Engaging Collections Journal - Volume 1

As an educator who was radicalized by Black feminist and womanist literature, I have always been clear that that was my goal for SISTORIES--to provide the grounds for Black women and nonbinary femmes to adopt a politic to address the root cause of the social issues that cause them harm by seeing and writing themselves into the historical narrative of Black femmehood.

Memorial for Queer Rhyolite, a temporary monument to dreams in the dust is a public work originally installed for the inaugural Bullfrog Biennial at the Goldwell Open Air Museum in October 2019. The piece memorializes a 1980s dream to establish “Stonewall Park,” a gay utopian effort aimed for Rhyolite, NV, a piece of deserted mining country that lies between Death Valley National Park and the Nevada Test Site.

Latinx customs, rituals and traditions have withstood countless transformations through their assimilation to the US and back, and the undocumented history of quinceañera practice–a journey I hold quite close to me–is still just one of the many deprived of proper accreditation.

Developing strong, meaningful, relationships between artists and archivists has so much potential to be fruitful for both fields. Interestingly, both art and archives have been historically undervalued in academia: artistic practice as a vehicle only for expression or reflection of issues, requiring translation by a critic or art historian to make sense of its real value (4), and archivists as “handmaidens of historians,” seen as passive intermediaries between records and the historians who interpret them (5)

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. 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.

Thread Library, an artwork I made for the Iowa City Public Library (ICPL) in February 2020, suggests that information is always mediated by the tactile, tangible, material, and personal. Simply put, Thread Library is a collection of thread with a card catalog, and each thread is cataloged as if it were a book.

From footage of hollering contests to oral histories of civil rights activists, Folkstreams.net is one of the most dynamic collections of independent films on the internet, containing over 100 documentaries, biopics, and performances available for free, alongside enrichment guides, transcripts, and an easily accessible list of rights information.

”As my family migrated and many others from the Diaspora did too, the camera was a way to document this broken American Dream narrative, instead, we needed to create a counter-narrative of our people, because we are not seen as American.”

The absence and resistance of historical context surrounding an object is an intriguing instance of sorts. Being a student of critical craft theory, my passion and research is Afro American craft history and material culture. This, combined with having a true admiration for antiquing, I have arrived at the dilemma I present to you now.

Being an Appalachian woman, artist, and herbalist, I am committed to honoring the women in my community. The women in this series have an intimate connection to the land and a beautiful and poetic way of communicating through plants and herbal medicine.

...Voices in Collective Thought presents some of the events and popular reactions lived throughout the October 20th electoral fraud and current crisis in Bolivia. Last November, after a thirteen year long presidency and a scandalous attempt at fraud, Evo Morales stepped down from presidency.

Queer Collections is a series of interviews and photographs exploring the eccentric and carefully-curated manners of collecting within self-identified queer communities. Zoe Rosenblum and Tristan Crane, alongside the collectors themselves, explore how the objects we hold dear inform our construction of identity and belonging—our vulnerabilities and anxieties, our joys and fantasies.

Cryptozoology is part of fringe science or pseudoscience along with ufology, numerology, transcendental meditation, electrogravitics, and more. These include different communities that often seem to be fun, harmless, and open-minded, but can be quite misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic, racist, and sexist.

”Against the Best Possible Sources presents the latest chapter of my ongoing project involving extensive research of the TIME, Inc. corporate archive and an investigation of the earliest history of the first professional journalistic fact-checkers, a role created by TIME in 1923 and held exclusively by women until 1971.”

I created this collection of video portraits of women in eastern Kentucky nearly ten years ago while pursuing my Masters in Fine Art from the University of Kentucky. It’s both comforting and humbling to revisit past work, but I find this timing especially poignant. I moved from Kentucky to New York City shortly after completing this film. I now find myself confined to a small apartment with my husband and baby in the midst of a global pandemic, in a universal holding pattern of our usual lives, contemplating how we want to shape our future life and home with our daughter.

During my visit to One Archives in LA last summer, I found a wide range of materials across lines of class, sexuality, gender expression, and race, however there are still gaps in representation: there is less working class material and the collection still favours big coastal cities.

“Social Distance (a photo project)” serves to reclaim the way we will talk about this “history-book” time. I am still actively working to broaden my scope of subjects, making sure that this project not only reflects my world as a young white person with access to financial support, but reflects the realities of those without that privilege and safety net as well. What will be the story we tell about this pandemic? How do we make sure it’s not remembered as ‘the great equalizer’, but rather, as something that is playing upon systematic inequalities that have existed for centuries?

In 2017, the Providence Public Library published a comic book called Lizard Ramone in Hot Pursuit: A Guide to Archives for Artists and Makers. Written and illustrated by Jeremy Ferris, it forms the core of a simple toolkit for archivists.