Archives of American Art Blog

How Does the Archives Fulfill Its Mission to Preserve and Make Available Its Rich Resources? A Behind the Scenes Look

For American Archives Month, Barbara Aikens, head of collections processing, takes a deep dive into the finding aid.

As American Archives Month draws to a close, it seems appropriate to give our readers a look at what’s new behind the scenes—technical work and initiatives aimed at improving collections’ stewardship, access, and digitization—all significant components of the Archives’ responsibility and mission to preserve and make available its rich resources.

Accelerated Processing Strategies

Senior archivist Stephanie Ashley processing one of the Archives’ large and complex collections.

In Fiscal Year 2016 (October 1, 2015–September 30, 2016), my team “processed” 104 archival collections measuring 1,228 linear feet—an increase of 30% over the previous year. Archival processing is defined as the activities of accessioning, organizing and arranging for physical access, describing for intellectual access, and properly housing archival materials according to established national standards and best practices. Processing workflows, methodologies, and tools are not static, but continuously evolving on the local and national level as we strive to make more collections more accessible to more users, while still preserving the collections for future generations.

There is no doubt that the significant increase in the amount of archival material processed can be attributed to the Archives’ focused efforts to reduce the backlog through the development and implementation of accelerated processing strategies. 

Over the last four years, the Archives, along with many other major archival repositories in U.S., adopted aggressive processing action plans to “do more with less.” This concept of “More Product, Less Process” (MPLP) was first introduced in a published report of a widespread study in 2005 by nationally recognized archivists Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner. The report argued that the nation’s ever-growing backlog of unprocessed archival collections can be traced to traditional archival processing methodologies that have focused almost exclusively on extremely detailed, item-level archival processing activities. This seminal article urged archivists to reconsider detailed arrangement and description and to remember that the first and foremost mission of the archivist is to make as many collections available to researchers as possible.

The Processing Team meticulously tracks the number of hours spent on primary tasks associated with processing each collection–for collections processed at the fullest level and for collections processed at an accelerated level.

While there is no single MPLP tactic that will work for each and every collection, repositories can adopt a toolkit of methods most suitable for their collections. Through four projects funded by the Smithsonian Institution’s Collections Care and Preservation Fund, the Archives has developed, tested, and documented unique accelerated processing strategies that are efficient and work with manuscript collections—versus large bodies of corporate or government archives—yet still result in high-quality online finding aids that meet all national standards and best practices.

Full-level processing is still the most appropriate choice for collections scheduled to be digitized in their entirety; these records will continue to be processed to a finer level of detail. Accelerated processing, however, averages nearly one-half the processing time per linear foot and results in the production of a larger number of finding aids in a shorter period of time.

Finding Aids

Example of a recently completed finding aid for a collection processed according to the Archives’ accelerated processing strategies.

A primary goal of archival processing is the creation of finding aids. In any format, they are an essential tool for researchers, providing detailed information about the content and intellectual and physical arrangement of an archival collection, providing researchers access to information about complex, voluminous, unique, and rare archival material. Finding aids also provide critical context, such as who created the records, why they were created, and what evidence they provide.

Essentially, finding aids are useful, reliable, and practical maps—leading users to the right repository, the right collection, and the right component within a collection. In today’s online environment, finding aids are the most efficient tool available to assist users in navigating archival collections across the globe. At present, the Archives of American Art has 760 standardized electronic finding aids available online, representing about 9,580 linear, slightly over half of our total holdings. On average, we’ve been producing roughly 100 new finding aids each year.

Finding Aids as Metadata for Digitized Collections

Online presentation of a finding aid for a fully digitized collection. Users access the digital files via links in the folder titles found in the container inventory of the finding aid.

Finding aids that are created according to national standards and best practices and additionally encoded in standardized digital schemas for web presentation contain highly structured metadata elements. The Archives has taken full advantage of the potential for repurposing the rich descriptive information found in finding aids to doubly serve as the sole descriptive metadata for our fully digitized collections. We began this effort roughly a decade ago, with major support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, and created an automated system built around the finding aid structure and workflow to support the large scale digitization of collections in their entirety. Not only does the descriptive information about the collection found in the finding aid double as the descriptive metadata for the digital files, the container inventory of boxes and folders in the finding aid also serves as the file directory for the saved digital images. Moreover, the online visual presentation of the finding aid serves as an easy to use online interface for navigating the digital files, providing users with a “virtual reading room” experience. These efficiencies and innovations have resulted in global access to over 2.5 million digital files on our website in the Terra Foundation Center for Digitized Collections, representing 190 fully digitized archival collections. And, the number continues to grow.

Finding Aids and Digital Art History

The SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) interface prototype explores the vast network of relationships among the creators of primary sources.

In addition to providing context for and access to digital content, the descriptive metadata found in electronically encoded finding aids can be repurposed and remixed for a variety of emerging web applications in the field of digital art history. Highly structured metadata can be transformed into open data that can be “released” to the web according to specific frameworks, thereby contributing to the “Web of Open Data” for linking on the semantic web—data that can be openly mined in various applications, including those capable of supporting any number of digital humanities studies.

Digital humanities scholars are already using advanced data visualization techniques rather than text-based sorting and selecting, and other new tools, such as 3-D mapping and electronic literary analysis, are being developed to analyze and present the data. These new digital scholarship applications will allow users to study and interact with primary source materials in ways that yield new findings and facilitate scholarly community building and information sharing.

Additionally, having a large body of  standardized finding aids available on the web positions the Archives to participate in national-level archival projects that are harvesting and aggregating finding aids, as well as the data found within the finding aids. One such prototype is the SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) Project online interface being developed collaboratively by the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the California Digital Library, and the UC Berkeley School of Information, with additional support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration. The project has mined biographical and historical notes from existing EAD finding aids to build standardized records about the creators of primary sources and the network of relationships amongst those persons, corporate entities, and families. The interface also links those records across multiple collections and repositories throughout the world, providing integrated access and context to dispersed archival resources.

