The American Design Collective is building a permanent, source-backed record of American creative practice.
That work requires more than servers and software. It requires people to find records, recover credits, verify identities, preserve source material, photograph work, interview practitioners, document scenes, and return to places whose creative history has never been systematically recorded.
We work with companies, institutions, venues, schools, archives and community organizations that want to help make that record possible.
Partnerships support the work of ADC. They do not purchase inclusion in the Registry, determine editorial coverage, or influence our factual findings.
Built so far, unfunded
19,645
sourced facts, from 40,396 captured documents
ADC is currently in its founding period. A limited number of organizations that provide significant early support will be recognized permanently as Founding Partners of the American Design Collective.
Founding support helps build the shared infrastructure behind the Registry, editorial work, archival programs, research, events, and future institutional partnerships.
Founding designation may also accompany another partnership, including a City Arts Partnership, Archive Partnership, or Program Partnership.
It recognizes organizations that helped establish ADC while the institution itself was being built.
Founding Partner opportunities are limited and will not remain available indefinitely.
Creative history is local before it becomes national.
City Arts Partners help ADC document the creative life of a particular community: its artists, designers, musicians, performers, craftspeople, venues, organizations, works, scenes and collaborations.
A substantial portion of every City Arts Partnership is committed directly to work serving the partner city.
City Arts Partners receive clear reporting on the work their support makes possible. A partnership might ultimately be measured not simply in impressions, but in people documented, credits recovered, records preserved, institutions indexed and stories added to the permanent record.
A sponsorship campaign disappears.
A recovered credit does not.
The goal of a City Arts Partnership is to leave the city with a richer historical record than existed before the partnership began.
Depending on the partnership, that may include
Many institutions already possess pieces of American cultural history. They sit in filing cabinets, production programs, spreadsheets, catalogs, old websites, photographs, event records, staff archives and institutional memory.
ADC works with Archive Partners to turn those materials into structured, accessible cultural records.
The original institution remains part of the history of the material. ADC provides the infrastructure for connecting that history to the people and work around it.
During ADC’s early development, a small number of institutions may become Founding Archive Partners. These organizations will help shape the practical work of building archival partnerships at scale, and will receive permanent recognition for doing so.
Their dedicated archive pages may receive distinctive visual and editorial treatment while the underlying records remain part of the same independent ADC Registry.
An Archive Partnership may include
Some organizations want to support a particular area of American creative life. Program Partnerships allow companies and institutions to underwrite defined areas of ADC’s work.
Program Partners may receive recognition alongside the initiative they support, including custom presentations, events, reports or other agreed-upon activations.
Program support does not determine which practitioners are included or how ADC covers them.
Defined areas of ADC’s work, such as
Organizations that want to support ADC without adopting a city, archive or program may participate as Supporting Partners. Supporting partnerships help fund the shared work underlying everything ADC does: research, sourcing, technology, preservation, editorial production, fieldwork and public access.
Supporting Partners may receive recognition across ADC communications, events, partner materials and other appropriate placements.
ADC welcomes commercial sponsorship. We also maintain a firm separation between support and the historical record.
Archive materials supplied by partners are subject to the same sourcing, attribution, privacy, correction and personhood standards as other ADC records — the standards set out in the archival methodology.
Support makes documentation possible.
It does not purchase the result.
A logo appears on a banner. An event ends. A campaign expires. ADC offers something different.
A partnership can help create records intended to remain useful for years:
We want our partners to be able to point not only to an audience they reached, but to something that now exists because they helped make it possible.
Ordered as the page argues them, founding first.
Partnerships are developed individually around the organization, community, archive or program involved.
For partnership inquiries, sponsorship proposals, institutional archives and collaborative projects, contact the American Design Collective.
20,989 records · 19,645 sourced facts · 40,396 captured documents · counted 2026-08-29