Excavating Race in the Archive
Session will present: RemotelyAffiliated Society or Committee Name: Association for Critical Race Art History
This panel brings together archivists and artists in conversation to consider the operations of the archives and their utility in scholarly and creative practices. Indisputably, archives are raced, i.e., constructed to advance the ideologies of racialized difference, particularity, or exceptionalism–variably marshalled to assert power or resist it. We consider both state institutions—from the Library of Congress to the Bibliothèque Nationale—and corrective collecting projects organized by those whose histories were not privileged in grand narratives. How do the institutional collections present their authority as centers of knowledge that hold incalculable cultural value? Archivists who care for and preserve vital documents and materials–letters, photographs, ephemera–that inform written histories of artistic movements and artists’ lives will discuss redress of racist legacies. Artists will speak to their critical interventions that challenge dominant, discriminatory ways of seeing, classifying, and organizing data and things. The panelists’ presentations–considered together–offer a view of the archive as a repository of accumulated power, albeit one that leaks. That is, archives invariably tell on themselves, collecting as they do the evidence of great achievement in ways that illuminate the fragility of subjectivity and anxiety about impermanence.
Keywords:
Topics: Race/Ethnicity
Topics: Critical Race Theory
Topics: Library and Archival Studies
Topics: Collections
Topics: Art Practice
Chairs:
Camara D. Holloway, Association for Critical Race Art History
and
Jacqueline Francis, California College of the Arts
Abstract Submissions Closed