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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.

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]

The article presents news briefs related to the Southern California region of the Archives of American Art. The Archives has acquired additions to the Phil Paradise papers and the Baxter Art Gallery records during the first quarter of 1991. The institution has also acquired the papers of Kamekichi Tokita. The Archives has held several meetings during the past months on the future of the wide-ranging archives of the Woman's Building.

The article reports on the acquisitions made by the Southern California regional office of the Archives of American Art compiled as of January 1986. The Archives has received a gift of the papers of painter Jan Stussy that provides personal insights into one of America's foremost modernist, Stanton Macdonald-Wright. The personal papers of painter Toby Edward Rosenthal were donated to the Archives by the artist's grandson John E. Rodes. It includes letters that reveal the relationship of the young expatriate to the patrons in San Francisco, California who collected his work.

The article presents news briefs related to American art in Southern California. A selection of papers held by William Lees Judson is related to the history of art activity in this region. Miv Schaaf, the former president of The Architectural Panel, has donated the records of the organization to the Archives of American Art. These records include research material, correspondence, reports, some financial information and membership data.