About Erin Dickey

Erin Dickey is dual degree candidate (MA Art History/MS Information Science, 2018) at UNC-Chapel Hill. As a Fellow in the IMLS-funded “Learning from Artists’ Archives” program (2015-2017), Erin held a summer internship focusing on digital asset management and the Oral History Program at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and conducted a studio archiving project with Asheville, NC area painter Connie Bostic. Prior to coming to UNC, Erin was Development and Outreach Coordinator at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC. From 2010-2012, she worked as a Mobile Facilitator recording stories and conversations across the U.S. for the national oral history nonprofit StoryCorps. She holds an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago and received her BA in English and Religious Studies from Boston University in 2008.

Learning from Artists’ Archives Goes Global

Posted on May 10, 2018 by Erin Dickey

Last fall, as part of our year-long Carolina Seminar series centered around issues of artists’ archives, the Learning from Artists’ Archives team was joined by Nigerian photographer and Director of the Nlele Institute, Uche Okpa-Iroha. The Nlele Institute is a photography training program and resource center in Lagos, Nigeria.

Left to right: JJ Bauer, Denise Anthony, Carol Magee, Uche Okpa-Iroha

Okpa-Iroha shared with us an issue his team at Nlele was working on: how to use archival materials as teaching tools and resources for the Institute’s student photographers, and how to incorporate an archival component into the Institute’s mission.

In 2015, Okpa-Iroha, with photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi and the former director of the Goethe Institut Nigeria, Marc-Andre Schmachtel, discovered a large stock of photographic negatives in a darkroom of a building formerly occupied by Nigeria’s federal press agency, before the agency moved to Abuja from Lagos. Okpa-Iroha and his colleagues were able to recover the boxes of materials, which include decades worth of documentation of Nigeria’s political history and cultural heritage. Volunteers and staff at Nlele are currently in the process of inventorying the negatives. These materials are, to Okpa-Iroha’s knowledge, unavailable in any form anywhere else in Nigeria. They have the potential to play a crucial role in the cultural memory of the country.

By fostering aspiring photographers’ artistic, intellectual, and professional development, Nlele addresses a lack of institutional support and professional photographic training in Nigeria. Nlele’s immediate goals in preserving these materials are to: (1) Provide a readily accessible resource collection for training young photographers on documentary photographic method and style, and to (2) Educate them about Nigerian history and culture in order to more critically engage them in the documentation of its present and future. In addition to preserving the photographic material of the students trained there, Nlele has a long-term goal of identifying, acquiring, and properly preserving other Nigerian photographic collections for use as training materials and eventually for public access and research. This will entail developing the resources and infrastructure to maintain the archive over time.

In order to facilitate this initiative, Carol Magee (one of the Learning from Artists’ Archives Primary Investigators, Chair of UNC’s Department of Art and Art History, and specialist in contemporary African art history) and I will be traveling to Lagos this month to conduct a condition assessment of the negatives. The goal of this project is to assess the Nlele Institute’s collection of former Nigerian press agency photographic negatives in terms of its scope, research value, current condition, and preservation needs. The assessment will be used by the Nlele Institute as a guide for future collections assessments, as a roadmap to completing its in-progress inventory project, and as an evidentiary component of requests to fund the preservation, digitization, and archival management of the negatives.

In the Learning from Artists’ Archives program, we’ve amassed a body of experience and resources to share with NC artists, collaborating with them to “think archivally” and tailor archiving habits and practices that meet their needs. We’re excited to go global with this preparation and openness to collaboration and exchange. I’ll be reporting back here about this project and our journey, including information about our assessment methodology, so stay tuned!

Connie Bostic Materials to be Archived in the North Carolina Room at Pack Memorial Library

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Erin Dickey

As the culmination of my Learning from Artists’ Archives field experience, a studio archiving project with Asheville, NC artist Connie Bostic–which included digitization of slides and ephemera, creation of a detailed artwork inventory, and the recording of oral histories with and about Connie–ephemera, recordings, and digitized items from Bostic’s studio will be preserved as a collection of the North Carolina Room at Pack Memorial Library. Pack Library is Asheville’s central library branch, located downtown. The North Carolina Room houses special collections focusing on local history in Asheville.

Though the NC Room has many large photographic collections, this is the first living, individual artist collection at Pack–testament to Bostic’s living legacy within the community.

Bostic’s collection in the North Carolina Room will be celebrated and formally announced with a small exhibition at Pack Library, tentatively planned for early spring.

The collection will contain video oral histories, physical clippings, posters, and other ephemera, and an inventory with thumbnail images and metadata documenting 670 of Bostic’s paintings, drawings, prints, and mixed media works. Researchers will be able to access higher resolution digital images of items in the inventory upon request.

Digitized slide from Bostic’s “In the Chicken Yard” installation

These items join the North Carolina Collection’s already existing collection of ephemera documenting Bostic’s work at World and Zone One Contemporary art galleries, linchpins of Asheville’s burgeoning downtown art scene from the mid-eighties to the early aughts.