However, secondary data releasing, linking, mining, and harvesting are only possible if the primary metadata is highly structured according to standards that “play well” together and that can be mapped to other archival metadata and resources on the web, as is the case with the Archives’ data in its finding aids.

There is no doubt that it is an exciting time to be an archivist and who knows what new and innovative developments await in the near future? I hope that by this time next year, we will be reporting on our success in developing effective collections management and access tools for born digital content—a major challenge for archivists across the world.

The archivists at the Archives of American Art hope that these efforts will also lead to exciting new discoveries by our users. 

Barbara Aikens is the head of collections processing at the Archives of American Art. She has primary responsibility for managing all archival processing work, the creation of the Archives’ online finding aids, and processing work in support of the Terra Foundation Center for Digital Collections.

Acquisitions: Jimmy Hedges Papers and Rising Fawn Folk Art Gallery Records

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new acquisitions. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the fall 2016 issue (vol. 55, no. 2) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the Journal can be found at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current.

Lonnie Holley at Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden, Summerville, GA, 1992. Jimmy Hedges Papers and Rising Fawn Folk Art Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The papers of James R. “Jimmy” Hedges III (1942–2014)—philanthropist, real estate developer, wood carver, and art dealer—have been donated to the Archives by his son James R. Hedges IV. The archive documents more than 400 “outsider” artists, a term Hedges used interchangeably with “self-taught” and “folk,” by way of biographies, newspaper clippings, and thousands of photographs that he took of the artists and their work, homes, and studios.

Of a prominent family from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Hedges pursued philanthropic endeavors as a trustee of the family’s Tonya Memorial Foundation before returning, at age forty, to his teenage passion of wood carving. Artists in his circle were predominantly southern African American self-taught painters, sculptors, potters, and carvers. Befriending them and collecting their work led Hedges to create Rising Fawn Gallery (later known as Rising Fawn Folk Art Gallery) on his 500-acre farm in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. An unconventional art dealer, Hedges would hand-deliver purchases to collectors’ homes, driving his truck on back roads and stopping along the way to acquire more works to sell. An active presence at the Outsider Art Fair and self-taught artist exhibitions throughout the United States, as well as at Slotin Folk Art auctions and prison auctions, his aim was to improve the economic condition of outsider artists and raise their public profiles. Hedges’s development of an archive was essential to this goal.

To open his files at the Archives is to enter a world where making art often functioned as a survival strategy in the face of poverty, physical injury, imprisonment, and precarious mental health. Hedges’s brief biography of Mose Tolliver (ca. 1920–2006), for example, notes that the artist “worked a variety of jobs throughout his life, as a gardener and general handyman. While sweeping up for a furniture company in the early 1970s, a load of marble fell on Mose’s legs, crushing them. While recovering from his injury . . . Mose began to paint. He’d sit in his front yard, painting the neighborhood children, and hanging his paintings in his front yard, hoping to sell them for a dollar or two.” Hedges’s papers contain numerous photographs of Tolliver’s paintings.

Hedges avidly promoted the work of lesser-known artists such as Georgia Blizzard, Haint Bradley, Marie Rogers, Charles Simmons, James “Son Ford” Thomas, Hubert Walters, and Purvis Young. He made fact sheets, postcards, and pamphlets about them, all of which are in his papers, along with sales records and research files on other collectors of outsider art. Also included with his papers is the camera with which Hedges documented the lives of the artists he championed, capturing them at ease in familiar surroundings. He always had at least one photograph taken of himself with an artist, and these pictures show Hedges enjoyment of the scene around him.

Jimmy Hedges with James “Son Ford” Thomas, ca. 1995. Jimmy Hedges Papers and Rising Fawn Folk Art Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The Jimmy Hedges Papers and Rising Fawn Folk Art Gallery Records join more than a dozen other collections at the Archives about outsider and self-taught artists, but this one expresses the unique vision of an artist-dealer and provides a detailed, thirty-year history of outsider art in the American South. In compiling this documentation, Hedges anticipated the recent incorporation of this extraordinary work into the mainstream American art world. Indeed, the arrival of his papers coincides with the planning of a major exhibition on self-taught artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Annette Leddy is the New York collector for the Archives of American Art.

Acquisitions: Albert Bloch Papers

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new acquisitions. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the spring 2016 issue (vol. 55, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the Journal can be found at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current.

Albert Bloch in his studio, 1932 / unidentified photographer. Albert Bloch papers, 1873-2014. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

1911 Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) exhibition, 1911 / Gabriele Munter, photographer. Albert Bloch papers, 1873-2014. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

When Saint Louis-born painter Albert Bloch (1882–1961) packed up his young family and moved from New York City to Munich, Germany, in early 1909, he could scarcely have realized he was embarking on the most perilous, exhilarating, and transformative decade of his career as an artist. Although he had planned to take up formal studies at the prestigious Munich Academy, he instead launched himself into the city’s creative and libertine bohemian scene. By 1911 he befriended prominent members of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM; New Artists’ Association of Munich). Among this circle of Modernist artists were Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, whose letters and postcards to Bloch are included among his voluminous papers, recently donated to the Archives by the Albert Bloch Foundation.

Bloch’s papers broaden our understanding of European Modernism, revealing that avant-garde art across the Atlantic was influenced to a large extent by the efforts of an American painter. Bloch greatly impressed Kandinsky and Marc, and the two artists conspired to get the artist’s paintings into NKVM’s next exhibition. When Bloch’s work was rejected on the grounds that he was a foreigner and not an official member of the collective, Kandinsky and Marc staged a revolt and formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group. Their inaugural exhibition, mounted at Thannhauser Gallery in the winter of 1911–1912, included six paintings by Bloch. Bloch’s papers include original mockups for the Blue Rider exhibition catalogue and installation photographs of the galleries snapped by painter Gabriele Münter.

