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Drawing on the archives of the electrical spectacular designer Douglas Leigh, this essay demonstrates the benefits of approaching the papers of commercial artists and advertisers from an art-historical perspective. Leigh's substantial archive documenting decades of production in New York City would arguably be better placed in a collection like the National Museum of American History, which has strengths in the history of advertising. But what might this change of context render invisible in a collection like the Douglas Leigh Papers? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo's overidentification with The Rose (1958–66), has resulted in a historiography that consistently—and as I claim, wrongly—frames her career thereafter in terms of aftermath. Against narratives of "before and after" upheld by writers on DeFeo, this essay maintains that The Rose represents neither a consummation nor a cleavage; rather, it came to stand for DeFeo for incipient possibility, encompassing and then generating a lexicon of forms. The still larger stakes involve the role collections intended for public archives play in private lives. The Archives of American Art's interest in DeFeo beginning in 1974 arguably accelerated her imaging of futurity, encouraging not just new work but her work's preservation—alongside that of related papers, diaries, records, and oral histories—in anticipation of future audiences who might still receive it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent addition of materials to the Archives of American Art's Worden Day Papers enlivens study of this fascinating artist's life. Methodologically, this case study also addresses the challenge of researching American women modernists who lack significant archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez is recognized internationally for his role in developing a West Coast calligraphic style and an oeuvre of text-based paintings featuring original typographies inspired by the graffiti of the Avenues, his East Los Angeles neighborhood. His dramatic transformation into a graffiti artist who works on canvas rather than on the streets is an established part of the scholarly and popular record. What is largely unknown and revealed by the Archives of American Art’s Bojórquez Papers is that the years leading up to this transition in the artist’s practice were filled with explorations of clouds. The papers document Bojórquez’s “lasting interest in clouds,” expressing his attachment to continuous motion, energy, and contradictory properties. They also highlight his developing belief that art should function as a tool of human communication and cultural empowerment. Consideration of the artist’s early cloud imagery discloses a burgeoning ethos of universalism that would be articulated more fully in his graffiti-based paintings. In these later works, Bojórquez embraced the local aesthetics of the Avenues as a means of connecting with a global audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hoping to evoke in readers memories of their own encounters with the missing or illegible, this visual essay highlights materials from across the Archives that represent mysteries. There are texts that have stumped the Archives' crowdsourced attempts to transcribe them, photographs of unidentified people, and manuscripts that have been damaged, destroyed, or lost, such as torn out pages from an artist's diary or a letter consisting of only the postscript. One could regard these objects with melancholy, as representing gaps in knowledge that may never be bridged. They raise questions about the limits of any archive, and the necessary incompleteness of the work we do as scholars. However, by being irreducible to facts—by, we might say, not doing their job—I argue that indecipherable or incomprehensible archival materials may assert a hold on the researcher that legible materials do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In documenting more than 200 years of artists and art communities in the United States, the Archives of American Art has long been an unparalleled resource for research in the field. In 2019, the Archives—in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art—launched a series of workshops designed to develop and share innovative approaches to teaching that history at the college level using primary sources in its collections. For this journal feature, workshop participants and leaders were asked: What is the value of teaching with the Archives? What are the rewards and challenges when students learn to think creatively and critically about primary sources? Their responses reach across the collections and experiment with a variety of learning goals. Collectively, they present the Archives' collections as vital to any classroom in which students learn to read, think, and write about American art and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To write Native North American art history is to dance with difficult archives. Most of our primary sources were authored by white artists, patrons, collectors, curators, instructors, anthropologists, and government agents. Accordingly, we arrive in the archive determined to root out the damaging ideologies of even the most well-intentioned authors. While this preoccupation sheds light on colonialism and its attendant power structures, it does not necessarily bring us closer to the archive's obfuscated Indigenous subjects. An exclusively critical orientation can lead us to overlook subtler clues—affective, sensorial—that register the impacts of Native art and artists on their social and ecological milieus. This essay offers an alternative approach, proposing that we read settler archives relationally. By this I mean studying white authors' recorded responses to Native art and artists as potential indices of Indigenous worldmaking under conditions of colonial duress. Here I attempt to learn from Native approaches to agency and ethics that assess human accomplishments according to their effects on others. Has one behaved as a good relative? Has one furthered the chain of reciprocity linking humans to one another, to other beings, and to the entire universe? Has one contributed to beauty, harmony, health, and balance in the world? This approach prioritizes Native artists' rights and responsibilities to nurture an orderly cosmos. I test this relational method using the papers of Olive Rush (1873–1966) at the Archives of American Art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the archive of Florence Allen, a Black woman who gained fame both as an artist's model and as a labor activist. I read Allen's activism alongside her modeling career to consider her resistance to the representational history of the Black female nude. Always careful to distinguish her nudity from her sexual availability, Allen declared a distaste for photography as part of a forceful definition of the boundaries of her sexuality. Despite this stated aversion, Allen donated a large collection of photographs to the Archives of American Art, many of which reveal the tensile thresholds between what Allen called "the Lewd and the Newd." Together with her remarks surrounding obscenity, these photographs suggest that Allen defined the potential for sexual and economic liberation of the Black female body not only along the axis of artistic labor but also through self-representation in the archive she created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National institutions in the United States such as the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art are finally bringing attention and resources to the artistic practice of Latinos as well as Latin American artists residing in the US. As more institutions collect, preserve, and exhibit Latino and Latin American art, and as more scholars and universities engage in these histories, access to archives will play a critical role in shaping the future of these fields. This edited interview with C. Ondine Chavoya, professor of art history at Williams College; Olga Herrera, director of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research in Washington, DC; Tey Marianna Nunn, director and chief curator of the Art Museum and Visual Arts Program at the National Hispanic Cultural Center; and Adriana Zavala, professor of art history at Tufts University and director of the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) explores how scholars today are transforming their research practice thanks to the Latino collections at the Archives and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spring of 2020, amidst the COVID-19 outbreak and a national reckoning with racism in the US, the Archives of American Art Journal invited a diverse group of scholars and artists to grapple with the question, What role can the Archives of American Art play in the midst of these public crises? In this feature, eight contributors set about mining the past, present, and possible futures of the Archives. Some turn to artists in the Archives whose work they see as offering models for addressing the epidemiological, social, and political challenges of 2020. Others reflect on using the Archives' holdings in remote teaching and research when their access was limited to digitized collections online. Still others imagine the new work the Archives can do in a post-COVID world in which more Americans might acknowledge the racism of this country's institutions and structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Founded in 1954, the Archives of American Art fosters advanced research through the accumulation and dissemination of primary sources, unequaled in historical depth and breadth, that document more than 200 years of our nation's artists and art communities. The oral history collection includes more than 2,400 audio interviews, the largest accumulation of first-person accounts of the American art world. Consuelo Jiménez Underwood Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. [Extracted from the article]