This partnership could not have come to fruition without the dedicated effort of Zoe Rhine and Ione Whitlock of the North Carolina Room, as well as Connie Bostic herself.

As this “Learning from Artist Archives” project and that of my colleagues (see Colin Post’s Art Documentation article for a detailed account of his archiving collaboration with Cornelio Campos and the Durham Public Library; see also Kelsey Moen’s project with Alia El-Bermani, and Kim Henze’s project with Susan Harbage Page) demonstrates, public libraries and other local repositories can play a valuable and necessary role in preserving and making accessible the materials of artists in their communities.

Developing a Repertoire of Roles: Students’ Interventions in Artists’ Archives

Posted on April 8, 2017 by Erin Dickey

(This post is adapted from a talk I gave at this year’s College Art Association conference, as part of the “Supporting Creative Legacies in Local Communities: Lessons Learned from the Artists Studio Archives Project” panel session with project Co-PI’s JJ Bauer and Carol Magee and Advisory Board Member Heather Gendron.)

Connie Bostic with Snakemobile and family Digitized from slide c. 2000s

Connie Bostic and collaborator David Dawson with Snakemobile. According to Connie, the kids “belonged to the house next to the church, they just ran out of the house to see the car.”
Digitized from slide
c. 2000s

Connie Bostic with Recognition of Death
Digitized from slide
c. 1989

It was a couple of months after the Asheville, North Carolina artist Connie Bostic had agreed to let me intern with her for a studio archiving project that I learned from a mutual friend what Connie had once shared about (joked about?) her hopes for her legacy. Connie had told her, “When I’m gone, I just want them to take all my stuff out in the yard and burn it in a bonfire.” As unsettling as this was for a nascent archivist to hear at the time, I later came to an understanding of this statement within the context of Connie’s life and work. Indeed, it was through the process of working with Connie’s materials as a student and proto-archivist, seeing them through the lenses of the different roles the “Learning from Artists’ Archives” internship was designed to cultivate, that I came to a fuller understanding of this seemingly tongue-in-cheek attitude towards legacy.

My project with Connie (as touched on in my last post) comprises the digitization of selected slides and ephemera, the creation of an artwork inventory, the establishment of a documentation trail for certain of her works sold or donated to private and public collections, the collection of a limited set of oral histories with and about Connie, and outreach to Asheville’s central library branch to gauge their interest in adding to their collection additional materials pertaining to Connie’s career.

Flyer – Once and For All, 1992

To plan the project, I initially reached out to Connie in February of last year in order to assess her studio needs. Most of the work took place last fall. Initially, we discussed synthesizing and updating her studio inventory, but her old inventory had been physical, and was out of date. I created a new inventory of all the artworks in her studio, as well as those in the collections that I was able to track down from her notes and advice, about 670 paintings, drawings, prints, and mixed media works thus far. While my initial project plan called for a database, the inventory in its current form is in an Excel spreadsheet. Non-archival quality snapshots of most of the works in Connie’s studio are included with each record to make the inventory more legible and usable for her. I digitized selections of Connie’s ephemera, as well as 183 of her slides, numbered to match with inventory entries.

Screenshot of inventory portion

Performing the “archivist” role in this project meant that I needed to develop my working knowledge of what an archivist was, and what sort of archivist I would be in managing this project. In 1970, Howard Zinn’s address to the Society of American Archivists represented a change in the conception of perceived “passive” archiving practices. Instead, he encouraged the development of archival practices geared towards actively seeking records that will help to document the lives of people and communities traditionally underrepresented in archives.[1] I went into this project with an understanding that my choices, even as a student working in a limited way on a collection, are political.

File structure for management of project’s digital assets

In the case of Connie’s artworks, due to the scale of her collection, I chose to focus on the intellectual rather than physical arrangement of inventory items. Arranging a collection intellectually is like making a map. And of course, “map is not territory.” Early on in the process, answering questions about work titles and dates required sessions with the two of us going through images together to determine approximate dates and titles, if applicable. But in doing so, I also learned about Connie’s practice as an artist–for some works, the titles were vital and the works were timely, tied to specific events and easily dated, such as her Katrina series, her “Day at the Fair” Series, painted on Sept. 11, 2001, or her Mark of the Goddess series, part of her MFA thesis exhibition, the reception of which was tied to a political climate informed by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms’ attempts in the late 1980s to legislate against so-called “indecent” art.[2] Other of her works could be dated according to her slide library, newspaper clippings, and exhibition materials. At this point, the role of archivist began to shade into that of art historian.