The Archives’ collection further reveals how World War I shattered Bloch’s sphere of inspiration and support in the European art world. Bloch remained in Germany for the duration of the war, but Kandinsky returned to Russia, and Marc was drafted into the German army. In a series of postcards from the war front, Marc discusses his enthusiasm for both the international conflict and the internationalist ideals of the Blue Rider. Marc believed the war might result in a unified Europe and even penned an essay on the subject, “Das geheime Europa” (“The Secret Europe”), which he sent to Bloch. That Bloch translated this manuscript into English with the intention of publishing it for an international audience points to his deep sympathy for Marc’s (and Germany’s) side of the conflict. Marc was killed at Verdun in March 1916, bringing to an end this formative friendship as well as any zeal, however complex, Bloch may have had for the war. He would maintain a lifelong correspondence with Marc’s widow, Maria, now preserved among Bloch’s papers.

Two bound record books in the collection represent a unique, handcrafted catalogue raisonné of his work during his years in Munich. Despite the obstructions caused by the war and his nearly constant financial insolvency, Bloch’s professional successes in this period likely precipitated the creation of these volumes. In 1919, for example, the Hans Goltz Gallery in Munich organized a retrospective of 104 of his paintings, the largest exhibition of his work at that time. The record books contain black-and-white photographs of Bloch’s artworks as well as reproductions clipped from printed matter, all of which are annotated in Bloch’s hand.

Worsening economic conditions in Germany after the war finally sent Bloch back to the United States in April 1921. After a brief and unsatisfactory teaching job at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in 1923, Bloch was offered a full professorship at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, a position he held until his retirement in 1947. He remained in Lawrence until his death in 1961, continuing to paint and translate German poetry into English.

The family letters among Bloch’s papers are arguably the most poignant documents to be found in the collection. Some of these letters were exchanged with Anna Francis, a young woman who came to the University of Kansas as a student in the early 1930s. She then worked with Bloch on the faculty and eventually became romantically involved with him. Francis soon was a permanent resident in the Bloch household, along with Bloch’s wife, Hortense, and their two sons. The letters to and from Francis open a window onto the family’s relationship with her, unorthodox for its time. Once they had left home, for instance, Bloch’s sons wrote warmly to Francis and expressed their deep gratitude for the care she provided both Bloch and their mother. Anna Francis married Bloch after the death of Hortense in 1949. A large collection of love notes on scrap paper, scribed in Bloch’s hand, illustrate how deeply he came to rely on Anna, particularly in the final years of his life. Bloch’s papers also include Anna’s correspondence after Bloch’s death in 1961, recording the tireless lengths she took to conserve his paintings and keep them in the public eye.

The Albert Bloch Papers provide an important link between American and European Modernism in the early twentieth century. They specifically shed new light on the critical reception of an American avant-garde artist living in Germany, the impact of World War I on his career, and the personal relationships that helped promote and define his work.

Jason Stieber is the national collector for the Archives of American Art.

Acquisitions: Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone Papers

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new acquisitions. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the spring 2016 issue (vol. 55, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the Journal can be found at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current.

Cosmos in Cosmos Appearance Series #371, circa 1979 / Charles Denson, photographer. Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone papers, circa 1850-2011, bulk 1940-2011. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

A bounty of 1970s avant-garde photographs has come to the Archives as part of the papers of Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone (1931–2011), generally known as “Cosmos.” A composer and Conceptual photographer, Cosmos primarily photographed the intersecting worlds of music, art, theater, and film in 1970s New York. While some of his images of art installations appeared in Avalanche magazine, and his shots of celebrities appeared in New York magazine, the vast majority of his thousands of images were never published. Cosmos stored them in boxes in his studio at Westbeth Artists Community, where he lived for forty-one years. A few years before his death, curator Catherine Morris, researching an exhibition on Gordon Matta-Clark’s experimental restaurant and performance space, FOOD, noticed that a number of the documentary photographs about the site were signed with the name “Cosmos.” Morris tracked down the artist and over time became his friend. When Cosmos died, he left his archive to her, and Morris facilitated its donation to the Archives.

In this collection, researchers will find hundreds of images of artworks from 112 Greene Street in SoHo, the first sizeable downtown independent art space in New York. Among the more than 3,000 almost entirely unpublished pictures of the space are views of many of its installations and performances between 1970 and 1974. One well-documented event in the collection is Prisoner’s Dilemma, by Richard Serra with Robert Bell, an enactment of a game theory exercise in which prisoners isolated from one another are promised freedom in exchange for revealing the names of their co-conspirators. The archive contains numerous images of “prisoners,” including art dealer Leo Castelli and other participants.

The Cosmos Papers also include rare photo-documentation of performances such as Willoughby Sharp’s HELP!, consisting of the artist on LSD trying to come to terms with a breakup from his girlfriend; Dennis Oppenheim’s Recall, which consists of a video monitor showing a close-up of the artist’s lips as he talks about his memories of turpentine; and Matta-Clark’s Walls Paper and Bronx Floors and Dumpster Duplex. While a few individual photographs of these works have appeared in the two books on 112 Greene Street, the Cosmos collection includes entire series of images, filling one to three contact sheets on each project, providing more complete documentation.

On Saint Sebastian’s Day, January 20, 1974, from 12:00 noon to 3:00 p.m., Cosmos Sarchiapone photographed everyone who came in or out of 112 Greene Street in New York City, including Vito Acconci. Vito Acconci at 112 Greene Street, 1974 / Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone, photographer. Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone papers, circa 1850-2011, bulk 1940-2011. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

In addition to documenting works of art, Cosmos photographed the key personalities of the 1970s New York underground. In one expansive series, he photographed artist Joseph Beuys daily for one month in 1974. The archive holds more than 400 images of Beuys at 112 Greene Street, at the New School of Social Research, and also relaxing in his hotel room in New York City; among these images is the iconic photo of the artist in a fur-collared coat that appeared on his Ronald Feldman Gallery announcement. Photographs of Hannah Wilke, Charlotte Moorman, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Philip Glass show these provocative figures walking on the street, talking on the telephone, and socializing at parties.

