Providence Public Library’s Creative Fellowship: Old Legacies, New Work
Walker Mettling’s “The Providence Sunday Wipeout”
Providence Public Library’s Creative Fellowship: Old Legacies, New Work
by Angela DiVeglia
Research is a solitary practice, but a research fellowship can be a tool for community-building, and the relationships between artists and archival materials can help upend and reshape our sense of history.
The Fellowship
Special Collections at the Providence Public Library (PPL) in Providence, Rhode Island offers an annual, 6-8 month Creative Fellowship for an artist to do intensive archival research and create new work, along with an interactive public program. The fellowship, now in its seventh year, serves as an integral part of the library’s outreach as we strive to create an open and supportive teaching and learning place for all Rhode Islanders. Fellows receive personalized, in-depth research support, a designated hold shelf, and a modest stipend and materials budget to support their work.
2019 Creative Fellow Laura Brown-Lavoie demonstrates her enthusiasm about her hold shelf
PPL’s Special Collections houses tens of thousands of items from around the world, ranging from the mundane to the fabulous. In addition to working with genealogists, high school and college students, local authors, curiosity-seekers, scholars, and amateur historians, we work closely with the local arts and design community. The Fellowship is the nucleus of a multi-faceted approach including specialized reference for visual researchers, an annual type design competition, and an online gallery to feature artists’ work inspired by our collections.
As the Librarian who runs this Fellowship, I’ve seen the quasi-magical ways in which it enables a research process and facilitates a creative process that are embedded, immersive, and relationship-based. It’s rare to be able to build a long-term relationship with a researcher over repeated, regular visits, but when we’re able to do so, the reference process becomes iterative and intuitive. During the Fellowship, I build a sense of how each artist builds connections between ideas and themes and see which items they connect strongly with. As our inaugural Creative Fellow, Micah Salkind, put it, “my research process was aleatory in the best ways.” Another Fellow, Becci Davis, noted that her research shifted as she followed imaginative trails through collections. “Over the course of the residency, I broadened the scope of my research… [my] focus shifted from hair specifically to immersing myself in the culture and ambiance of the [Civil War] era. Some of the research topics were identified through serendipitous engagements with the collections but by far the most fruitful discoveries were made as a result of conversations with the curators and archivists.”
Creative Fellow Becci Davis performing “Private Proclamations” on the steps of the Library
Part of an installation from Creative Fellow Laura Brown-Lavoie’s Earth Day ritual
Our Fellows’ research has ranged throughout our collections: Fellows have dived deep into environmental reports, Rhode Island atlases, Civil War-era correspondence, mid-century magazine advertisements, an illustrated folio of the excavations of the Necropolis of Ancón in Peru, broadside ballads, guides to local plants and minerals, a linguistic atlas of New England, illustrations of steam engines, historic newspapers, and much more. Their resulting projects have been just as diverse, breathing life into our materials as they’re integrated into comics, performances, art installations, writing projects, illustrations, and murals. The Fellows’ work has been vital as in essential, but also as in alive: audiences engage viscerally with source materials through art, allowing them to understand and interact with historical materials in heartfelt ways. As Laura Brown-Lavoie described it, “when an artist helps me learn about our history, it usually stays with me in a more physical way and emotional way— the data is delivered by someone who has also done the work to feel it… for me art is a lasting vessel. And what I learn from art that is rooted in history is a way of understanding the present moment as part of a continuum— if we feel that continuum, we can better heal what is still wounded and behave in a way that interrupts the repetitions of wounding.”
Fellows as Community
The cadre of past Creative Fellows retains close ties with the library, returning frequently as researchers. They also serve a vital role as ambassadors for the library and our collections within their families, social networks, and creative communities: their comfort with the librarians and the research process, built through repeated contact, means they frequently refer or even physically bring new researchers to us.
This network of positive relationships extends internally as well: the Fellows build ties with each other, often going on to collaborate and support each other’s work. Artist Keri King describes her relationship with other Fellows as both respectful and inspirational: “the compassion, work ethic, and imagination driving each of these artists' work inspires me to work harder, dig deeper, be more vulnerable… I think our shared experience with Special Collections is a palpable bond.” Becci Davis describes the relationships as “rich, generative, and stimulating.”
Keri King at work in her studio
Current Practice
During Rhode Island’s spring 2020 stay-at-home order, the Library’s Programs & Exhibitions Director, Christina Bevilacqua, and the Library’s Events Coordinator, Janaya Kizzie, developed a new interactive project about how to navigate unrelenting uncertainty, fluctuating productivity, and debilitating isolation. The project, called Adaptive Practices: Six Artists Redefine Isolation and Distraction, invited our current and former Creative Fellows to share their work with the public, delving into how they, as artists, venture into the unknown, work in solitude, and experiment with new ways of thinking and doing. The Fellows and Library staff met to brainstorm potential ideas and formats for their presentations, and some even followed up with virtual visits to each other’s studios.
The following video is a Zoom recording of the first Adaptive Practices event: Becci Davis’s “An Ode to Home,” in which she explored her relationship to her hometown and the reflections of her family history in its landscapes through a collection of photographs, and then challenged participants to create their own photo-based narratives interrogating their concepts of “home”.
Art in Archives
Inviting artists (and other non-traditional researchers) into the archives in warm and substantial ways can shift both the relationships between research and creation, and the relationships between people and the historical content itself. In terms of the former, Micah Salkind notes that “artists can challenge the notion that only trained scholars can do meaningful research by shifting the boundaries of what counts as meaningful research, and they can also appropriate the tools and methodologies used by scholars in ways that might demystify and popularize them.”
Increasing accessibility of research methods and materials is part of the process, but inviting our Fellows and other artists to use materials in new ways is at its core. In order to truly interrupt the legacy of the archive as a locus of power and a repository for records of the powerful, we aim to shift ideas of who creates archives and what archival materials have to say in concrete ways. Our materials should be preserved and respected, but neither their messages nor their creators need be revered; history, as we see it, is ripe for reinterpretation and reimagination. Becci Davis puts it succinctly: “I absolutely believe that the legacy of power and privilege which left our current archives in its wake can be shifted and challenged by creating new research-based work, democratizing the practice of archive creation and through the reexamination and analysis of the historic record.” Who’s doing this groundbreaking work? “ There are many examples of artists, historians, and other scholars who are using archives in compelling ways to decenter systems of power and privilege,” Davis notes. “Stephanie M. H. Camp, Titus Kaphar, Simone Leigh, Ariella Azoulay, and my Creative Fellow cohort are just a few.”
Angela DiVeglia is an artist, urban gardener, curator, and librarian in the Special Collections department at Providence Public Library in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work centers around visual and immersive research, social movement documentation, public history, post-industrial landscapes, and the transformative power of community archives. Learn more about Providence Public Library’s Special Collections here or follow them on Instagram.