Janet L. Stanley (1945 – 2026)
The Smithsonian Institution mourns the passing of Janet L. Stanley.
Janet L. Stanley served as the chief librarian for the Warren M. Robbins Library at the National Museum of African Art from 1979 until her retirement in 2024. In that time, which stretched from the museum’s foundational era in its original location on Capitol Hill until today, she built the library into a global resource for the research and study of the visual arts of Africa. Its collection of more than 50,000 volumes covers all aspects of African visual arts, including sculpture, painting, printmaking, pottery, textiles, crafts, popular culture, photography, architecture, rock art, and archaeology. The Robbins Library has significant supporting collections of African ethnography, musicology, performing arts, theater, cinema, oral traditions, religion, creative writing, and arts in the African Diaspora as well as general information on the history of African countries.
Janet was a diligent and focused collector and cataloguer of ephemera connected to living African artists, creating a series of files on approximately 5,000 artists, a one-of-a-kind resource regularly consulted by researchers (and even artists themselves). She also built a unique collection of artists’ books within the Library’s collections, the focus of the exhibition Artists’ Books & Africa that ran from 2015 to 2016; the collection is also featured with a rotating display in the museum’s current galleries.
Widely recognized and celebrated by artists and researchers alike, Janet built a deep global network and a reputation as a scholarly resource on the arts of Africa. She wrote a series of four annotated bibliographies on African art and served as a primary consultant on African art terminology with the Getty Research Institute from the mid-1980s until her retirement. A product of her years of support for and engagement with artists on and off the continent, she also donated 100 works of art from her private collection to the museum, including important examples of work by artists previously unrepresented.
She instituted a field-leading program of regular donations of books to Africa-based libraries. At the museum, she always had her door open to colleagues, docents, artists, and emerging scholars, to quietly advise and make connections, and to celebrate personal joys and commiserate on sorrows. Her commitment to African art was vocational, and deeply personal.
Janet received a B.A. in International Relations from the School of International Service, American University (1968) and a M.S.L.S. from the Catholic University of America (1970). Janet was originally born and raised in West Virginia and spent formative years living and working as a librarian in Nigeria at the Obafemi Awolowo University, in Ife.
Her decades of work and dedication to the study of African art history sit at the foundations of the discipline. Her mentorship and friendships, meanwhile, have created networks of affection, memory, and opportunity that live on and continue to grow.
The National Museum of African Art joins with her family and friends in mourning her passing and in celebrating her contributions and achievements. Plans are underway for a symposium along with other efforts to honor her legacy.
Image Credit:
Daniel Taye (b. 1968; works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia);
Portrait of Janet Stanley;
2000; oil on canvas;
Collection of the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Insitution,
Gift of Janet Stanley
Submitted to the ASA by Jennifer A. Mitchell, Communications and Marketing Manager, National Museum of African Art
