From Home Movies to History: Jacqueline Stewart Named Getty Scholar
August 3, 2026 (last updated on August 5, 2026)
As a 2026-2027 Fellow, Stewart will develop a new book drawn from two decades of the South Side Home Movie Project
When Jacqueline Stewart, MacArthur Fellow film historian, curator, Turner Classic Movies host, and founder of the South Side Home Movie Project (SSHMP), arrives at the Getty Research Institute this September, she will begin work on a book twenty years in the making.
The project will become the first book-length study of African American home movies, and will draw on the SSHMP’s decades of preserving, digitizing, and exhibiting home movies from Chicago’s South Side.
Stewart joins the 2026-2027 Getty Scholars cohort of art historians, curators, provenance experts, and other scholars engaged in interdisciplinary research on the arts. In conversation with the Getty’s annual theme, “Provenance,” Stewart will examine how Black American families across the twentieth century documented their lives, aspirations, and communities on film, and how these films have traveled over time.
Exploring footage of birthday parties, vacations, church gatherings, civic events, and everyday life, the book traces the development of Black middle-class identities from the 1930s to the 1970s, the era of shooting home movies on celluloid before the adoption of video cameras.
The fellowship marks a new chapter in a career devoted to expanding how we understand American film cultures, and how Black communities have fashioned their own moving-images practices.
Reading what others overlook
Why would a film scholar spend over twenty years collecting home movies?
The answer partly lies in Stewart’s scholarship, devoted to illuminating films, filmmakers, and film audiences that have not been prioritized in dominant film histories or archival collections. Before she began collecting home movies, Stewart was searching out the earliest interactions between African Americans and the cinema.
In her landmark 2005 book Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, Stewart challenged a tendency to read early Black film history solely through the lens of racist caricature. She describes how cinema, as a medium and a social institution, was impacted by Black migration from the South, along with the more thoroughly documented immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans into US cities, creating new encounters across racial, ethnic and class lines.
Reflecting on Migrating to the Movies now, Stewart says she wanted to move beyond binary readings of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Black screen representation as “either positive or negative, realistic or stereotypical.” Instead, she turned to how films registered the anxieties of a rapidly changing American society.
Looking closely at films by pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux and lesser-known silent shorts and features, Stewart showed how movies registered social transformation even before the Great Migration reached full force.
Migrating to the Movies includes striking examples such as Micheaux’s 1920 The Symbol of the Unconquered, a “race movie” made for African American audiences in which a Black female lead, decked out in a cowgirl outfit, mounts a horse to chase off the Klan. Yet Stewart also found earlier mainstream films where Black figures, such as domestic workers, signaled new possibilities for African American subjects.
In one chapter, Stewart analyzes Laughing Gas (1907), a short Edison film centered on a Black woman who, after going to the dentist to treat a toothache, moves through public spaces comically disrupting social hierarchies. For Stewart, such figures reveal how filmmakers responded to new forms of Black visibility, mobility, and labor in modern urban life.
“Throughout my experiences watching silent films, and the classical Hollywood films that came later, the butlers and maids always stood out to me,” Stewart reflected. “I wondered, what’s their story?”
Moving images and social worlds
The South Side Home Movie Project extends Stewart’s longstanding interest in recovering underrepresented voices and visions in film history.
Since founding SSHMP in 2005, Stewart and collaborators have preserved more than 1,400 reels of amateur footage created by South Side residents between the 1930s and 1980s. Today, the reels are stored in a climate-controlled vault at the Logan Center for the Arts, where fragile film stock is protected from deterioration.
Together, the films form an extraordinary visual mosaic of life across Bronzeville, Bridgeport, Washington Park, and other South Side Chicago neighborhoods.
Stewart’s attention to not only what appears in moving images but how those images are constructed reflects intellectual training cultivated through decades in the Arts & Humanities Division. As a graduate student in the English Department, Stewart studied with scholars including Miriam Hansen, Tom Gunning, Elizabeth Alexander, and Kenneth Warren. Their work sharpened her focus on the intersections of race, history, and aesthetics in film studies.
“UChicago has always encouraged interdisciplinary studies, and reflection on how to bring various methodologies into productive tension and relation,” Stewart reflected. “For me, thinking through the social and aesthetic dimensions of cinema has co-existed with efforts to understand the perspectives a diverse range of scholars, as well as filmmakers, audiences, and archivists over time. Doing so helps keep my brain open to a surprising range of interpretive possibilities.”
That openness informs how she reads home movies. Choices about film format, framing, camera movement, and exposure can reveal things about the person behind the lens beyond simply what they are shooting.
