The Kartemquin Archive spans 55 years of independent filmmaking on diverse subjects, including: health care, urban youth, race, labor, gentrification, immigration, aging, and gender. KTQ has produced 70+ documentary projects that promote empathetic engagement with pressing social issues. The collections consist of over 19,000 physical elements and growing. Materials include film, magnetic media, paper, photographs, ephemera, and born-digital media. There are 228 collections, each representing a discrete production, including commercial and unfinished projects.
Founded in 1966, Kartemquin spans a fascinating time in American history and independent documentary production. The KTQ Archive contains a trove of stories and unique materials that will be of great use to film scholars, filmmakers and historians for years to come. Since 2007, the KTQ Archive Project has been dedicated to assessment, inventory, and National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) grant projects. From 2011-2014, KTQ’s Inventory Project, lead by Chicago media archivist Carolyn Faber and funded by the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, resulted in thousands of item-level records and the creation of an archival database for all KTQ audiovisual elements.
In recent years, the KTQ Archive Project has focused on planning for transfer of the collections to a sustainable archival home. In 2020, KTQ selected Washington University Libraries Film & Media Archive as the collections' future home. The Film & Media Archive will expertly care for the KTQ Archive, ensure its longevity, and make it broadly accessible for research, interpretation, programming and reuse.
Read more about the partnership here.
The KTQ Archive Project has been funded in part by generous grant support from the Reva and David Logan Foundation. If you would like to contribute, please do so here.