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The article focuses on the autobiographical notes by painter Gerald Murphy from the papers of curator Douglas MacAgy. On May 17, 1962, MacAgy wrote to Murphy and requested him to expand and clarify certain points of biography and work. MacAgy's inquiries and Murphy's notes are contained in the Douglas MacAgy Papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. An excerpt from Murphy's October 24, 1962 set of notes commenting on MacAgy's summary of his production is provided. According to the article, Murphy's numbered answers correspond to numbers in MacAgy's typescript.

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]

The article offers a sampling of the papers and library of artist and art collector Walter Pach, which have been acquired by the Archives of American Art. The earliest papers are family records which provide information on his school days and his early training as an artist. One of the most important early papers is his logbook for the summers of 1903 and 1904 when he joined William Merritt Chase's summer classes in Europe. His letters with artists in Europe are varied, wide and informative. It is pointed out that the papers offers much insight into Pach's contributions to the life of art.

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]

The article describes the Philadelphia Project in which the Archives of American Art acquires the archives of artists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An excerpt is presented from an 1817 letter written by Benjamin West to Thomas Sully. Lloyd Ney and Abraham Rattner wrote letters to each other when Ney was in the U.S. while Rattner was in France. The Archives microphotographed several collections of personal papers that are part of the archival resources at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

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]

This article reports that the West Coast Regional Center has acquired additions to several noteworthy collections which includes the papers of Lucien and Marcelle Labaudt, Peter Selz, Harold Paris, and James Smillie. The Labaudt papers are among the richest dealing with developments in the first half of the century in Northern California and consists of correspondence and photographs. The papers of James Smillie have entered the Archives through several various Archives centers like the San Francisco office.

The article discusses the Archives's additional Abraham Rattner, Lincoln Rothschild and Henry Hitchings's papers provided by their widows. It mentions that Rattner's widow, Esther Gentle Rattner provided the papers wherein cross-country automobile trip with Henry Miller was the main focus which was described in the 1941 book of Miller entitled "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare." On the other hand, Elisabeth Rothschild donated the historically interesting documents of both men wherein different writer career aspects, editor, arts administrator, sculptor as well as the unpublished book "Painters of Democracy," and "The Pragmatist in Art" were the main concern of the materials. In addition, Henry Hitchings had produced several books on art instruction that were now offered at the Archives.

The article offers news briefs. Suspension was given to the Archives program review in the first quarter of 1984. The papers of Louis Demott Bunce, one of Portland's well-known painters, are highlighted by the volominous personal correspondence. The letter to Jackson Pollock is one of the most exciting composition of the Bunce papers.

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]

The article presents information on the activities of the Archives of American Art research institute in Southern California. A group of personal papers document art patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg's support of modernist developments in the twentieth century. Jacqueline Anhalt Stuart presented to the Archives a gift of art dealer David Stuart's papers, which include documentation of his arrest for the exhibition entitled "Erotic Art '69". The Los Angeles County Museum of Art made a donation of audiotape-recorded group discussions of modern art, public art, and functionalism, that included Calvin Tomkins, Elyn Zimmerman, and Siah Armajani as participants.

The article presents information on the activities of the Archives of American Art research institute in New England. The Archives has received the personal papers of scholars Lincoln Kirstein and Laurence E. Schmeckebier in the form of drafts for writings and research notes. The papers of Marie Danforth Page and H. Dudley Murphy enhance the documentation of the Boston School of painters. The Archives cooperated with the curators at four museums to microphotograph a hundred sketchbooks of Maurice Prendergast and Charles Prendergast.

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]

The article discusses the activities of the Archives of American Art in New York State. The collection of former Brooklyn Museum Curator John I. H. Baur's papers include draft manuscripts of books, photographs of painting and sculpture, and correspondence. Sculptor Christopher Wilmarth kept records of his artistic masterpieces, his teaching, and his exhibitions. The Archives microphotographed an installment of Charles Seliger's diary, which provides Seliger's informed commentary on the New York art community.

