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Crystal Sanchez
Scope and Contents
The papers of New York video artist and painter Robert Wiegand measure 10.9 linear feet and 0.001 GB and date from 1953 to 1994. Found within the collection are biographical materials, correspondence, art project and exhibition files, printed and digital materials, video art, photographs, and industrial and miscellaneous video recordings. About one-half of the collection is comprised of video recordings.
Biographical materials include school yearbooks, video and paper documentation from his 1991 wedding, and photograph and video documentation of his funeral and memorial service in 1994. Also found are resumes and Wiegand's SoHo live/work artist permit from 1976.
Correspondence is comprised primarily of letters written by Wiegand, some in digital format, and a handful of letters received. Outgoing letters mainly concern Wiegand's video production work for hire and other personal financial matters. Letters received relate primarily to Wiegand's painting sales, and are from James McLeon, Vivian Browne, Susan Larson, Burt Chernow, and Alexandra Rose. Additional correspondence can be found in the project files.
Project files include documentation of the 1968 inagural "10 Downtown" exhibition, the
City Walls
mural project, a multimedia art work created through the Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) project called Changes
, the products of the 1978 trip to India, including the video work Snapshots of an Indian Day
, the "Madama Butterfly" video production produced by Wiegand, and the artist panel series ArtistsTalkonArt
. The files contain a wide variety of documentation, such as correspondence, event flyers and press materials, photographs, slides, and videos. Printed materials include exhibition and event announcements and catalogs, clippings and reviews, magazine publications, and published books that contain Wiegand's work. There is also one scrapbook compiled by Wiegand for his 5th One Man Show of Paintings at the Phoenix Gallery in New York City.
Video artworks created by Wiegand, often made in collaboration with his wife Ingrid, include
Georges
, Julie
, Moran
, Omar is El Uno
, Nat
, Walking (interstices)
, Face-Off
, and How to tell an artist with Dr. Sheldon Cholst
. Photographs include a combination of personal and professional photographs, although most of the materials are slides of artworks and events. Of note are slides from the "Bicentennial Banners" exhibition that Wiegand was invited to participate in and that was on display at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in 1976. The last series contains over 4 linear feet of all other video recordings and includes industry productions, independent projects, performance documentation, work samples, and works by others. Notable among these productions are documentation of Pamela Stockwell's reenactment of the Tomkins Square Park riots of 1988 and footage of performers Carolee Schneemann, Trisha Brown, Laura Foreman, and Leonard Horowitz, among others.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
The collection was donated by Lynn Braswell, Robert Wiegand's widow, in 1998 and 2000, and in 2014 by Ingrid Wiegand, Robert Wiegand's first wife.
Separated Materials
Twenty sound cassettes of interviews and lectures were removed from the collection and returned to the organization that created them, ArtistsTalkOnArt. A few video cassettes are still found in the collection from that series.
Funding
Sponsor
Funding for the processing of this collection was provided by by a grant from the Mellon Foundation through the Council of Library and Information Resources' Hidden Collections grant program.
Processing Information
The collection was processed in 2012 by Crystal Sanchez. Born-digital materials were processed by Kirsi Ritosalmi-Kisner in 2020 with funding provided by Smithsonian Collection Care and Preservation Fund.