Katrina series: 6 (2005)
Oil on canvas
14.75” x 12.75”

From Day at the Fair series (2001)
Oil on mat board
13.5” x 10”

Connie began studying art in earnest in the 1970s, eventually receiving her MFA at Western Carolina University. Later, Connie and Bob Godfrey, the Head of the Art Department there, would run a gallery, The World, together in downtown Asheville, under the umbrella of Western Carolina University. WCU pulled its funding from that gallery a year later in 1987, due to controversy over some of Mapplethorpe’s works being shown in an exhibition there, a small battle in the culture wars. In 1991, Connie opened another art space in the same building, Zone One Contemporary, the first dedicated contemporary art gallery in downtown Asheville. It closed in 2000.

clipping, Collection of Connie Bostic

From A Thorn of Memory (c. 1996)
Oil on mat board
17” x 11”

A series of her works, as well as a commissioned mural, focus on the writer Thomas Wolfe, himself a native Ashevillian. As I catalogued these works, I discovered one of her consistent interests, the tension between artistic legacy and physical oblivion. This phrase that she had used among friends to subtly deride her lasting legacy–“burn it in a bonfire”–was drawn from one of her foundational influences, Thomas Wolfe. In citing the fire that she may or may not want to consume her work after her death, she makes veiled, perhaps unconscious, reference to a foundational moment of awakening at the beginning of her life, her discovery of Wolfe’s oeuvre at age 15. At the same time, her remark evinces a rejection of traditional assignations of value to the art object, just as the content of her work undermines comfort with the norms on which those assignations of value rely, especially within her local art scene. Reflecting on this discovery, I realized that my responsibility as an archivist to think about a potential donor’s legacy is nuanced by my training as an art historian, and helps me to understand the complex way that the artist I’m working for conceives of endings and beginnings.

“God! I’d like to go up all at once in one good blaze – just like a bonfire.”
The Good Child’s River

The role of documentarian provides one name for the overlap that exists between archivist and art historian. I conducted four oral histories with and about Connie, to be kept with her collection. Participants include friends, colleagues, and students. In an interview with Connie and Linda Larsen, Connie’s friend, fellow artist, and longtime collaborator, I was particularly interested in documenting the story behind Connie’s controversial MFA thesis exhibition, which was covered in the local press and which I initially learned about while digitizing her clippings and ephemera.

Despite changes in the profession over the last 40 years that have helped us to dispense with the illusion of the ostensibly “neutral” archivist who collects passively, there is still a sense that an archivist should not be too invested in what she chooses to or not to collect and preserve. In general, this is for good reason, in order to avoid conflicts of interest. The valorization of a vague archival neutrality has given way to cultivation of our profession’s diplomatic skills, balancing the interests of stakeholders in a professional and informed manner, while also acknowledging our own interests. All of the roles I’ve discussed are themselves interventions, affecting the archive as it is intellectually and physically organized, the narratives pulled from it, and how it can affect the artist’s career–or perceptions thereof. With my choice of an artist to work with, I was also making a choice about my own understanding of the value of artists’ archives. I chose someone intrinsically local, whose story and work is tied to her community, but who intervenes within larger narratives and movements.

In thinking about the pedagogical effectiveness of this part of the “Learning from Artists’ Archives” program, and about how this internship has better prepared me for my career, I’ve discovered that the experience has generated a recognition that is both practical and political–that my choices are interventions, and therefore I need to be conscious, careful, and accountable for each choice that I make, prepared to base justifications for those choices within an established practical literature. I can’t help but parallel the roles I’ve explored in this project with both the exploration and confrontation of given roles and narratives that Connie deploys in her artwork, as well as with the various roles Connie has performed throughout her life–as artist, gallerist, owner of an Asheville gay bar in the late 80s, dog trainer, art teacher, wife, mother, and grandmother. She wears them lightly, not worrying too much about whether they conflict or fail to hang together in a legible way, confident that they make sense taken singly or together within the context of her life and practice. And so, even as I acknowledge the value in strengthening through specific efforts my performance in the roles I’ve discussed, I strive to do the same.

[1] Zinn, H. (1971). Secrecy, archives, and the public interest. Boston University Journal, 19(3), 37.

[2] Wicker, T. (July 28, 1989.) In the nation: Art and Indecency.” The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/28/opinion/in-the-nation-art-and-indecency.html

Artists’ Archives and Local History: Working with Connie Bostic in Western NC

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Erin Dickey

In August, I started working on a semester-long studio archiving project with Connie Bostic, western NC-based painter, teacher, and woman-about-town. I first got to know Bostic in her role as a board member at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, where I worked before starting my graduate program at UNC-Chapel Hill. In the museum’s nomadic early days, Bostic’s Zone one contemporary gallery provided downtown exhibition space for the small nonprofit. Zone one, which closed in 2000, was also the first contemporary art gallery in downtown Asheville (known in its first incarnation as World Gallery).[1] This semester, my project includes inventorying the artworks and ephemera in Bostic’s studio, a renovated barn in the bucolic Fairview community outside of Asheville. I’m also doing a bit of detective work–hunting down and inventorying other works in private collections–as well as photographing a selection of the works.

