Glossary: Community-based archives
Community-based archives
Community-based archives are defined as collections of materials gathered, collected, and shared primarily by members of a marginalized community to document their collective histories.
(source: https://mellon.org/programs/scholarly-communications/call-for-proposals-community-based-archives/ )
Related Terms:
a professional with expertise in the management of records of enduring value
Community-based archives are defined as collections of materials gathered, collected, and shared primarily by members of a marginalized community to document their collective histories.
"quotations" and / or / not "quotations" + * or for "everything”
The division within an organization responsible for maintaining the organization's records of enduring value.
Traditionally an archive is a store of documents or artifacts of a purely documentary nature
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As an educator who was radicalized by Black feminist and womanist literature, I have always been clear that that was my goal for SISTORIES--to provide the grounds for Black women and nonbinary femmes to adopt a politic to address the root cause of the social issues that cause them harm by seeing and writing themselves into the historical narrative of Black femmehood.
Memorial for Queer Rhyolite, a temporary monument to dreams in the dust is a public work originally installed for the inaugural Bullfrog Biennial at the Goldwell Open Air Museum in October 2019. The piece memorializes a 1980s dream to establish “Stonewall Park,” a gay utopian effort aimed for Rhyolite, NV, a piece of deserted mining country that lies between Death Valley National Park and the Nevada Test Site.
Latinx customs, rituals and traditions have withstood countless transformations through their assimilation to the US and back, and the undocumented history of quinceañera practice–a journey I hold quite close to me–is still just one of the many deprived of proper accreditation.
Developing strong, meaningful, relationships between artists and archivists has so much potential to be fruitful for both fields. Interestingly, both art and archives have been historically undervalued in academia: artistic practice as a vehicle only for expression or reflection of issues, requiring translation by a critic or art historian to make sense of its real value (4), and archivists as “handmaidens of historians,” seen as passive intermediaries between records and the historians who interpret them (5)
”As my family migrated and many others from the Diaspora did too, the camera was a way to document this broken American Dream narrative, instead, we needed to create a counter-narrative of our people, because we are not seen as American.”
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During my visit to One Archives in LA last summer, I found a wide range of materials across lines of class, sexuality, gender expression, and race, however there are still gaps in representation: there is less working class material and the collection still favours big coastal cities.
In 2017, the Providence Public Library published a comic book called Lizard Ramone in Hot Pursuit: A Guide to Archives for Artists and Makers. Written and illustrated by Jeremy Ferris, it forms the core of a simple toolkit for archivists.
Harold Fisk’s maps of the Mississippi River’s meanders, traces and shifts over time were produced as part of a report for the Army Corps of Engineers in 1944. But where are they now?
“..we were interested in discussing the concept of custody. It was vital to articulate how, from the point of view of the institution and as subjects, we were asking ourselves about the limits between guarding and possessing a collection..”