ARLIS/NA 53rd Annual Conference

Craft in the Filing Cabinet: Documenting the History of Craft Workers, Objects, and Spaces in Institutional Records Tough - Jenna Stout
A 2024 review of artist files in this small art museum library revealed an overall lack of staff artist representation. More specifically, the artist files did not reflect the numerous craft workers employed by the institution since its founding. This collecting gap can be partially traced to the historic separation of fine arts and applied arts.

With roots in the late nineteenth century, this museum offered night classes in bookbinding, drafting, and other technical arts for day laborers. Craft workers, in the form of carpenters, plasterers, and house painters, help build the institution from the ground-up. From WPA technical drawings to artist file drawers by the Crafts Division, hand-built slide carrying cases, and the award-winning period room restoration project of the 1980s, the institutional records reveal a rich history of on-site craft labor that is embedded in the galleries and other spaces. On a more localized scale, the museum library's design itself is the work of a prominent architect; however, the library's interior has been reconfigured to fit new spaces under the skilled supervision of the museum's cabinetry department. While reports of craft workers and objects pop up in the archives, a delineation between work product and art object is reverberated in institutional records.

The presenter will discuss a collection audit and subsequent reparative description project of administrative files to illuminate craft history in the museum archives. Legacy filing systems, retention schedules, and cataloging practices can pose barriers to the discoverability of craft stories. In reviewing and redescribing administrative files, there is an opportunity to shed light on the labor of staff and contractors that might not be visible in top-level staff directories and archived record container lists. A range of source materials can be utilized for tours, exhibitions, and other programming events. The presenter will also touch on research approaches to sift out historic documentation and tangible objects related to hidden labor and marginalized voices in repositories.

A Tough Row to Hoe: Weeding an Art & Design Collection - Amy Lazet
Many libraries are increasingly under pressure to reduce the footprint of their physical collections. This is an impetus for many to aggressively deaccession titles from their existing print collections, a necessary but potentially fraught task. Weeding a library's collections requires a robust set of criteria against which the books can be evaluated.

Many of the seminal texts on weeding focus on public libraries while the literature for academic libraries tends to emphasize quantitative criteria as well as encouraging a reliance on interlibrary loans and ebooks. Art and design publications, however, are more print preferred than other disciplines. Furthermore, these specialized collections often contain books that are difficult to replace (i.e. exhibition catalogs from a limited print run that cannot be repurchased at a reasonable price a few years later). Some authors have recognized that the humanities require more qualitative criteria, but there is a dearth of literature around weeding art and design collections specifically. The relevant publications that do exist, meanwhile, often focus on a very narrow portion of art and design collections (e.g., reference books).

In 2021, the author's institution integrated its branch library into the main library's space. The author was tasked with single-handedly evaluating the entire print book collection, a task that had not happened for at least 20 years. Based on information drawn from existing literature, consultations with librarians at other art and design institutions, and a process of trial and error, the author developed a comprehensive set of guidelines for weeding all subject areas in an art and design collection.

This paper makes available that set of criteria for weeding and art design books and particularly photography books including qualitative criteria and a sliding scale for quantitative criteria. This information will also be contextualized with findings from a survey of deaccessioning practices from other art and design collections.

Criticizing Art Criticism - Emilee Mathews
This paper investigates how racism and sexism interoperate in the reflection of contemporary art through gallery shows and exhibition reviews. In order to do so, I gathered a set of 97 exhibition reviews covering the 2016/2017 season from well known publications such as Artforum, New York Times, Brooklyn Rail and more.

In this paper I build on previous quantitative research tracing proportionality by qualitatively analyzing not only which artists were covered, but also how. I analyze demographic biases (are artists of color more favorably reviewed than white artists?) as well as art historical trends (are painters better received than sculptors? Which galleries tend to have the most favorable coverage?). I uncover author affiliations and compare articles they've written against others in the dataset. I then contextualize these reviews and the dispositions they reflect in art criticism literature from the stalwart Sylvan Barnett to the intrepid Aruna D'Souza and meta publications like "the Bad Review List" from 4Columns. I look additionally at the role criticism and reviews play more broadly in contemporary society. From food to film, books to bed and breakfasts, whose judgments we seek and taste we emulate has changed significantly due to sites like Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon and Yelp. By analyzing this article dataset, we can explore dynamics of how the publications we collect in the library reflect broader cultural ecologies.