Researchers will witness these artists and art events in the broader context of the pre-gentrified New York that the artist’s papers reveal. They will discover seedy movie theater box offices and marquees, the Velvet Underground of Andy Warhol and his circle, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon convention, the Jesus Joy Jubilee at Carnegie Hall, the Beat Generation poets’ reunion, and private parties attended by Hollywood actors and directors. Joan Crawford, Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, John Lennon, Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and many others appear in more than 30,000 prints, negatives, and contact sheets.

Cosmos worked at Push Pin Studios, the design firm founded by Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, Cosmos’s mentors and supporters. The Archives collection contains more than 100 posters from the 1970s, including a number of Glaser’s, and hundreds of exhibition announcements, theater programs, and playbills, offering a chronicle of the downtown art world in the graphic design specific to that period.

Cosmos’s intriguing Conceptual artworks, included in this gift to the Archives, often incorporate aspects of his work as a photojournalist. We see this in Reciprocal, a project in which Cosmos photographed figures in the art world whom he admired—John Cage, Meyer Schapiro, Robert Scull, and others—and then asked each to photograph him. A mock-up of this never-published artist book presents each pair of photographs on facing pages. An admirer of American photographer Diane Arbus, Cosmos generated two serial works made from fragments of her discarded photographs, mounting and sequencing them in a way that both recalls and transforms the artist’s iconic images.

Cosmos created numerous scores for plays and dance performances, and these are included in the archive as both recordings and written compositions. Researchers may view many drafts of his opera Vox Humana, which concerns three heroines of history: Antigone, Joan of Arc, and Patty Hearst. There is also the source material Cosmos collected in the course of writing this opera, such as issues of the National Enquirer detailing the Hearst kidnapping. Indeed, Cosmos’s collections—of vintage postcards, books on how to draw nudes, Hollywood movie stills—exemplify the vernacular source material common to many Conceptual artists of the 1970s, while also portraying Cosmos’s unique, if not eccentric, preoccupations. Users of his extraordinary collection at the Archives will encounter it on many levels: as documentation and specimen, as an autobiography of an artist, and as a portrait of an artistic era.

Annette Leddy is the New York collector for the Archives of American Art.

Acquisitions: Eileen Cowin Papers

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new acquisitions. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the spring 2016 issue (vol. 55, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the Journal can be found at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current.

Cibachrome proofs, 1990 / Eileen Cowin, photographer. Eileen Cowin papers, 1961-2015. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Los Angeles-based artist Eileen Cowin (b. 1947) has donated her personal and professional papers, most dating from about 1965 to 2004, to the Archives. The collection includes her negatives, work prints, videos, exhibition announcements, and reviews and documentation of her public art projects, as well as correspondence with writers Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, photographers Darryl Curran, John Divola, Carl Chiarenza, Todd and Betty Walker, Robert W. Fichter, and Robert Heinecken, and others.

There are approximately two dozen letters from Heinecken, her colleague and close friend, that reveal his thoughts about the cameraless photographs he made during the early 1970s. Some of these letters are written on the backs of exhibition announcements or discarded prints; one even appears on an air-sickness bag. Among the foremost proponents of photographic experimentation, Heinecken was then making photograms of food. Describing them to Cowin, he wrote that they were “very strange and sickening (just as I like them).” In another undated letter, he explained, “I am putting the food directly on the offset plates which is blowing the mind of the engraver/friend I work with.”

The collection also includes Cowin’s personal writings, notebooks, calendars, lectures and documentation of exhibitions and artworks, as well as rare printed material, such as a poster from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition Experiments in Art and Technology. There are preparatory materials for her collaboration with Louise Erdrich for the cover of Erdich’s novel Tales of Burning Love (1996).

Cowin is recognized as a significant figure in the development of American art photography in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Brooklyn-born artist studied with modernist photographer Aaron Siskind and received her Masters of Science degree in 1970 from the influential Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. While still in graduate school, she was expanding the traditional definitions of the photographic medium, incorporating magazine imagery and employing other unusual techniques into her work. Around this time, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Peter Bunnell, acquired two of her prints, which led to her first solo show at New York’s Witkin Gallery in 1971. In her gift to the Archives, Cowin has included a comprehensive selection of working prints that she made during and after this period.

In 1975, when Cowin joined the faculty of California State University, Fullerton, Southern California was rich territory for artists experimenting with photography. Emboldened by the 1970s feminist art movement, Cowin produced controversial color photographs that borrowed the pictorial strategies of mass media, especially the conventions of film and television. She was a pioneer in this arena, along with her East Coast counterparts, including Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons.

Cowin’s papers offer insights into her evolution as an artist, as well as the experimental and Conceptual photography scene in Southern California at a transformative time in its history.

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp was the California collector for the Archives of American Art.

Acquisitions: Robert Ebendorf Papers

This is the first in a series of entries that highlight new acquisitions. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the spring 2016 issue (vol. 55, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the Journal can be found at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current.

Robert Ebendorf’s studio, April 21, 2015. Photograph by Mary Savig.

The home studio of Robert Ebendorf (b. 1938) is a trove of trash and treasure: discarded bottle caps, coins, doll parts, twigs, buttons, keys, crab claws, Barbie doll shoes, clock parts, and the occasional squirrel tail are piled onto nearly every surface. Ebendorf playfully juxtaposes this detritus of daily life with fine metals and gems to create evocative jewelry. The artworks conjure memories, tell stories, and prompt viewers to reevaluate assumptions about value. So, too, do Ebendorf’s personal papers, donated to the Archives in 2015. This collection is an assemblage of records that offers insight into his multifaceted career as a jeweler, metalsmith, and educator. For Ebendorf, the donation itself is the capstone to his lengthy career.