“It’s important not just to look at the ‘content’ of home movies but also to look at things like their editing patterns, whether they are on 8mm or Super 8mm film stocks, their uses of closeups or long shots, and more,” she said. “The form and styles of home movies help to situate them historically and to consider the varying priorities of the filmmakers.”
Stewart traces SSHMP’s origins partly to her engagement with so-called “orphan films”— home movies, training films, and other nontheatrical moving images that fall outside film canons. While attending the first Orphan Film Symposium in 1999, Stewart encountered the films of Dave Tatsuno, showing Japanese American families incarcerated during World War II engaged in everyday activities—cooking, going to church, playing baseball.
The experience cued a question that would inspire the SSHMP: what kinds of everyday visual histories exist closer to home in Hyde Park (Stewart’s home neighborhood) and across the South Side?
From family keepsake to historical record
Many films arrive at SSHMP from basements and closets, just before they are discarded. Frequently inherited from relatives, the reels are a mystery to their owners, who may have no idea what they contain nor equipment capable of playing them.
When the footage is cleaned, inspected and digitized, unique historical records emerge.
Film donors see their parents in their youth and themselves as babies, or rediscover birthday parties, graduations, vacations, and beach days long forgotten.
The films document middle-class life on the South Side; and they are themselves products of this class status. Owning a camera, purchasing film stock, shooting family events and milestones, and screening these films in their homes were all practices tied to documenting achievements and attainments, which had particular significance for Black middle-class families.
Stewart emphasizes the importance of "looking in the background" and attending to "brief shots" in these films. A reel in the Ramon Williams collection from 1946 briefly shows sociologist Horace Cayton in front of a Charles Sebree painting hanging in the Parkway Community House, a major hub of the Black Chicago Renaissance (see 3:30).
Another striking example in the SSHMP archive is a film in the Jean Patton Collection that was merely labeled “Riot Film” documenting the West Side after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The footage includes burning buildings, mourning residents, and in a surprising last shot, we get a rare glimpse of the landmark Wall of Respect mural in Bronzeville before its destruction.
Making these fragments searchable, Stewart says, gives scholars “new visual tools to understand Chicago’s intersecting Black cultural and political significance.”
A grant from the Getty Foundation’s Black Visual Arts Archives initiative will help identify these materials for broader public access. With the funds, SSHMP will convene artists, researchers, and student interns to watch the footage closely and assist in describing evidence of art activities and institutions.
Creative reuse has also become central to SSHMP’s work. Since joining UChicago’s Arts + Public Life (APL) in 2019, SSHMP has pushed beyond traditional archival boundaries. Programs like Spinning Home Movies, which invites local DJs, musicians, and poets to score SSHMP footage, create new points of entry into the archive while remaining grounded in the communities that produced it.
This August, SSHMP and APL will march in the Bud Billiken Parade, a beloved South Side tradition. The entry will feature a mobile LED screen featuring historic parade footage from SSHMP’s Ramon Williams Collection, alongside live, contemporary dance performances by youth in APL’s Choreographic Arts Program—bringing archival footage back to the very streets where it was filmed.
Care as context
Through SSHMP, Stewart has built more than an archive. She has created a framework for preserving Black visual history that stretches across scholarship, teaching, public programming, and community partnership.
For Charleigh Flynn (BA‘26), a recent graduate of the Media Arts and Design program and an SSHMP intern, working alongside Stewart changed her notion of storytelling and cultural memory-keeping.
“I've learned that archives are not meant to be hidden away in boxes collecting dust,” Flynn said. “While a large part of the project involves collecting, stewarding, and preserving the film history of South Side communities, an equally important part is reactivating these materials and reconnecting them with the people whose lives they document.”
Flynn describes Stewart’s approach as one grounded in “care as context.” Historical materials acquire meaning through sustained relationships with the families and descendants whose lives they record.
She recalls Stewart moving through the SSHMP's twentieth-anniversary exhibition, The Act of Recording is an Act of Love, greeting donor families, descendants, collaborators, and community members.
“Professor Stewart knew everyone,” Flynn says. “She knew one collection’s granddaughter, another donor’s uncle. These family histories were often complex, but it was clear that she knew the people behind the collections, not just the materials.”
As Stewart’s work demonstrates, representation is relational. Historical meaning builds through the conversations that surround the images. As Flynn notes, listening is itself a form of storytelling; narratives come to light through dialogue.
The Getty fellowship's annual theme, “Provenance,” will place Stewart in conversation with art historians studying preservation, ownership, and cultural stewardship. For Stewart, provenance is a crucial issue in the preservation and re-presentation of moving image materials.
As Stewart begins the fellowship, that insight will guide a new book and a new stage of a decades-long effort to amplify the histories, acts of care, and social worlds embedded in everyday images.