collection
The Foundation is devoted to the permanent preservation and dissemination of the
Meserve-Kunhardt Collection, a private collection of photographs, artifacts, and documents from 19th
and early 20th century America. The collection was begun in 1897 by Frederick Meserve and contains
photographs by Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and other early photographers.
In 2004, the NEH awarded the Meserve-Kunhardt Collection a Save America's Treasures grant, declaring that "the collection
is an essential tool for Lincoln scholarship and for studying American cities and social movements." With this grant and
other funding, the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation is preserving the collection and making it available to the public as a
tool for many areas of scholarship.
The Gordon Parks Collection
The Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation (MKF) announced that it has created a new division called The Gordon Parks Foundation, which will be dedicated to the preservation of photographer, author and film director Gordon Parks1 ground-breaking creative work. Parks is known to many for his photo essays in Life magazine, his direction of the 1971 film Shaft, and for his autobiography The Learning Tree.
Parks was a poet, a composer and in 1969 became the first African American to direct a major Hollywood production, which was a film adaptation of The Learning Tree. Gordon Parks died in March 2006 and was a very close friend of MKF Founder and former Life magazine managing editor Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., who died just two weeks later.
Parks and Kunhardt first met as colleagues at Life magazine in the early 1950s were they became close friends sharing the same passion for photography. Through the years their friendship grew and now their love of photography and the arts will be carried on through MKF and the Gordon Parks Foundation. The Gordon Parks Collection will be managed by Peter Kunhardt, the son of Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr.
"It is an honor to preserve the work and legacy of Gordon Parks who was not only an American treasure but a friend," said Peter Kunhardt, President of The Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation. "I am pleased that my father1s vast collection and his best friend1s work will be preserved together."
"This is exactly what Gordon hoped for," said Gene Young, his former wife and executor of his estate. "His work will be in good hands and we are all going to work hard to make it available for future generations."
The Dorothy Kunhardt Collection
The Dorothy Kunhardt Collection is the comprehensive archive of the creator of Pat the Bunny, the ground-breaking, "touch-and-feel" book published in 1940 to immediate and enduring success.
Dorothy Turner Meserve (September 29, 1901 Ð December 23, 1979) was born in New York City, the first of three children of Frederick Hill and Edith Turner Meserve. She attended the Brearly School in Manhattan and Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. After graduating in 1923, she traveled the world with best friend, Kay Strauss. In 1925 Dorothy returned to Europe to study art and drawing in Paris. Dorothy Meserve married Philip Bradish Kunhardt in 1926. The couple had four children, Nancy, Philip, Ken and Edith and lived in a house on a hill in Morristown, New Jersey for 43 years. For the last ten years of her life, Dorothy Kunhardt lived in New York City. She had eighteen grandchildren.
Dorothy's debut children's book, Junket is Nice, was published in 1933. It was an immediate best seller and established her as a children's book author of great interest. In the next three years she wrote and illustrated four more, highly acclaimed nonsense books, including Now Open the Box. After her ground-breaking book for pre-readers, Pat the Bunny, Kunhardt wrote seven more books for children and two sets of twelve Tiny Golden Books, Tiny Animal Stories and Tiny Nonsense Stories.
Soon after the run-away success of Pat the Bunny, Dorothy Kunhardt was asked by her publisher to write a biographical sketch of herself for book buyers. She wrote, "Dorothy Kunhardt believes that books for young children should not merely be read to them, but also smelled and felt by them, possibly even eaten, hammered, or melted in a glass of water. Pat the Bunny gives youngsters a chance to use the senses of sight, sound, smell, and touch and teaches coordination - besides being fun."
With over 200 items, including writings, drawings and early manuscripts, correspondence, 17 first editions of Kunhardt's books for children (published between 1932 and 1965) , the prototypes of Pat the Bunny and The Telephone Book, reviews, royalty statement and voluminous notes, The Dorothy Kunhardt Collection is a family legacy and public treasure.
Dorothy's granddaughter, Sandra K. Basile, a writer and artist, is the Director of the Dorothy Kunhardt Collection.
The Women's Project
For too many people, the "women's movement" is a relic of the past–a fight for rights
long-since attained, led by individuals and organizations long-since faded from the cultural conversation.
Yet, understanding this half-buried, unfinished portion of history is crucial to creating a better future
for the world.
That is why MKF is launching an ambitious documentary project to record the vanishing voices of the historical movement
and to tell the evolving story of women's movements around the world today. The project will create an unprecedented Web-based
archive of digital video histories–inspirational filmed conversations with the icons, pioneers, unsung heroes, and leading
thinkers of the global women's movement. Available in a wide variety of formats, these original video histories will represent
an unparalleled resource for the public.
Working with Gloria Steinem, the Women's Media Center, and the Feminist Press, The Women's Project will make it possible for
women's voices to be heard and become a powerful new tool to inspire the next generations.
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