The article reports that the Archives of American Art research institute acquired the personal papers of West Coast educator, author, and painter Worth Allen Ryder, which include photographs and family letters. The correspondence with colleagues is related to Ryder's professional career as teacher of modern art in the University of California. Ryder exchanged love letters with his girlfriend and later wife Cornelia in which they express their dedication to art, their depth of relationship, and mutual respect. An excerpt is presented of Ryder's letter to University of California faculty member Erle Loran about the Exposition and Congress of Art Education in 1937.

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.

The article reports on the acquisitions made by the West Coast office of the Archives of American Art compiled as of September 2000. The Archives has acquired papers of Some Serious Business that include correspondence with artists, exhibition announcements, flyers, posters and financial records. Santa Barbara Museum curator Robert Henning Jr. donated a collection of papers of Beatrice Wood that include a letter, photographs and a typescript of Wood's manuscript "Reflection of a Wonderful Day With Marcel Duchamp and Louise and Walter Arensberg."

The article reports on the acquisitions made by the New England office of the Archives of American Art compiled as of September 2000. The Archives has acquired the papers of Eve Peri, a pioneer in the interface between the traditional arts of needlework and modern abstract art in the U.S. The papers of art historian Brucia Witthoft, who spent decades of careful and patient research on the lives and works of the Smillie family of painters, engravers, jewelers and writers, were also acquired by the Archives.

The article reports on the acquisitions made by the New York office of the Archives of American Art compiled as of September 2000. American photographer, filmmaker, painter and downtown character Maryette Charlton has donated a group of papers that includes letters from Xenia Cage, Dimitri Hazdi and Lillian Kiesler, and tape recordings of Leon and Owen Elliott. The Archives has also acquired papers of LLoyd Goodrich that includes letters and postcards from Reginald Marsh, Betty Burroughs Marsh and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.

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]

The article focuses on the artist Andre Emmerich's papers at the Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York City. According to the article, one group of documents had been destroyed in a warehouse fire and the remaining of Emmerich's archives had become the property of Sotheby's auction house when it acquired the gallery in 1998. It adds that Sotheby's decided to return the papers to Emmerich to dispose of as he wished. Emmerich's archives consisted of the inventor of card of every contemporary art object.

The article presents news briefs regarding the New York center of the Archives of American Art. The Archives has acquired the papers of painter, writer and sculptor Lily Harmon. A Philadelphia, Pennsylvania art dealer has lent to the Archives two sketchbooks of Abstract Expressionist painter William Baziotes for microfilming. The papers of Abstract Expressionist sculptor Reuben Kadish were also borrowed by the Archives.

The article presents news briefs regarding the Southeastern center of the Archives of American Art. The research papers of art historian Giulio V. Blanc have been donated to the Archives by his sister Margherita Blanc. The remaining papers in the studio of artist Ida Kohlmeyer have been donated to the Archives by her daughter Jane Lowentritt. The Archives has also acquired the research files of folk art collectors Jan and Chuck Rosenak.

The article reports on the various collections acquired by the Archives. The collection of Frazer Family papers which include portrait painter Oliver Frazer's letters to his family owned by the University of Kentucky library was microfilmed for the Archives. These letters showed Frazer's disappointment with his instructors, descriptions of his art training, visits to European museums, and other activities. Meanwhile, Charles Pollock's papers acquired by the Archives consist of correspondence for his family, wife, friends and associates of the 1930s.

The article reports that the Archives of American Art's Art Documentation Project has discovered a series of art-related papers buried in a collection of marine insurance records at the Philadelphia Maritime Museum in Pennsylvania. The collection comprised some one hundred and fifty letters, shipping lists, and artists' and dealers' receipts of the prominent Philadelphia art collector and patron James L. Claghorn. It includes papers about American and European paintings imported from Germany and Italy intended for the Claghorn collection or resale in the U.S.

The article reports on art documents received by the Archives of American Art in Southern California. It mentions that the Archives received papers on Double X, an organization endorsing a feminist art movement. The documents provide information on the organization's art activities and political views. Papers were also received on the Baxter Art Gallery at the California Institute of Technology. The records describe the art program of the institute and its numerous exhibitions. Documents by Betty Freeman provide information on several artists including Sam Francis and Clyfford Still. An overview of the documents received is provided.