The gift of Ebendorf’s papers was more than a decade in the making. In 2004, he was interviewed as part of the Archives of American Art’s Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America, a program dedicated to recording the creative lives and practices of prominent craft artists. That interview coincided with a major traveling exhibition, The Jewelry of Robert Ebendorf: A Retrospective of Forty Years, organized by the Gallery of Art and Design at North Carolina State University. In 2010, Ebendorf received the North Carolina Governor’s Award in Fine Arts and, in 2014, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of North American Goldsmiths. In 2015, when the Greenville Museum of Art organized the exhibition Materials and Making: Celebrating the Work of Robert W. Ebendorf, the artist determined that it was time for his papers to go to the Archives. “It is an exciting time for me to let these memories and objects go, knowing that they will have a wonderful home for scholarly purposes,” he wrote to me in February 2015.

A consummate collector and connector, Ebendorf has helped shape the field of contemporary jewelry in the United States. His papers offer insights into both the evolution of his studio practice and his influence as an educator. Biographical and professional records trace his life from his childhood in Topeka, Kansas, to his current role as Belk Distinguished Professor of Art at Eastern Carolina University (ECU), documenting his accolades in the craft world as well as a commendation from the New York City Police Department for foiling a diamond heist in 1979. More specifically, the materials map Ebendorf’s development as a master metalsmith. Of particular interest are drafts of his artist statements, in which Ebendorf articulates the metaphorical and spiritual meanings of found objects. In the mid-1960s, he began building a visual vocabulary featuring old photographs, organic materials, and discarded objects. “I was restless and straddling two worlds: the pure and clean vs. the ugly discarded object,” he explained in 2002. Events like the shootings at Kent State University in 1970 left a lasting impression on the artist and his work. Ebendorf continues,

In the mid-1960s our society was in upheaval. Many questions were being set forth about authority, politics, church vs. state and political unrest and perhaps I was caught up unknowingly even in that turbulent time of youth in society. It was filtering into my work at the time.

Since then, his work has continued to explore notions of consumerism, religion, and beauty.

Robert Ebendorf in his studio, circa 1982 / unidentified photographer. Robert Ebendorf papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Ebendorf has shared his vast knowledge of metal techniques nearly as long as he has been making art. In his 2004 oral history interview, preserved in the Archives, he contemplated his roles as artist and educator:

Was my journey about education or was my journey about an artist, or did [I] have the pleasure . . . of moving and wearing these different hats and coats? I think I’d rather find myself . . . being an educator and some days being the artist, but having the pleasure of keeping my balance as the skateboard goes rumbling down the way. So I guess I’m hangin’ 10.

Many of Ebendorf’s papers indicate his importance as a teacher, mentor, and historian of metalsmithing techniques. Photographs, printed material, and teaching files trace his faculty positions at the University of Georgia, State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz, and ECU. Rare printed materials also document the many workshops he has led throughout the world, including at the Penland School of Crafts and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. When Ebendorf applied for the Belk Chair position at ECU in 1998, he gathered several letters of recommendation that spoke to his teaching philosophy. Former student James Bennett wrote, “Robert Ebendorf’s ability as a teacher has do to with his faith in the practice of Metal.” (Bennett was a student of Ebendorf at the University of Georgia and SUNY, New Paltz. They later taught together at SUNY, New Paltz.) As his teaching notes suggest, he instills this faith in metal by setting a strong example. While he encourages the mastery of skills through repetition, he also nurtures “idea generation,” or creating positive conditions in which a student can find one’s voice through working with the materials.

In addition to representing aspects of his teaching and art-making, Ebendorf’s papers—the correspondence, photographs, and professional files, in particular—refer to his vast network of colleagues, students, and close friends. In so doing, his papers intersect with many other Archives collections, notably the papers of and oral history interviews with his peers at the forefront of contemporary metalsmithing and jewelry, such as L. Brent Kington, J. Fred Woell, Heikki Seppä, Ramona Solberg, and Arline M. Fisch, among others. The conversations among these collections and what they reveal about the field of American craft are here to be explored.

Mary Savig is the curator of manuscripts at the Archives of American Art.

An Epistolary Friendship: Miné Okubo’s Letters to Kay Sekimachi

Archivist Rihoko Ueno examines the friendship of Miné Okubo and Kay Sekimachi through their letters.

Miné Okubo letter to Kay Sekimachi Stocksdale, 1956 August 27. Bob Stocksdale and Kay Sekimachi papers, 1937-2014. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

In a letter to Kay Sekimachi dated August 27, 1956, Miné Okubo wrote (grammar and emphasis Okubo’s own), “At this point in my decision to follow the pure creative painting I think I am stark raving mad but it’s too late to turn back for I’ve put too much into the fight.” Found in the Bob Stocksdale and Kay Sekimachi papers are several folders of letters from Okubo and they all reflect this fiery spirit and determination.

Kay Sekimachi and Miné Okubo met during World War II when they were both at Tanforan Assembly Center in California, before being relocated to the Topaz internment camp in Utah during roughly the same period (1942–1944). Okubo was already an accomplished artist before the internment, having received a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and traveling to Europe on a fellowship where she studied under the painter Fernand Léger. Okubo, fourteen years older, taught art at the high school Sekimachi attended that was mostly run by internees inside the Topaz camp. They went separate ways after the war—Okubo to New York City to work for an issue of Fortune Magazine, Sekimachi to Ohio with her mother and sister before eventually settling in California—but they kept in touch. Both went on to become successful, prolific, and highly respected artists: Kay Sekimachi for her fiber art, Miné Okubo for her paintings and drawings. Their friendship which began during their time in the internment camp spanned more than five decades until Okubo’s death in 2001.

