Every so often I am asked how to secure mail art archives. Crackerjack Kid seems to tell people I have this knowledge. Here is the sum of my knowledge as written to the most recent inquiry.
Dear Sheril,
Thanks for your letter about your mail art collection blues.
Chuck and David did contact me about David’s archive before he died. Then an archivist working with David's collection before and after he died also contacted me.
I do not have any personal information about collecting, donating, or securing mail art archives, although I think Chuck Welch thinks I do. When I was doing my doctoral research on mail art one of my main findings was that mail artists of a certain age were very concerned about the safety of their archives and wanted to find them a home in an institution.
Here is what I learned and it may be helpful to you.
John Held Jr. a professional librarian with a well-organized archive has sold parts of it to various institutions such as the Smithsonian National Archives and the Getty. John has received a lot of flack for selling mail art, but in fact, that’s a way to get a large institution interested. If you are giving away an archive then it has no actual value to the acquiring organization such as university library or museum.
Judith Hoffberg also a professional librarian donated her archive of artists’ books to her university's library.
I would start by talking to these two mail artists about their archives and how to get yours secured into an institution. Then publish how you did it on the web at mailartist.com. Send your solution to me and I will post it there.
Another avenue is to contact a school of information (formerly called school of library science) at a university. Offer your archive as a capstone project and let students research how to handle mail art archives. I think this is the best idea yet. Grad students get a unique problem they can 1) research 2) solve and then 3) write about in scholarly journals. A byproduct would be that you would secure the works you care about.
I wish you the best of luck in securing your archive or repurposing it into new art. I am a recycler myself so I don’t have an archive and I don’t have archive legacy issues that go with archives.
Best wishes,
honoria
source:
http://honoriartist.livejournal.com/370702.html
A hard-copy version of the first 10 thoughts I wrote for the Internet. The online version is still available at: http://www.iuoma.org/overview.html and a direct access to all the texts you can find though: http://www.iuoma.org/secret_9.html. All the texts are hyperlinked, so you can jump from one text to another. Realize that the texts are old ones. They are my views from back then.