from Bostic’s “Mark of the Goddess” series

Before the start of this project, I digitized a set of Bostic’s clippings from early in her career. Prominent within the collection are materials pertaining to Bostic’s 1990 MFA thesis exhibition, a set of paintings in her Mark of the Goddess series combined with quotations about women from history’s “great men”. The paintings–abstract oil on paper works–were to be exhibited in the Walker Arts Center of the Asheville School from Aug. 8 – Sept. 10, 1990. Instead, the headmaster John Tyrer

called for them to be removed almost immediately, saying “Female genitalia have no place on the walls of a school building.” Bostic’s work, intended to evoke reflection on the loss of women’s cultural heritage within history, was itself covered over and symbolically silenced, an absurdity that advocates of the exhibition’s censorship appeared to miss. The materials documenting this event include exhibition photographs, flyers and postcards, and newspaper clippings regarding the censorship and community protests and response. As I think about the role of art and its reception within a community, I find these materials to present a compelling argument for inclusion of local artists’ archives within local repositories.

Photo from Bostic’s archive depicting the covered wall of her MFA thesis exhibition

Artists’ archives provide important insight not just into artists’ careers and artwork, but into histories of their communities–how they have shaped and been shaped by their homes. To explore this a bit more, my project also includes the collection of a limited set of oral histories in order to more fully document how her history and local history intertwine, as well as planning for possible institutional donation of some of her archival materials. As I’ve been exploring Bostic’s materials and hearing stories from her and the folks she’s worked with over the years, it has become clear to me that you cannot tell the history of the arts scene in Asheville, the revitalization of the downtown area, and the often fraught identity of places marketed as “arts destinations” without spotting Bostic as a key figure. Indeed, in a program series at Asheville’s Pack Library this summer, “Asheville in the 80’s,” Bostic discussed bringing works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring to Asheville, as well as the impact of other influential figures in the arts community.

Connie and I at the recent opening of her exhibition, “RED.”

After the semester ends, I’ll post an update on my project with some lessons learned. Currently, the major quandary I face is, “How do I account for interaction?” Artists don’t work in a vacuum, and certainly not Connie. Friday mornings are a rush of activity in her studio, as Connie directs a circle of students while taking calls and answering questions and sharing gossip and preparing for the next exhibition (which opened recently as RED and is comprised mostly of large oil on canvas works demonstrating her career-long exploration of themes of womanhood and sexuality).[2] I’m finding that, in addition to her artwork and studio materials, that atmosphere is something I’d like to preserve.

And finally, the “Learning from Artists’ Archives” team has a big weekend coming up: This Saturday, October 8, we will be holding our second daylong Archiving for Artists workshop at the Mint Museum Randolph location in Charlotte, NC. This year, we’ve added sessions on intellectual property issues related to legacy planning, as well as optimizing studio archives to facilitate grantwriting, exhibition planning, and marketing. View our schedule here and stay tuned for future posts recapping the event.

Notes:

[1] Bailey, Patricia. “The End of an Era.” The Mountain Express. December 20, 2000. Accessed October 2, 2016. https://mountainx.com/arts/art-news/1220zoneone-php/\.

[2] “Flood Gallery Reopens at New Location with RED.” September 14, 2016. Accessed October 2, 2016. http://www.citizen-times.com/story/entertainment/arts/2016/09/14/flood-gallery-reopens-new-location-red/90263792/.

From Oral History to Art History: Inside the Oral History Program at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Erin Dickey

Paul Ramirez Jonas with Josh T. Franco. Photo courtesy of Mary Savig.

“It’s something I wouldn’t give you, or I would double check,” artist Paul Ramirez Jonas said to Archives of American Art (AAA) Curator Josh T. Franco, referring to an item found in a box of studio materials recently donated to the Archives.

Beat.

“Um, it’s already here, Paul,” Franco replied, as the crowd in AAA’s gallery within the Smithsonian American Art Museum laughed.

Examining donated archival materials is not something usually performed in front of a crowd, but this event—with the AAA’s current exhibition, “Finding Source Material in the Archives of American Art,” as a backdrop—encapsulated the process of archiving an artist’s materials, while also demonstrating the value of those materials in context. The curator examined the artist’s donated materials, observing organizational structure and how that box fit in with the rest of the artist’s collection. In once instance, Franco came across an empty but labeled folder in the box, joking, “This folder would have to go in another folder as an archival document.” The artist provided contextual details about individual items, recalling memories they evoked, telling the story behind a piece, and in some cases noting that a photo or a slide was the only remaining record of an artwork. Included in Ramirez Jonas’ materials are plans for kinetic sculptures either never completed or no longer functioning. Of those plans, Ramirez Jonas said, “The work can never be as good as the notes,” identifying the division between imagination and reality, intention and the completed work—one of the fulcrums along which archival work, art historical research, and artistic practice pivot.

This summer at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, I’ve been focusing on this pivot point as it appears in the processing of artists’ oral history interviews within the AAA’s Oral History Program. My colleague Kim Henze interned in Collections Processing at the AAA last summer–where she worked with physical materials like diaries, sketchbooks, and correspondence, my focus has been mostly on digital and digitized audio files, as well as their corresponding transcripts.

