This is the final installment in the Artists on Diaries series curated by artist Mary Temple, in which guest authors comment on contemporary diary practices.
— Archives of American Art Blog editors
Archives of American Art Staff Blog : Artists on Diaries
- Bernarda Bryson Shahn lived nearly two more years after writing this feisty diary entry in 2002. Her life and that of her late husband’s, Ben Shahn, were inextricably woven into the rich history of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in rural Maine.
- In Charles Green Shaw’s diary from 1963–64 in the exhibit, A Day in the Life: Artists’ Diaries from the Archives of American Art, the artist records detailed but succinct accounts of events throughout the day. These short declarative sentences state the time at which he awoke in the morning, what he read, whom he saw and what work he accomplished in the studio.
- In his 1946 diary, Joseph Cornell utilized an advertisement for a bedside lamp that he’d clipped from a publication to evoke the night of dreams he’d had the previous evening (May 16th). The way he communicated the intensity of the dreams, and the sense of the day that followed, underscore the fact that all his experiences were interwoven into his work.
- In the previous blog post of this series, Sarah Schmerler described how her friend Martin Wilner’s work inspired a series of drawings made while riding the New York City Subway. When I asked Wilner to tell us more about his projects, he began by citing Henry Mosler’s diary, on view in the exhibition A Day in the Life: Artists’ Diaries from the Archives of American Art.