Symposium on Mixed-Media Archives and Contemporary Art History

The Archives of American Art announces an upcoming symposium, “The Multi-Media Archive: Stewardship and Use of Audiovisual Media Documenting Contemporary Art History,” to be held at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, in Washington D.C., on Friday, March 27, 2015.

This symposium is a culminating event for the Archives of American Art’s 3-year project Uncovering Hidden Audiovisual Media Documenting Postmodern Art. The project collections document a period of contemporary American art when ephemeral and dynamic new art forms and means for documenting art were emerging in art communities and spaces across the country. The audiovisual materials in these collections are rare archival resources that uniquely document this recent art history, but gaps in archival standards and best practices for documenting audiovisual media found in archival repositories have often left this material hidden and unavailable to Archives users.

The symposium will bring together the two sides of the archival repository’s community—archivists and people who use archives—to consider the complexities and possibilities of audiovisual recordings that form part of the archival record of contemporary American art history.