Artists Talk on Art records, circa 1974-2018

Administrative files include a general history file, various versions of by-laws and articles of incorporation, board meeting minutes and related scattered notices and notes, one file of program committee notes and minutes, financial statements and ledger, panel attendance notes, and scattered panel schedules and lists of panelists.

The director's and chairman's general correspondence is somewhat scattered but includes the files of ATOA directors Lori Antonacci, Vernita Nemec, and Jeannine Russell, as well as chairman Douglas Sheer. There are also memos and letters from ATOA members, such as Robert Wiegand. Topics include board affairs, financial affairs, fund raising, publicity, and program planning.

Found here are ATOA's grant applications to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), and to a lesser degree, the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs. Files contain applications, supporting documentation, notes, and reports. There are also a few files devoted to grant inquiries and proposals to private foundations and general grant planning.

Panel release forms were signed by individual panel/dialogue participants authorizing ATOA to reproduce and distribute any reproduction of the presentation for not for profit purposes. Most of the forms include the title of the panel dialogue. Users are advised that while the series appears to be complete, the forms were not compared or matched with other panel documentation.

There are written transcripts of four panel presentations in the 1980s: 1981 panel on "Issues in Contemporary Sculpture"; "Polyartistry: Artists at Work in More Than One Discipline" (1986); "Looking Back at the 40s" (1988); and "Aesthetics/Ethics" (1988). Some are annotated and marked "unedited".

Electronic copies of 12 transcripts made available on the Artists Talk on Art website are included in this series in pdf form. The existing pdf files were created at the time of donation from html files whose creation date is unknown. Panels with electronic transcripts include dialogues with Donald Kuspit (2004), Willem de Kooning (2005), Miltos Manetas (2007); sessions featuring students of Hans Hoffmann (1978); and sessions called entitled "Why Make Art In New York?" (1979), "Post-modernism" (1980), "The Perfect Artist" (1997), "Young Artists Trying to Make it in New York" (2001), "For Women Only" (2001), "Wolf Kahn's America" (2003), "The New Art Dealer's Alliance" (2004), and "Long Term Healthcare Insurance" (2004).

The bulk of the printed materials consist of a complete set of printed panel flyers dating from 1975-2009, as well as a digitized copy of panel flyers dating from 1975-2010. Many of the printed flyers are annotated with last minute participant and program changes, as well as panel attendance notes. The digitized set of flyers also contains annotated versions, though the annotations do not always match the annotations found on the printed flyers. Files also contain related panel announcements and press releases. There is one file of programs of "Art Talks" sponsored by the Alliance of Artists that appears to pre-date ATOA, perhaps as a precursor to ATOA or as a reference model for ATOA programs.

Additional printed materials include publicity flyers and announcements that are more general in nature, including issues of the calendar of arts events published under the name of Downtown by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, materials about ATOA benefit auctions, issues and clippings of the Women Artists Newsletter dating from 1976-1980, and ATOA printed video catalogs.

Three scrapbooks contain primarily printed materials. Scrapbook 1 is entitled "History and Facts". Scrapbook 2 has been dismantled into four folders and includes a section on general publicity and a section containing a nearly complete set of panel flyers dating from 1975-1989, many of which are annotated. Scrapbook 3 was labeled "Lori Antonacci" and has been dismantled into two folders containing mostly publicity related printed materials and a few letters.

Photographic materials include slides, negatives, contact prints, and color snapshots. Most of the slides, negative, and contact prints were organized by ATOA into labeled notebooks. Aside from one slide portfolio and a folder of contact sheets labeled "ATOA History", the majority of the images depict panels and panel participants. A few of the files also contain images of works of art, possibly associated with benefit auctions. The slides and negatives are organized only by year and most do not include the name or titles of the panels or participants; there are a few exceptions, and name placards are visible in a great many of the images. One file contains a list of dates of images from the "Photo and Negative Notebook". There is also one folder of images of ATOA staff/directors.

Series contains video and sound recordings of public programs presented by Artists Talk on Art, including panel discussions, public interviews, and slide lectures by hundreds of artists, gallerists, critics, curators, and collectors on a wide range of contemporary art subjects that were held in New York City between 1977 and 2016. Programs were recorded on a range of analog and early digital media, often in multiple formats simultaneously. A few of the programs were edited into shorter versions, and samplers of excerpts from a season's programs were created for a few seasons.

ATOA's recordings chronicle the American art world, covering critical discussions and significant art world issues over five decades. Thousands of artists such as Will Barnet, Louise Bourgeois, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Robert De Niro, Agnes Denes, Michael Goldberg, Robert Longo, Ana Mendieta, Robert Morris, Elizabeth Murray, Alice Neel, Philip Pavia, Howardena Pindell, Larry Rivers, Sylvia Sleigh, Kahinde Wiley, Hannah Wilke, David Wojnarowicz, and others speak about their work. The original recordings exist in a variety of analog sound and video formats.

Participants in each event are listed in the series listing. Events were often organized by their moderators or by a core group of ATOA organizers, including Doug Sheer, Donna Marxer, Leon Golub, Molly Barnes, George Rada, Fran Kornfeld, and Lynne Mayocole.

Event recordings are listed in chronological order.

Most of the events that were recorded have been digitized for preservation and access. A subset of sound recordings of events dated 1977-1992 were digitized in 2008, and a comprehensive set of video and sound recordings of events dated 1977-2016 were digitized in 2016-2017. During the 2016-2017 preservation project, where multiple video and sound recordings were made of a single event, as was often the case, a single master version was generally selected to be digitized.

Events that were recorded but not digitized are described in the series along with digitized recordings, with a physical box location added to facilitate research requests for access.