The program began in 1958, at a time when larger institutions were just beginning to incorporate oral history archiving in a systematic way. The Columbia Center for Oral History had begun just ten years earlier. In the AAA’s Oral History Program, staff contracts art historians, critics, and writers to interview working artists about their lives and careers, documenting not just individual works and voices, but also of specific moments within American art history. Through artists’ immediate description and living memory, the over 2200 oral histories build context and complication for researchers weaving art historical narratives.

The first interviews collected in the program are with artists who had participated in the 1913 Armory Show, widely considered to be the first significant exhibition of modern art in the U.S. Since the 1963 launch of the Oral History Program’s first large-scale collecting project, an oral history of the New Deal art programs, interviews have typically been collected under the auspices of specific initiatives, such as the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and the Decorative Arts in America, which documents prominent craft artists; and Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project, which examines the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the New York art world of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.[1]

The AAA records about 20-30 interviews a year, depending on collecting initiatives and funding. In 2010, the AAA received a Save America’s Treasures grant to digitize its remaining analog oral histories. In addition to my work with the Oral History Program this summer, part of my job has been to upload these digitized files to the AAA’s Digital Asset Management System.

At the same time, I’ve been researching the history of the program in order to create project pages for the AAA’s launch of its newly redesigned website. I’ve spent the majority of my time, however, moving bottlenecked interviews through the Oral History Program’s lengthy transcript review process.

Untranscribed and unindexed audio is not the most easily navigable format. Because of this, the AAA makes its oral history interviews more accessible to researchers by transcribing them. Alas, this transcription process presents another set of issues for the archivist. First, it’s very time consuming, as well as costly. The AAA transcribes its interviews through third party vendors, but these initial transcriptions must still be checked against the audio upon their return to the AAA, through a process called auditing. Second, the editing of these transcripts can pose questions of institutional policy, ethical practices, and archival theory. During the review and editing of the audited transcripts, artists’ individual preferences regarding their representation within the archive and archival documentation can sometimes collide.

Jennifer Snyder addresses an a GWU class on Oral History.

Jennifer Snyder addresses a GWU class on Oral History.

According to the Oral History Program’s currently established workflow, the AAA sends the audited transcript to the interviewer and interviewee (called “narrator”) for the correction of factual errors. The spoken word, however, is very different from the written word—occasionally artists want to make editorial changes or wholesale revisions to the transcription. As mediators within this process, the question that oral history archivists must ask themselves (and the question that has come up in many of my conversations this summer with Oral History Archivist Jennifer Snyder) is: At what point is the transcript an existentially different record than the audio? This is a more important and potentially complex question than it appears to be at first glance.

Transcripts that differ markedly from the audio of oral history interviews can confuse researchers wishing to check the audio against its transcript, as well as institutions seeking audio excerpts of interviews for exhibitions and programs. These texts purport to be that which they are not, i.e. verbatim transcripts of a specific conversation that took place on a specific day. On the other hand, oral history archivists must balance the need for accurate transcripts with the wishes and intentions of the artists recorded. At the AAA, artists sign a “Consent & Gift” form for both the audio and the transcript at the time of the interview—occasionally the material is restricted, but often not. Despite unrestricted donation of this material, however, it is understandable that artists may wish to omit sensitive material, or alternately, material that they deem unimportant to the interview. The very accessibility that makes a transcript more navigable for researchers may be more access than an artist wishes to give. The AAA must balance the legal status of the interview and ease of accessibility for researchers with their ethical obligations to a living interview subject. This is especially true as more and more word-searchable transcripts are added and accessed online.

Within the AAA’s process, narrator and interviewer transcript reviews are received and input into separate electronic documents, those changes are accepted within a transcript, the document is archived physically and electronically, the catalogue record is updated, and the transcript is put online. The AAA currently has about half of its transcribed interviews online, with more going up every day.

The summer’s tasks.

These complications in making an interview publicly accessible represent a microcosm of the issues artists and archivists face together. I’m ending my summer at the AAA with a stronger inclination that archivists must work with artists to clarify the control they can take in not just organizing their materials, but managing their legacies. This includes informing artists of their rights over their materials and options for restriction, making sure that what they have agreed to donate to a collection is what they actually want to donate, explaining how accessioning and processing work, and supplying scenarios for how their materials will be accessed and used–tasks made even more difficult when an archives is not the primary contact for an artist, such as when an interviewer or contractor without the same knowledge or commitment provides most of the information and facilitates the signing of any restriction forms for an oral history interview. I’m also leaving the AAA with a concrete understanding of the the very real and constant uncertainty that archivists work through in managing the materials of living artists, as well as the limitations that restrictions in time and resources pose.