The article reports on the acquisitions made by the southeast office Archives of American Art in the U.S. compiled as of September 2000. The Archives has received a substantial gift of the Janet de Coux papers that includes draft drawings, correspondence, sketchbooks, photographs, audiotapes and printed materials documenting her career as a sculptor from the late 1920s to 1998. American art historian Richard J. Powell has donated the first segment of his papers documenting his intellectual journey and adventures abroad in the mid-1980s while gathering information on painter William H. Johnson.

The article reports on several developments in the Archives of American Art regional center in West Coast, U.S. as of March 1996. San Francisco artist Jerome Caja's papers, which includes correspondence, photographs and printed materials, were donated to the Archives by his executor Anna van der Meulen. The Archives have also acquired the papers of Cleo, a long-time nude model for many artists, which included her autobiography, her photographs and photos of works where she modeled. Moreover, the Archives' West Coast regional center sponsored the symposium "With New Eyes: Towards an Asian American Art History on the West Coast" held at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, along with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and San Francisco State University.

The article reports on the collection of papers given to the Archive of American Art Regional Center in Southern California. Among the papers received were those of Laura Andreson and Constance Perkins as well as the Southern California Artists Index, 1930-1945, which were donated by Joseph H. Krause of California State University. Another important addition was a set of seventy-three sketchbooks by the late Carlos Almaraz, on loan for microfilming. An addition to the Woman's Building collection consisting of thirty-one boxes of records of the founding of a feminist art organization is also included.

The article discusses the collections of the Archives of American Art. This Smithsonian research unit, whose staff is composed of art historians and archival workers, has research centers in Boston, New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and Washington DC. Some of the Archives' collections include the David Smith papers, a large collection of documentation covering the artist's career and the Rockwell Kent papers, an immense collection of books, catalogues and articles about Kent. The largest and richest single collection of the Archives is the records of the Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The article reports on the records of Penland School of Crafts in Penland, North Carolina, which were microfilmed by the Archives of American Art. The papers provide a history of Penland's origin as a cottage industry up until its current status as a multi-studio crafts mecca offering instruction in clay, glass, fiber arts, iron, fine metals, drawing and book arts. The records include Penland publications, correspondence, minutes of board meetings, photographs and sales records. The papers of the director emeritus, Bill Brown, and his wife, Jane Comfort Brown, were also microfilmed.

The article reports on the project of the Archives of American Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which involves transferring records to microfilm, in particular the holdings of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The first set of microfilms were of the Sartain family papers, which include selections from the Centennial Exhibition records, Henry Gilpin's letters, journals and selections from the Hopkinson Family papers. Other donations included in the collection are catalogues, reviews, press releases and some Beatrice Fenton materials.

The article reports on American artists from New England and their documents and records given to the Archives of American Art. The Emmet Family's correspondence and other papers were given to the Archives in 1990. The archives has acquired several of Dwight Blaney's documents including a scrapbook, exhibition catalogues, and photographs of artists, among others. Other collections in the Archives include Boris Mirski's complete gallery, the papers of Elizabeth Gilmore, and letters received by Robert S. Taylor, among others.

The article presents news briefs regarding the New England region of the Archives of American Art. The Archives had microfilmed several postcards and letters sent by Frederic Remington to businessman Joel W. Burdick. Several papers of Henry Hudson Kitson and his wife, Theo Ruggles Kitson, were received by the Archives in late 1986. The institution also received the papers of Alexander Robertson James, the younger painter-son of philosopher William James.

The article reports on art documents received by the Archives of American Art. It mentions that papers by Robert Neuhaus describe the career of artist Clyfford Still. The article discusses that Still was influential on artists in the Bay Area, California and his works provide information on art after World War II. The archives also received papers on Emmy Lou Packard who is an artist in San Francisco. The documents describe her relationship with other artists including Diego Rivera, Anton Refregier, and Juan Gorman. The article also reports that the Archives received an interview with painter Hassel Smith. An overview of the documents received is provided.

The article reports on the acquisitions made by the New York regional office of the Archives of American Art compiled as of January 1986. The Archives has received the gift of the papers of writer, art critic, and curator Thomas B. Hess, who was for a long period a prominent and influential voice in the contemporary art of the twentieth century. The Archives has also acquired the papers of German nonobjective painter Rudolf Bauer that include photographs and copies of lengthy and bizarre letters from Bauer to Hilla Rebay.

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]