ACQUISITION

Vita

What is a museum without its archive? What does it mean to champion the legacy of these artists? Access isn't only achieved through exhibition practice, but also through facilitating access for researchers to explore the history of how these artworks have moved through space and time and the trajectory of the artist's and practitioners careers.

Lex

Yeah, it's interesting what you're saying too, about gathering and then you have this room of stuff, because I feel like that's something I've been thinking about a lot in the past year or like learning from other archivists about how many institutional archives, more like academic archives, or places that approach collections with an attitude of “Oh, we're trying to like, acquire this collection of this person or this place or this group or whatever.” There is this infinite desire to acquire stuff. From what I've heard and also in some ways what I’ve I experienced in my own stuff, especially when you're trying to do this archival work against the grain kind of archiving, against the dominant history or narrative. It's like, yeah, can we ever gather enough stuff but then at a certain point, it's like, well, what good is this stuff if it's just in a box in a room and the people, whatever the people means, don't even know it's there or can't access it? I know these are quintessential archivists problems, but yeah, I'm kind of curious about what to do with that insatiable drive to acquire stuff.

Vita  

Yeah. I have that same question. And in an institutional setting there's also practical things that come with that about collecting capacity and having enough resources to process incoming collections. Like you can't just willy nilly collect things without having the resources to then show that that was a good acquisition and make the material available.

Lex Yeah, I have learned that as well. That's something that professional archivists are always thinking about: do we have the resources to process this? Do we have the resources to then make it into a thing that is accessible to someone else? These questions are really real and since people should get paid to do stuff, do we have the money to pay them? 

With community archive projects, people are also resources too, right? In some ways, I feel like I'm part of some things whereas others not so much.  I was part of one community archive project where there was some funding for each of us to have a little stipend per month and then it ran out and we were like, well, we're still going to do this because it was so important to us, even if we don't get paid to do it. One commodity or resource that exists in community archiving is just desire to care for communities’ histories, and also in some ways, the feeling of accountability that you have to other people that you're quote unquote, doing it for or with or on behalf of, whether they're alive now or in the future. But for another project I'm a part of it's like we have lots of ideas about all the things that we want to do but it's just so hard to find the time because there's just so much shit to do and yeah, there's always something. It's hard to find the time, which I guess is where it's relevant to get paid to do work. Money  makes it easier to find time or make time.