Miné Okubo postcard to Kay Sekimachi and Bob Stocksdale, 1977 July 27. Bob Stocksdale and Kay Sekimachi papers, 1937-2014. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Over the years, the two frequently attended each other’s art exhibitions, offered feedback, exchanged art, and kept each other updated about their work. Okubo typically does not hold back. In an undated letter (circa 1956) she recalls seeing Sekimachi’s weaving in an unnamed show and remarks, “If I wasn’t looking for a ‘Sekimachi Masterpiece’ I would have never found this cut-off hallway off the 1^st floor where your stuff is hung. . . . I liked the piece but felt the fuzzy wuzzy fringe distracted from the design. Too much chaos the way it was hung. It was hung loosely on rod and upper fringe was like rat’s nest.”

Okubo was an older and more established artist at the outset, her book Citizen 13660 about the internment camps was published in 1946, and her early letters are sprinkled with advice, “You and your sister can go into business together if she is going into commercial art. Lots of luck to both of you. Creative dreamers need lots of it to buck the tide of non-dreamers in this world” (August 27, 1956). As Sekimachi gets older and starts to exhibit more regularly the relationship transitions from that of student and teacher to colleagues.

Okubo remains steadfast in her encouragement over the years, telling Sekimachi to keep going as she tries to make a living from her art. Although Sekimachi’s letters are not among the papers, Okubo must have relied upon her friend for support. By all accounts, Okubo had an austere lifestyle and lived in a small Greenwich Village apartment for years, and she often mentions troubles with her living situation such as quarrels with landlords and repeated break-ins at her apartment: in a letter dated December 30, 1971 Okubo wrote, “Kay, Holiday Season here in N.Y. is not exactly a Roman Holiday. . . . I tell you this place gets robbed all the time.” Another mentions a gaping hole was left in her wall and ceiling for a week while plumbers try to locate the source of a leak (March 9, circa 1971), and a cleverly illustrated postcard describes the New York City blackout of 1977 (July 22, 1977). Often the letters provide a portrait of New York City life that is as embattled and restive as Okubo’s personality.

Miné Okubo letter to Kay Sekimachi and Bob Stocksdale, ca. 1980. Bob Stocksdale and Kay Sekimachi papers, 1937-2014. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Despite what must have been a difficult life for a young Japanese American woman living alone and working as an artist after the war, Okubo’s letters often have playful drawings of birds, cats, and rabbits; these imbue her writing with levity.

Sometime around 1970 on September 8, she wrote, “I am glad you have cats—they sound real goofy and delightful. Cats alone know how to live because they maintain their personality and independence. They give one just enough for room and board and that’s that.” She was formidable, undaunted by challenges, and proud of her achievements and independence.

Nonetheless, comments about the fickleness of the public’s attention, the weather, health issues, and housing problems arise with increasing frequency in her letters beginning in the mid-1980s: “I have finally accepted the fact that I am alone on a total odds road on a universal values so it is my own challenge—picking up the pieces and now trying to build forward again. My generation gone so I will have to find imaginative ways of my own. It’s a hell road but I’m walking on—[illegible] eviction is a worry” (April 22, circa 1992).

At a glance, the word that I see over and over again in Okubo’s letters is “work.” In the final batch of letters from the mid to early 1990s, the word I see repeated often is “alone” and the phrase “my generation gone.” In a 1984 New Year’s greeting, Okubo expressed regret with having lost many friends over the years. The constant nature of her friendship with Sekimachi must have been invaluable.

In many ways, theirs is a unique friendship between two Japanese women who experienced the hardships of forced relocation and internment during World War II and shared a vision of becoming artists. The similarities aside, the letters provide a window into the lives of two people who saw each other through sickness and health, successes and disappointments, and shared the quotidian details of daily life, as friends do. The romantic image of artists struggling alone eclipses the fact that artists rely on support systems. Sekimachi viewed Okubo as a role model, but the help they offered each other must have been mutual. It was also lasting. After Sekimachi and her husband took a trip to New York City, Okubo wrote in a letter dated May 9, (circa 1984), “When we see friends we like it is as though time has not passed. It was good to see you both.”

Rihoko Ueno is a processing archivist at the Archives of American Art.

New Technologies: John Vassos and Television Design

Danielle Shapiro, author of the first biography of John Vassos, looks at the industrial designer’s innovations in television design.

Musicorner room designed by John Vassos displayed at the American at Home Pavilion, 1940 New York World's Fair, 1940 / Richard Averill Smith, photographer. John Vassos papers, 1920-[198-]. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

John Vassos (1898–1985), a Greek–American industrial designer and artist, thought deeply about the technologies of sight and sound, and what they should look and feel like. As the leading consultant designer for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) between 1932–1975, Vassos excelled in designing radios, television, and computers—technologies with no prior form. His papers, donated to the Archives of American Art in 1986 by his nephew Paul Johannes, reveal in rich historical detail the evolution of the design of the television set and how his visionary designs contributed to the shape of a new technology.

Among the most startling discoveries that I made in the archive was evidence of Vassos’s extensive work on television design from 1930s to the 1970s for RCA, a major television manufacturer and owner of NBC (National Broadcast Company). From the prewar introduction of television to a skeptical public at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair, to the widespread embrace of TV in the postwar era with the advent of color television, Vassos was involved in all aspects of television design and research and contributed to shaping the television receiver and its place in the home over these years. Vassos was well suited to helping the public adjust to a new machine in the home, something that in the past had been met with suspicion and dread in the case of the radio. From his earliest days as an industrial designer, he considered how the frenzied urban environment with its rapid transit, towering buildings, and powerful machinery increased anxiety. His 1931 book Phobia focused on how individuals suffered from these modern urban ills. He was among the first designers to note that user–centered design could soothe modern stress and alleviate fears about new technologies. Carefully applied modern design—such as simple geometric shapes, without distracting ornamentation, and an intuitive, tactile interface—would make complex technology less frightening. His television designs, starting with the stunning polished wood art deco TRK-12 television which marked the arrival of American broadcast television, reflected this philosophy. Vassos’s sleek Living Room of the Future or Musicorner, which he designed for the America at Home Pavilion, opened in 1940 at the New York World’s Fair. Vassos imagined the living room as a cozy media center—a shocking new concept which disrupted the sense of the parlor as an intensely private, domestic space. He chose modular cabinetry in which the phonograph and television could be easily concealed, calming concerns that the television would be looking back at the viewers.

