MIXED MEDIA

It's with a heavy heart that I post this final video to MIXED MEDIA. It's been a pleasure sharing the treasures of artists' archives and the work of dedicated librarians and archivists. A very special thanks to our loving readers and contributors.

One Wall, Two Germanys: Photographs by Rudi Meisel

In the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Archives, a Magical Past and Present Unite

Brooklyn Public Library Digitizes 107 Years of City Directories and Telephone Books

Kodak’s First Digital Moment

Missing Historical Marker Resurrects Debate Over Photographer’s Birthplace

Abandoned Cars Are a New York Memory

Too Fragile to Open, World’s Oldest Multicolor Printed Book Is Digitized

Jerry Lewis' never-released Holocaust film The Day the Clown Cried inches closer to a possible screening

The Oldest Known Photograph Of The Smithsonian Castle

A Love Letter to New York City’s Vanishing Mom-and-Pops

Oxford’s online Bodleian archive: illumination for all

New Email Archive Tool to Sift Literary Legacies

In China, the Photobook as Art and History

Digitized, Searchable Archives Help Revive ‘Sleeping’ Languages

The Exuberant Postcard Art of the First Bauhaus Exhibition

Dr. Seuss Book: Yes, They Found It in a Box

How the NY Public Library Crowdsources Digital Innovation

Alan Parker Donates Entire Working Archives to British Film Institute

N.Y.U. Library Acquires Archive of the Digital Art Journal Triple Canopy

A Find in Britain: Quran Fragments Perhaps as Old as Islam 

A Look at the Suffrage Movement With the UK’s First Female Photojournalist

Secret Grand Jury Testimony From Ethel Rosenberg’s Brother Is Released

Previously unknown Amelia Earhart footage donated to Purdue archives

The Forgotten Man Behind William Carlos Williams’s ‘Red Wheelbarrow’

The Man Who Saw America: Looking back with Robert Frank, the most influential photographer alive

Stravinsky’s Illegal “Star Spangled Banner” Arrangement

The Revolution Has Been Digitized: Explore the Oldest Archive of Radical Posters

Treasures from the Vault: The Research Papers of Elizabeth Roth, Keeper of Prints and Rare Books at the NYPL

Andrea Jenkins Archives LGBQT Stories for the Ages

Louis Le Prince: Are these the world's oldest films?

Archive of Captured Enemy Documents Closes

Newly Discovered Photo Offers a Glimpse of van Gogh and Gauguin

Can An Algorithm Do The Job Of A Historian?

MoMA Is Archiving Its Exhibition Websites Before They Expire

Tara Strongosky is an archivist of accumulation. She is the cataloger, records manager and lone arranger at the Arman Studio & Archives. In an interview with MIXED MEDIA, Strongosky discusses Arman’s archives, his personal collection of radios and the challenges of cataloging accumulated artwork.

Could you give me an overview of what’s in the archives?

The archive is made up of Arman’s artwork. The span of his career lasted almost 50 years from around 1947 to 2005, and we have the earliest artwork and the most recent artwork. The collection includes visual resources; slides and photographs – 35mm, large format, every kind of format you can think of. We have videos and audio recordings, but I haven’t delved into those yet. That’s not my priority right now, but it’s on the list. We also have artist books and an entire print collection. We don’t have all of his sculptures here, but we do have some sculptures, paintings and drawings. In addition to his artwork, we have his personal collections, like radios, and I maintain those as well. It’s not as well cataloged as his work because that just hasn’t been the focus, but now that he’s gone and his wife is getting older, we’re trying to focus more on getting all of their other artwork under control. We have publications on Arman and we have a very large collection of auction catalogs. I’ve been working on a retention schedule with them because there are just too many and I’ve been trying to harness the important information and put it in Artbase, which is the database we use, and record the information in terms of who’s buying the artwork, where it’s going, how much it’s selling for, and then pretty much disposing of the auction catalog since they’re not really important to this collection. We also have archival papers and tons of correspondence, tons of writings on his work and philosophies, and internal records.

Is there a separation between the art collections and the archival collections?

It’s pretty much all melded together at this point. When Arman was working and alive, I don’t think there was any separation between personal life, studio life and the art world. Everything is still intertwined.

Is it difficult to catalog the artwork because of the variety of mediums in each piece?

The cataloging has been a real challenge. When I got here, there was already a cataloging system in place. But because his body of work is so large and diverse, and because he worked with every material on the planet, it’s been a challenge to categorize everything and make it work with the system. I’ve done a revamp of the system and making our numbered system work better. And also thinking logically, is this the main material being used? Should we categorize by that? I can’t go back to square one because there’s 50 years of cataloging that’s already been done. I don’t work with a standard vocabulary because it’s only an internal system that we use, but I’ve been thinking more and more about standardization in terms of materials, like polyester versus resin. It’s been a major challenge.

Who are the main users of the collections?

Auction houses are probably our biggest user. They want to get authentication for the work, which we still do. The second group would be private collectors, who are looking for certificates of authenticity or information about the artwork that they have or just general interest. I’d say the third group is students, independent and academic researchers. We don’t get a ton of visits here, only because it is private, but we do get some from time-to-time. I wish people could visit more because it is such a neat place.

How did you get into archives?

The Memory-Keeper of SoHo

Many Choices for Obama in Replacing Billington at Library of Congress

MoMA Acquires Hundreds of August Sander Photographs

Medicine’s Hidden Roots in an Ancient Manuscript

12 Essential Archives For Internet-Era Music Historians

In 2014 Artspace published the article, “How the Art World Caught Archive Fever,” which discussed of the use of archives as source material for curated exhibitions and contemporary artists. Archives were represented at the recent Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island, which brought together several dozens galleries under one giant tent. There was also a handful of one-artist and curated shows. The stand out in the latter was Ibid Projects’, The Archigram Archival Project, featuring original material created by the 1960s architecture collective.

The mission of the Archigram architectural collective was to share ideas about the neo-futurist architecture, design, and technology permeating all aspects of modern culture of their time. Archigram was a conceptual counter-movement to the practical architectural applications of these modernist theories, and its projects were mostly un-realized.

Ibid’s display held all 9 ½ issues of Archigram, a self-titled publication dating 1961-1970. Produced at home and in a small print run, each issue was the vehicle for Archigram’s ideas and work to the public. Set inside a vitrine, without their contents visible, each cover was well designed and graphically spectacular, trippy, and fantastical.  

In addition to the publication, the exhibition featured a few drawings and ephemeral items related to Archigram projects. One project, Instant City, was a mobile city, similar to a carnival, which moved locations, allowing non-city dweller access to all that a big city has to offer before moving onto its next location.  

Room of 1000 Delights was a musing on the space that exists between reality and the virtual. Something we are familiar with today’s technology, however at times appeared as science-fiction.

Boyhood: An astounding, one-of-a-kind trove of stories and drawings reveals what life was like for young men growing up in rural 19th-century America

Emory archive acquires Atlanta Contemporary Art Center’s records

Two Prints Go Missing at the Boston Public Library

Quantifying the Need: A Survey of Existing Sound Recordings in Collections in the United States

Archivists Find Fragments of an Unfinished Orson Welles Autobiography

Unknown Hans Christian Andersen text found

USC's secret archive of horror films features work by John Carpenter, Dan O'Bannon

Picasso’s Stage Curtain Is Unfurled at Its New Home

Works In Progress: A very small sampling of the female artists now in their 70s, 80s and 90s we should have known about decades ago.

A New Digital Archive of Documents Relating to Free Persons of Color in Antebellum Louisiana