Symposia

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art

Funded by the Keith Haring Foundation

Review the 2015 Symposium focusing on the Multi-Media Archive: Stewardship and Use of Audiovisual Media Documenting Contemporary Art History. Held at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, in Washington D.C.

Webcast for the November 2013 symposium to explore digital scholarship in American art history, hosted by the Archives of American Art, at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, in Washington, D.C.

In recent decades, artists have become increasingly interested in archives both as inspiration and as an artistic medium. Accumulating and sorting—the same impulses that drive the creation of an archive—feed the process of making assemblages and collages. Conceptual and performance art continue to blur the line between art and documentation. And more recently, many artists draw on the archive to revisit and reenact earlier works. This symposium considered how archives not only trace the creative process, but also become part of that process and even of the work itself.