Editor’s Note

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s NoteTanya SheehanTanya Sheehan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThroughout its history, the Archives has collected the papers and oral histories of prominent women artists, critics, dealers, and art historians, along with the records of institutions that supported or disseminated their work. This special issue highlights that commitment, joining the efforts of the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative to document the vital role women have played in the history of the United States. In honor of the one hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage in 2020, we have chosen to showcase new approaches to feminism in and through the Archives. Several questions motivate the contributors: What constitutes a feminist reading of an archive? In what ways do archives serve or challenge feminist art histories? And how can or should we define a feminist archival practice today?“New Research” begins with Laura R. Prieto tracing the history of a 1915 art exhibition to benefit suffrage by analyzing the scrapbooks of the Macbeth Gallery and the archival remains and silences of the artists who contributed to the project. K. L. H. Wells uncovers not only the significant contributions of women to the production of modern tapestry but also feminism’s marginalization of this male-dominated artistic practice in its stories of American modernism. Lucy Bradnock turns to exhibitions and conceptual art projects from the 1970s that blurred the lines between self-portraiture and fictional narratives of the self. By creating deliberately unreliable archival documents, artists such as Eleanor Antin, Lowell Darling, Ilene Segalove, and Alexis Smith conceived of the archive as a fantasy space with feminist potential.“Art Work” features a collection of artists’ replies to the question, “What is feminist art?” dating from 1976–77 and 2019. Many of the artists of color and LGBTQ+ artists that the Archives selected for the 2019 project challenge the movement’s traditional centering of the perspectives of white, cisgender women—a centering also present in the responses that this special issue’s open call for papers generated. The artists featured in “Art Work” point to the dangers of adopting such a narrow political worldview and argue instead for twenty-first-century feminisms that encompass a diversity of bodies and selves.The remainder of this issue is devoted to reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic and a national reckoning with racism in the summer of 2020. It features a conversation I facilitated among scholars and artists on the role the Archives can play in the midst of these public crises, as well as a collection note on the Archives’ Pandemic Oral History Project. We are honored to reproduce on this issue’s endpapers details from an artwork created by one of the project’s interviewees, Mark Bradford, amidst the turmoil of the past year. The editorial team mourns the loss of too many people in the American art world in 2020 and hopes to find thoughtful ways of acknowledging their contributions in the years to come. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 60, Number 1Spring 2021 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/714298 Views: 978Total views on this site © 2021 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.