For all these complications, though, the oral history represents a chance for the artist to respond to their art historical moment, and, perhaps more importantly, to how they may have already been narrativized by critics and historians. For instance, in a 1965 AAA oral history interview by Dorothy Seckler, Robert Rauschenberg responded to the contemporary critical reaction to his Black Paintings (1951-1953), saying:

“…they [critics] couldn’t see black as color or as pigment, but they immediately moved into associations and the associations were always of destroyed newspapers, of burned newspapers. And that began to bother me. Because I think that I’m never sure of what the impulse is psychologically. I don’t mess around with my subconscious. I mean I try to keep wide awake. And if I see in the superficial subconscious relationships that I’m familiar with, clichés of association, I change the picture…Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with it that one recognizes it without looking at it…So if you do work with known quantities, making puns or dealing symbolically with your materials, I think you’re shortening the life of the work even before it’s had a chance to be exposed. I mean, it hasn’t had a life of its own. It’s already leading someone else’s life.”[2]

In this explanation, Rauschenberg militates against the attribution of intention, speaking to critics who might ascribe a subconscious meaning to his work.

In a different vein, Agnes Martin, in her 1989 interview, responded to the common labeling of her work as Minimalist, something she disagreed with on both practical and theoretical grounds, but chose not to protest. Of an early show in New York with nine other artists, she said:

“They were all Minimalists, and they asked me to show with them. But that was before the word was invented. And I liked all their work, so I showed with them. And then when they started calling them Minimalists they called me a Minimalist, too…Well, I let it go, but—I didn’t protest, but I consider myself an Abstract Expressionist.”[3]

And just this summer, in the course of the review process for the interview of Chicago painter Vera Klement, Klement objected to her interviewer’s characterization of her work as “abstract”, and requested a postscript be appended, clarifying:

“I spend much effort making the images…recognizable and believable as three-dimensional objects…They are icons from a common source, images that are in the collective consciousness, described by Aby Warburg as Urformen in the early 20th century. The unusual presentation of these objects doesn’t render my paintings ‘abstract’…”[4]

These clarifying voices are vital precisely because they can both complicate and sharpen overarching narratives, easy definitions, and overly obscure labels. This is the value of oral history—that people, when questioned, don’t always say what they are expected to say.

During the gallery event I described at the beginning of this post, the artist, the curator, the public, and the archival box were in one room. What a luxury! It was a rare, if limited chance to clarify issues that are often so muddled in archival work. What does a record represent, and what is its physical and meaningful relationship to other items within a specific location or collection? How does an artist represent her/himself, and how might s/he want to be represented? What should an archivist, a curator, or an art historian make of the daylight between the “does” and the “want”?

A glimpse at AAA collections storage.

At the end of the session, Ramirez-Jonas, whose work often explores the relationships between the artist, artwork, and audience, responded with a metaphor to a question about when and why he began organizing his materials.[5] He said that he started early in his career and advises young artists to start now, because “Archiving is like brushing your teeth, you need to do a little every day, so you don’t get gum disease.” And what’s the archival equivalent of gum disease? Not just disorganization, but a loss of control over your own materials. Referring to studio archiving practices, Ramirez Jonas noted, “We don’t train artists to do this.” It’s true, and one of the cultural preservation issues that my colleagues and I are hoping to address in the “Learning from Artists Archives” Program.

Notes:

[1] In an interesting piece of serendipitous archival trivia, Kim Henze, during her internship at the AAA in summer 2015, catalogued the first interview that would eventually start the oral history program, a 1956 interview with Atta Medora McMullin, wife of Alson Skinner Clark, donated as part of Clark’s papers. The interview is only existent now in a transcript. Seven years later, in 1963, the AAA began actively collecting oral histories.

[2] Rauschenberg, Robert. Interview with Dorothy Seckler. December 21, 1965. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-rauschenberg-12870.

[3] Martin, Agnes. Interview with Suzan Campbell. May 15, 1989. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-agnes-martin-13296.

[4] Klement, Vera. Interview with Lanny Silverman. June 12-14, 2015. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[5] Ramirez Jonas, Paul. “Statement.” Accessed on July 30, 2016. http://www.paulramirezjonas.com/selected/refImages/CV/statement.pdf

Artists Archives and Digital Art History: Imagining the Possibilities

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Erin Dickey

With the “Learning from Artists’ Archives” project, students, artists, museum, library, and arts information professionals, and art historians are collaborating on ways for North Carolina artists to preserve their materials, with an end goal of strengthening the historical record of NC artists’ materials. In this project, we’re all stakeholders. In the past few posts, my colleagues Colin, Kim, and Fannie have focused, respectively, on how artists might preserve their own materials in genres which have traditionally resisted preservation, on one artist’s design and planning process for her current archiving project, and on one librarian’s efforts to create archival files documenting the careers of artists in her community. In all of these projects, the roles of the artists and arts information professionals involved are explicit. The impact of these archiving projects on the final set of stakeholders I listed above, art historians (and with them, other scholars, students, and arts enthusiasts), is less immediately tangible. As we gear up the planning for our next Artist Studio Archives workshop at The Mint Museum in Charlotte this October, I wanted to explore the ways in which people are learning through artists’ archival materials presented online. In order to broach the scholarly impact that efforts to archive artists’ materials makes and has the potential to make, I’ve been looking at the use of artists’ archival materials in the larger context of Digital Art History research.