Concept sketches for the Advanced Design Center at the Radio Corporation of America, circa 1961. John Vassos papers, 1920-[198-]. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Concept sketches for the Advanced Design Center at the Radio Corporation of America, circa 1961. John Vassos papers, 1920-[198-]. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

In a 1954 letter to W.W. Watts, a vice president at RCA, Vassos urged the company to expand its leadership in television design and create a top–secret design center to develop future styling ideas for RCA products. It was a conceptual breeding ground guided by Vassos and a “brain trust” he personally selected in a 1960 memo to Kenneth W. Bilby, a vice president at RCA. The group included interior designer Melanie Kahane, anthropologist Leonard Outhwaite, and Paul Rudolph, architect and Dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University. Concept sketches from the team’s three ideation sessions culminated in eight futuristic “Sets of the Seventies” rolled out in May 1961. They included wafer–thin, large–screen televisions with crystal clarity and miniaturized portable color sets for use in the car, which when closed were as small as a lady’s purse. A versatile television set for the “executive on the move,” which folded into an innocuous attaché case, could be used for marketing presentations in the office as well as personal enjoyment at home.

Portable and sleek, these televisions were envisioned in macro and micro—for wall and pocket. They anticipated the mobile screens and Nano–thin, theater–size viewing walls of today, which fit easily into our palms and daily life. None of these televisions were produced, but they reflect the visionary thinking of John Vassos who created attractive and functional shapes for technologies which had no design precedent.

Danielle Shapiro, the author of the first biography of John Vassos, John Vassos: Industrial Design for Modern Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), has worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and has a PhD from the Department of Art History and Communications Studies from McGill University. Her awards include a teaching fellowship at Harvard University, a Fulbright Award, and postdoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Wolfsonian Museum. She blogs at http://www.johnvassos.com/blog.

An Artist’s Home Movies: Hildreth Meière and the New York World’s Fair

Guest author Sally Stokes looks at the home movies artist Hildreth Meière made of murals at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair.

Part 1, Hildreth Meière footage of murals and friezes at the 1939 New York World's Fair, 1939. Hildreth Meière papers, 1901-2011, bulk 1911-1960. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

For the past several years, I have been studying the religious architecture of Clarence S. Stein (1882—1975). One of the major undertakings of the firm Kohn, Butler and Stein was Temple Emanu-El (1929), on East Sixty-fifth Street in New York City. The temple’s sanctuary features breathtaking mosaics by the art deco muralist Hildreth Meière. At the time I first visited Temple Emanu-El, in 2012, I did know that Meière was responsible for at least some of the murals applied in 1939 to the cloister walls of the New York World’s Fair’s Temple of Religion, a building designed by Stein, with Alfred Easton Poor and Oliver Reagan; but I had neither seen any of her work nor known much about her before that 2012 visit.

Mural painters in World's Fair film, 1939. Hildreth Meière papers, 1901-2011, bulk 1911-1960. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Meière, born in Flushing, New York, was one of few women who were well recognized in the art world during the first half of the twentieth century. Among her many professional roles, she was president of the National Society of Mural Painters, first vice president of the Architectural League of New York, and the first woman to serve on the New York City Art Commission.

Hildreth Meière’s papers are now among the holdings of the Archives of American Art. The papers include some of Meière’s 16-millimeter, mid-twentieth-century silent home movies. The films, shot in exquisite Kodachrome, include footage of the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair, constructed on 1,216 acres in, as it happens, Flushing. Although others have uploaded family footage of the fair to a variety of video sites, I longed to experience and examine Meière’s own moving images as a means of access to the artist’s eye.

Murals and sculpture were integral to the spirit of the fair. Under the supervision of Ernest Peixotto, thirty-five sculptors and a similar number of muralists received commissions for more than sixty sculptures and 105 murals, respectively, at an exposition that heralded the social and scientific advances of the “World of Tomorrow.” Meière’s assignments included, among others, “Asbestos” (a wonder product of its day, only later discovered to be a health menace) on the Johns-Manville Building; and, in stark paradox, a mural on the Medical and Public Health Building in which, according to the 1939 season’s official guidebook, a doctor “[points] out to an ailing humanity the resources of modern science.”

Still of "Aesbestos" on the Johns-Manville building from Hildreth Meière footage of murals and friezes at the 1939 New York World's Fair, 1939. Hildreth Meière papers, 1901-2011, bulk 1911-1960. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Still of Temple Emanu-El in the Temple of Religion from Hildreth Meière footage of murals and friezes at the 1939 New York World's Fair, 1939. Hildreth Meière papers, 1901-2011, bulk 1911-1960. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The murals I was most keen to study and interpret were those in the cloister of the Temple of Religion. For the temple cloister, Hildreth Meière and her colleague Austin Purves each created cartoons for six murals, representing religious buildings from the sixth century (Hagia Sophia, Constantinople) to the near present (Temple Emanu-El, completed only a decade before the fair). It was my fervent hope that Meière had captured the Temple of Religion murals in her personal Kodachrome survey.

This hope was all but dashed when I learned of the barriers to gaining access to the film’s content. First, there was the necessity of copying the film at a specialized lab, because of archival film’s fragility and the damage that could be caused by projecting or viewing the original. The fate of these particular reels was further complicated by the presence of vinegar syndrome. This condition had resulted from temperature and humidity fluctuation over the course of the films’ seventy-five-year lifespan, causing shrinking and buckling that adds to the cost and urgency of the lab work. In short, there was no assurance that the Meière films could be salvaged without quick and significant intervention. I took some comfort in the fact that assorted black and white still images of the Temple of Religion murals exist online, and I tried to curb my creeping regret. Slowly, I resigned myself to the likelihood that the films might be a complete loss.