In the mid-1970s, a number of artists in Southern California made works that merged self-portraiture, material documents, life narrative, and fiction. The 1976 exhibition Autobiographical Fantasies , Lowell Darling's This Is Your Life (1973–76), and Eleanor Antin's The Angel of Mercy (1977) related to feminist consciousness-raising strategies and to the presentation of identity as contingent and unstable. In emphasizing the materials of personal life narrative, they also raised questions about the critical potential of archival practices in art and art history, troubling ideas of authenticity, documentation, and the archive's ability to construct a coherent subject. Such ontological and methodological challenges situate the archive as performative rather than constative, with critical feminist implications. In the form of deliberately unreliable archives, artists such as Antin, Darling, Ilene Segalove, and Alexis Smith proposed the archive as a space of fantasy that demands performative engagement and retains its feminist potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the photographic source archive of New Deal artist Ben Shahn at the Smithsonian's Archives of America Art in New York City. It explores Shahn's working method, progressive artistic production and its sociopolitical contexts, his aesthetic inclinations, and formative stages of ideas in the New Deal, World War II, and post-war eras. It discusses Shahn's role in expanding documentary photography and the influence of the New York Public Library Picture Collection in his archive.

Art historians often go to archives to find those excluded from and forgotten by history. We desire a more inclusive discipline that integrates a wider range of voices than the field's Eurocentric patriarchal roots typically allow. Oral history serves as a vital tool in that mission by preserving the potency of such voices. Drawing from oral history scholarship, I argue that oral history's special value lies in its being a narrative, and all that encompasses: lost perspectives, series of remembered truths, and reflections of personal and societal values (in the process of being made personal and social). Through a close reading of the Archives of American Art's 1969 oral history interview with gallerist Martha Jackson, I grapple with oral history's complexity in order to better understand gendered experience at midcentury and find Jackson's voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Founded in 1954, the Archives of American Art fosters advanced research through the accumulation and dissemination of primary sources, unequaled in historical depth and breadth, that document more than 200 years of our nation's artists and art communities. The oral history collection includes more than 2,500 interviews, the largest accumulation of first-person accounts of the American art world. An international leader in the digitization of archival collections, the Archives also makes nearly three million digital images freely available online. [Extracted from the article]

Drawing on the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Lecture Archive in the collection of the Archives of American Art, this essay asks what we might learn both about and from the artist talk, a form of public address that is ubiquitous, understudied, and perhaps even a dialogic model beyond the bounds of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]