Digital Art History, like its parent field, Digital Humanities, means different things to different people, precisely because it can encompass widely divergent sets of data and ways of exploring that data. In one of the texts working towards defining Digital Art History as a method, “Is There a ‘Digital’ Art History?”, Joanna Drucker distinguishes between a “digitized” art history as one built on the use of online resources (repositories and image collections) and a “digital” art history which uses analytic techniques enabled by digital technology in order to think (or rethink, as the case may be) art historically using digital processes.[1] This might entail collaborative image and artifact viewing and annotating; map, timeline, and network building; or other tools and processes incorporating digital materials. Though useful as a conceptual framework for classifying various modes of digital humanities research, not all digital art history tools fit neatly within this dichotomy. Given that this field is still emergent, how are art historians, archivists, and librarians using digital tools to present and study artists’ archival materials? What might these new uses and ways of conducting art historical research mean for the choices artists make about archiving their materials?

Both Colin and Kim have given examples of how artists use their digital archives as a means of either structuring the narrative about their materials, or working against the imposition of any single explanatory narrative on their work. Susan Harbage Page’s envisioned “Anti-Archive” of her U.S. Mexico-border project is characterized as an art archive, performance piece, photography portfolio, and documentation project” (despite the ultimate time and budget-based restrictions in realizing the originally conceived open navigability and playfulness in its online manifestation). As described by Colin, John Latham’s archive pushes visitors to mediate their experiences with his materials by choosing among portals leading to different arrangements of the information, provoking reflection on how information arrangement might determine historical narrative creation. These examples demonstrate how artists are using digital tools to present their archival materials, but what are other ways in which art historians and information professionals, perhaps in collaboration with the artists themselves, are using artists’ archival materials online to generate further study?

http://www.anthonyreynolds.com/breakwell/diary/diaries/projects/walking_man/image_1975.12.16

Ian Breakwell, from The Walking Man Diary, December 16, 1975

The Diary Re-invented, a 2007 project with artist Ian Breakwell and Jane Gibb and Felicity Sparrow at the University of the Arts, London, presents a visual diary of Breakwell’s images and texts from the 1960s-2000s, browsable via a timeline. Breakwell’s full oeuvre includes visual texts, drawings, photo-collage, events, theatre performances, film, film performances and expanded-cinema events, installations, environments, video, audio works, slide-tape sequences, digital imaging, and readings of prose texts. Breakwell explains that his diaries “record the side events of daily life: by turns mundane, curious, bleak, erotic, tender, vicious, cunning, stupid, ambiguous, absurd, as observed by a personal witness.” He identifies his own themes as the “investigation of the relationship between word and image…the concept of personal time, and the surreality of mundane ‘reality’.” The use of a digital timeline to organize these archival works encourages the user to explore the emergence of these and other themes over time. Some entries are annotated, while the users must explore others without a guide. The website, part of Breakwell’s Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship project at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, is not an online artist’s archive per se, but instead takes a form of work or works that would traditionally be considered a part of an artist’s archival holdings, the diary, and reconceives it in digital form.

A digital project of a different scale, Digital Kirchner, a Getty Research Institute initiative, centers on a 1917 series of illustrations of the apocalypse created on the back of cigarette boxes by German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938). The project involved digitizing the drawings, which were kept in a sketch album preserved in the Research Institute’s special collections. Team members Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Anja Foerschner wrote a scholarly essay about the works, examining the historical and biographical context in which they were created and comparing them to Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcut series.[2] Though this project may appear at first to be a “digitized” rather than “digital” art history project, to use Drucker’s dichotomy, the digitized album was used to develop a beta version of the Getty’s online collaborative platform, the Getty Scholar’s Workspace, released late last year. The Workspace provides a research environment and set of tools (bibliography builder; image comparison, editing, and annotation tools; text editing and annotation tool; correspondence forum; archival material/manuscript presentation tool; and timeline builder) to facilitate communication for research teams examining digital surrogates of artworks and primary source materials. Though this particular project resulted in a research paper, other Workspace collaborations might result in exhibitions, conferences, or other types of publications. In this instance, one artist’s archival materials were used to help build a new way of conducting research within the still-nascent discipline of Digital Art History.

http://primo.getty.edu/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=GRI&afterPDS=true&institution=01GRI&docId=GETTY_ROSETTAIE489108

Drawing 3 from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s sketchbook, 1917

Drawing 3 verso from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s sketchbook, 1917

The gulf in style and institutional scope between the Breakwell and Kirchner projects demonstrates the openness of the field of possibilities for Digital Art History projects using artists archives. Though many current digital art history projects draw widely on different artists’ archival materials held by a number of repositories, the number of digital humanities projects, other than databases and digitization projects, that focus within a single artist’s collection is still quite small. Because digital humanities methods allow scholars to organize and present larger quantities of data than traditional methods, the temptation has been to examine larger quantities of materials than a single artist’s output. The projects listed above demonstrate the value of focusing the digital humanities lens on a single artist or set of works. While the work we’re doing in the “Learning from Artist’s Archives” program will help to build a larger and richer set of NC artists’ materials for future art historians and students to draw upon, I hope that strengthening artists’ agency in actively planning, building, and maintaining their own archives will help to shape the future of digital art history and facilitate scholars’ closer examination of the contexts surrounding a single work, set or works, or legacy.