Still of the Czech Pavillion from Hildreth Meière footage of murals and friezes at the 1939 New York World's Fair, 1939. Hildreth Meière papers, 1901-2011, bulk 1911-1960. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

But imagine my delight upon learning that, through a financial gift from an anonymous donor, expert film conservators had brought Meière’s movies back to life!

Over the course of hours, days, or weeks in 1939 or 1940, Meière had carried her camera through the vast expanse of the fairgrounds, pausing to record her own works and those of others; panning evenly, left to right, high to low; hovering at intervals, as if to contemplate the pieces in the moment, and for the future: for the fair and its buildings and art—the physical embodiment of the “World of the Tomorrow”—would be demolished, and the site cleared, after the close of the exposition.

What an opportunity we now have to accompany Hildreth Meière on her film tour, and to see the fair through this artist’s perspective as the world teetered on the precipice of World War II.

The fact that Hitler’s forces invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939 render Meière’s frames of the Czech and Polish Pavilions especially poignant.

And for this researcher, the desired content did not disappoint: there is the Temple of Religion, its blue cathedral glass glowing from the apse, through the nave, to the courtyard; and there are the Meière and Purves murals—Hagia Sophia, Temple Emanu-El, and ten other buildings representing the history of Western religions, and stories of religious freedom and oppression.

Part 2, Hildreth Meière footage of murals and friezes at the 1939 New York World's Fair, 1939. Hildreth Meière papers, 1901-2011, bulk 1911-1960. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

In a 1944 interview with Patty de Roulf, Meière stated,

‘I loved all the work I did for the Fair. . . . There is something warm and pulsating about a World’s Fair with all its glitter and fantasy. There’s also something dramatic about the way it lives for a day and then is all over, completely destroyed and forgotten after its brief moment of glory.’

And was it difficult to see her creations torn down after the Fair had closed? ‘Indeed not,’ replied Miss Meière. ‘My joy came in the creating. Supposing my work had been made only to rest in some museum, how many people would actually come to see it? Well, compare that figure with the great multitudes who swarmed into the World’s Fair day after day. No work is in vain if it is enjoyed by its contemporary world. Nor is a work less great because only one generation has been able to appreciate it. From my point of view, I know that my pleasure comes primarily from creating the work itself, regardless of how enduring it may be or what it may mean to others.’

There is something equally dramatic about the Archives of American Art’s giving new life to the 1939 World’s Fair through Meière’s own motion pictures; and about the prospect of these films’ enduring, and having meaning to others, in this contemporary world of digital media, and for generations to come.

Sally Stokes is an independent scholar who teaches in the Cultural Heritage Information Management course of study in the Department of Library and Information Science at the Catholic University of America. At the University of Maryland, she served as curator, the National Trust for Historic Preservation Library Collection, from 1987 to 2003; and as interim head, Art and Architecture Libraries, from 2013 to 2014. Her publications include articles about the California architects Allison & Allison, and the historical and cultural implications of the novels of the British author Noel Streatfeild. She has presented papers on fashion and the 1876 Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, sheet music inspired by the bicycle craze of the 1890s, and the evacuation of European children to the United States in 1940. Sally has enjoyed performing archaeological and architectural fieldwork outdoors, but is never more at home than when immersed in archival material, in preparation for her next project.

Explore more:

• Hildreth Meière footage of workers painting her murals at the 1939 New York World's Fair
• “A Finding Aid to the Hildreth Meière papers” by Megan McShea

Tools of the Trade

Blogs across the Smithsonian will give an inside look at the Institution’s archival collections and practices during a month long blog–a–thon in celebration of October’s American Archives Month. See additional posts from our other participating blogs, as well as related events and resources, on the Smithsonian’s Archives Month website.

To wrap up Archives Month, 2015 we are sharing some our favorite archival tools.

WIRELESS HEADPHONES | Judy Ng, Collections Processing

Judy loves her wireless headphones for listening to podcasts while she processes. “Keeps your brain sane,” she says. Judy tunes into the Pop Culture Happy Hour while arranging exhibition files and photographs in the Leo Castelli Gallery records for digitization and online access.

CLEAR RULER | Elizabeth Willson Christopher, Rights and Reproductions Coordinator

In the battle of the measuring device (ruler vs. tape measure) this ruler is clearly superior “as it allows you to have minimal interaction with collection materials: you can measure photographs without touching them.”

TAPE MEASURE | Bettina Smith, Digital Projects Librarian

Bettina proclaims, “This snazzy red tape measure is pocket–sized, easily measures documents that are longer than the standard ruler, and the lion logo brings back fond memories of time spent at Rare Book School. (aka summer camp for librarians).”

THE MICROSPATULA | Anna Rimel, Collections Processing

Anna notes, “The spatula is delicate yet powerful.” Among its many uses include scraping the residue of old rubber bands from paper and removing staples and paper clips as seen in this (soon to be viral) video.

MECHANICAL PENCILS | Sarah Mundy, Collections Processing

“We have to write a lot. You never have to sharpen these!”

TRELLO | Michelle Herman, Digital Experience Manager

“Trello is the only way I can keep sane.” Michelle uses this task–management program to keep track of what she’s doing and what she’s done. It provides ways to track and label that she finds particularly helpful in her work managing the design of the new Archives’ website.

LETTER OPENER | Bridget Mazet, Advancement Assistant

Bridget has found the letter opener to be an invaluable tool during planning for the Archives’ annual benefit. Plus, it “looks like something from another world.”

LETTER SORTER | Stephanie Ashley, Collections Processing

The letter sorter (aka AZJD09+), continues to be a workhorse, and staff favorite, in Collections Processing. “It’s the best,” declares Stephanie.

Explore more:

• Archives Month, 2015
• Archives Month, 2013
• Archives Month, 2012
• Archives Month, 2011