ARTCHIVES: Where Will the Art Go?
As the artists featured in Kienholz’s book age and die off, their work is increasingly being left to heirs and others ill-equipped to carry on sales and marketing efforts. My artist friends and I are in a quandary about what to do. Most of us donate art to fundraisers for worthy causes, continue to participate in exhibitions, and a small number have gallery representation, but there is still the larger issue of preserving a definitive body of an artist’s work for a fuller perspective and a possible new audience in the future.
Responding to growing international recognition of Los Angeles as a major art center in the 1980s, Lyn Kienholz, founder of California/International Arts Foundation, produced a comprehensive chronicle in 2010 of more than 500 artists who exhibited in the Los Angeles area – L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980. Kienholz’s compendium acknowledged that these seminal, yet under-recognized artists, contributed to the emergence of Los Angeles onto the global stage beginning in the late 60’s and early 1970’s after 2 decades of dominance of post WW II New York/Abstract Expressionism. Her project highlighted that Los Angeles had become the place where women and people of color first achieved parity in the historically white male dominated field of fine art.
While I have been blessed with gallery and dealer representation in the past, my output has far exceeded what can be put into the public realm in the normal course of events. Since I tend to work in series and “bodies” of work, these installations are not easy to place, to transport, and to store.
Studio pull out storage
Installation photos of the Nagasaki/Hiroshima Memorial Series
Boxed and rolled stored works
Rental garage storage that contains three major series of paper sculptures
Large installation, currently stored in studio
Garage storage of flat and framed pieces
There are several artist archives throughout the country, for example the Archives of American Art that was folded into the Smithsonian in 1970, but they do not include the actual artworks and instead focus on collateral materials such as exhibition announcements, artist notebooks, personal correspondence, etc. The problem is that there is no institutional safety net to archive art like we archive books and other forms of documentation. Unless most of an artist’s work has been purchased or acquired by an institution by the time of their death, any archived collateral materials are without reference. Entire bodies of artistic output are in danger of being lost to future generations. History shows that all too often important creative work goes unrecognized in the creator’s lifetime.
Interestingly, Hauser & Wirth, a major international string of galleries, has been representing previously under-recognized African-American artists, aging artists who have never been in the gallery and auction system, and estates of artists. In addition, they have set up the Hauser & Wirth Institute, a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) private operating foundation dedicated to art historical scholarship and to the preservation and accessibility of artists’ archives. This demonstrates that there is much of value to discover that is under the radar of the art marketplace.
While many Los Angeles artists will become commercially viable in their lifetime and their work acquired by collectors and institutions, many works will remain unsold and unrepresented by the commercial marketplace. We need to preserve the work of artists unrecognized in their lifetimes and make this work available to the public in similar ways that public parks make nature available to urban dwellers and libraries make books available to those who cannot avail themselves of bookstore merchandise.
There needs to be a network of ad hoc preservation for artwork spread around the City – Artchives or Artbanks – housing the artwork produced in that neighborhood. Simply digitizing a work of art is grossly inadequate to convey its full meaning and impact. The essence of art and its humanistic value lies in its physicality and cannot be adequately conveyed in other modalities. For starters there is scale, texture, nuance, and dimensionality in an in-person experience that digital reproduction can only approximate or symbolically indicate. There is also the experience of repeated physical encounters, such as if a work were installed in a school setting, that cumulatively can impact understanding and appreciation.
These works can be loaned or rented to local businesses (like LACMA once had an Art Rental Gallery), placed in public buildings, and displayed on a rotating basis in the area’s schools (perhaps with study guides prepared by curators-in-residence). They can be a resource for scholars and loaned for exhibition at very little cost. The art might find its way into a museum or private collection if the managers make work available for sale.
The management of these Artchives provides internship and employment opportunities for conservatorship, curatorial development, experience in exhibition management and curriculum development, and artist residencies. Depending on the configuration and location of the site, exhibitions and events can provide easy access and first-hand encounters for children, their families, and the public with authentic artwork produced by artists from their own communities. So much of modern life is shifting to virtual replication. We need to hold onto the experiential level of engagement when encountering art.
The question ultimately arises: How will this network of collections and programs be funded?
The precursor to this question is: Where will it be housed? – which could suggest how the costs could be covered.
Short of setting up a new institutional construct such as the Library system, this program is best served by being integrated into settings where a support structure is already in place and where the benefits are most needed: schools and institutions. Institutions can provide the scholars and conservators and may have budgets or in-kind assets like property and staff to at least partially support this program. That institution could then leverage its commitment and status to fundraise through grants and private sources.
Flexible real estate solutions are called for because of the physical “heft” of the art objects to be collected, their fragility, their need for ongoing attention, interpretation, handling, and to accommodate collections as they expand to encorporate new modalities such as installation, performance, and multimedia.
What are the real estate opportunities?
It’s unlikely the collections will be housed in facilities built to suit. Instead, it is more environmentally responsible to look to ad hoc solutions in existing buildings that can be adapted for the collection or shared with other institutions in various communities throughout the city and county. These neighborhood-based art archives offer opportunities for public/private partnerships in funding and management.
Artchives can be appended to existing community or college libraries or attached to a community’s adult school or continuing education facility or built into a neighborhood park, or can repurpose a decommissioned public facility such as an outdated post office, fire station, police station, storage facility, hospital, or become a priority for adaptive reuse of excess city or county properties.
An Artchive could be the community benefit incentive or amenity for a developer of affordable housing or senior housing or a shopping center. It could be attached to transit stations as an attraction for the use of public transportation. It could be incorporated as part of an “Opportunity Site” where local governments promote transitioning neighborhoods to the development community.
Housing these collections in dormant otherwise vacant spaces could help repurpose commercially obsolete structures – often historically/architecturally significant buildings – such as abandoned factories and warehouses and non-compliant hospitals, and spread out this vast trove of artwork into the communities where the artists lived or worked. This project salvages currently non-viable commercial properties as well as endangered artwork.
Some industries throughout the city have become obsolete. Abandoned facilities could house an Artchive, e.g. the Firestone Tire Factory in South Gate on a State University campus. It is slated for demolition for a parking lot.
The old County Hospital in Boyle Heights – 1.5M square feet – is a landmark that cannot be demolished and can never be a hospital again. We need to bring such real estate assets that have historic and/or architectural value back into use.
Now is the time to develop the Artchive before we lose so much of the art which brought our region to prominence.