NOTES

[1] Joanna Drucker (2013). Is There a “Digital” Art History? Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, 29:1-2, 5-13, DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2013.761106

[2] T. W.Gaehtgens & A. Foerschner (2014). Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Drawings of the Apocalypse. Getty Research Journal, (6), 83–102. http://doi.org/10.1086/675792

Starting the Conversation: Impressions from the First ASA Workshop

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Erin Dickey

Early Saturday morning, Cherryl T. Cooley, a poet, playwright and fiber artist, greeted the Artist Studio Archives team as she entered the large conference room at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA), the earliest of the artists selected to participate in the first Artist Studio Archives (ASA) workshop.

The ASA project team.

The team for this first session was comprised of Heather Gendron, former UNC Sloane Art Library Director and current Director of the Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University; UNC Music Librarian Philip Vandermeer; NCMA conservation technician Stacey Kirby; UNC Art Department and SILS faculty members Denise Anthony, JJ Bauer, and Carol Magee; Sloane Library Temporary Research Assistant Amelia Holmes; 2nd year Fellows Colin Post and Kimberley Henze; and 1st year Fellows Elizabeth Grab, Kelsey Moen, Fanny Huang Ouyang, and myself. Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the workshop was the result of a year’s planning by the 1st year Fellows and UNC team members.

From left: Linda Dallas, Stacey Kirby, Stacy Lynn Waddell, and Cherryl T. Cooley.

As I spoke to Cherryl before the session began that morning, she said she felt fortunate to participate in the workshop during a time in her career when her conceptions about her own practice and personal archives are coinciding with her ambition to work with other artists on issues of legacy, estate, and intellectual property. She described being particularly spurred to action by witnessing how the legacies of artists she admires are handled after their deaths. As an example, she expressed dismay at the piecemeal sale of Maya Angelou’s art collection and other estate items. Cherryl’s own work focuses on themes of womanness, Southern culture, myth and folklore, race, family, love, and icon culture. She maintains a WordPress blog as “a chronicle of her evolution as a writer and a human.”

Throughout the day other participating artists raised complex questions of archival practice. Lynn Duryea, a sculptor and Professor of Art at Appalachian State University, was curious about how to document and archive a given community–specifically, the individuals and artworks associated with a Maine artist residency program she participated in and coordinated.

Alia El-Bermani, a painter, wanted advice on how to usefully and creatively archive an emerging art movement that she is involved in. Women Painting Women, founded by El-Bermani, Diane Feissel, and Sadie Valeri, began as a blog focused on conversations about “how contemporary women artists are handling women as subjects.” The site has since launched a number of opportunities for women artists to meet and collaborate, as well as to promote and exhibit their work in the U.S. and overseas.

Fellow Kim Henzy leads a breakout session on email, social media, and web archiving.

Fellow Kim Henze leads a breakout session on email, social media, and web archiving.

One artist shared the gut-wrenching experience of losing three years of creative work after her blog was hacked, saying, “I am here because of the things I lost.” She was “gun-shy” about using her new blog, and wanted input on best practices for archiving web content, a situation with which other participating artists empathized.

Several archivists from local institutions–Lynn Richardson of the North Carolina Collection at the Durham Public Library; Chaitra Powell from UNC’s Southern Historical Collection; Tanya Zanish-Belcher, Director of Special Collections and Archives at Wake Forest University; and Linda Sellars of NCSU Special Collections–joined us for the lunch session, initiating conversations on how the personal archives of regional and local artists add to the richness, depth, and representativeness of institutional archival holdings.

As Steven Silverleaf, a painter currently working on collaborations with choreographers, bookmakers, and printers, noted during the closing session, the workshop provided a chance for sometimes-overlooked local artists to connect with their area archivists and museum communities. And when I caught up with Cherryl again at day’s end, she seemed (like most of us at that point) contemplative, a little tired, but excited to go home and get to work using some of the tools she picked up throughout the day.

Participating artists during the ASA workshop.

This workshop was the opening salvo in what we hope to be a long, fruitful, and ever-evolving conversation between the NC arts and arts information communities about the role of artists’ archives in our cultural heritage. Stay tuned for more reflections from Fellows on this workshop, for details on the next workshop over the course of the year, and for a forthcoming workbook for artists, Artists’ Studio Archives: Managing Personal Collections & Creative Legacies.

Artists' Studio Archives

Practical strategies for artists, archivists, librarians, and museum curators to collect and preserve artists' archives

Author Archives: Erin Dickey