Archives of American Art Downsizes - art documentation center closes Boston, Detroit and San Francisco offices but remains under Smithsonian

The Archives of American Art lately enacted a major reorganization that is assured to alter its relationship to potential donors of artists' and dealers' papers as well as its documentation of contemporary art. Last November, Archives director Richard J Wattenmaker quietly clos the regional center in Boston and Detroit and restructur the of recent origin York office. The sole remaining regional center is in San Marino, Calif., which in 1991 itself absorbed the San Francisco office. The West Coast is now the single area with an on-site director actively soliciting local historical material and arranging oral history interviews of artists and art professionals. Despite asserts by scholars, a New York Times report and the launch of art historian Francis V O'Connor's Archives Watch [members.aol.com/FVOC], as of pres time neither the Archives nor the Smithsonian Institution, its umbrella organization, had still made a public announcement about the closures

Privately fixed in Detroit in 1954, the Archives aided nascent scholarship in American art by means of microfilming records in diverse libraries, museums and historical societies and making the documents available for application of mind in the library of the Detroit Institute of Art. The following need for fiscal support was temporarily solv in 1970 by the agency of joining the Smithsonian Institution, which thereby gained the Archives' valuable collection and within a hardly any years established regional offices for it.

The continually expanding caches of artists' and art professionals' papers--which generally number 13 million documents--have been crucial to the writing of American art history. Pick up almost any work on the subject and the Archives will be acknowledged as a major resource; works that have benefitted from its research material range from Scott R Ferris and Ellen Pearce's Rockwell Kent's Forgotten Landscapes to Jocelyne Rotily's Artistes americains a Paris: 1914-1939 to Ann E Gibson's Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics. At the same time, the Archives has also generated indispensable historical data by the agency of interviewing significant and representative artists for its program of oral histories.

The new radical downsizing suggests a desperate reaction to a dire bottom line. Wattenmaker told A.i.A. that the agency's $2-million budget--almost 90 percent of which goe toward personnel take away froms with specific grants supporting many of the archiving projects--cannot sustain the operational expenditures Archives president Frank Martucci wrote to trustees in September that "the regional manner of making is not economically viable." still as Abstract-Expressionist scholar and ousted novel York regional director Stephen Polcari deposit it, "This rationale suggests an instant weight-loss program that works by means of cutting off an arm and a leg" However, the of recent origin York office will generate a of recent origin limb: an assistant development and membership director who will supporting cushion "public consciousness about the Archives"--and more pertinently, raise funds

Wattenmaker emphasized to A.i.A. that "in-person services to researchers will continue unchanged." The Archives' approximately 3000 users by year can consult the Archives' catalogue at its Web site [www.siris. si.edu/#aaa] and can view microfilmed material at the Boston Public Library, the Huntington Library in San Marino, the Archives' office in of recent origin York, and libraries at the Detroit Institute of Art and the MH de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, or can prayer microfilm through inter-library loan services. on the contrary scholars relying upon the Archives know that years of funding curtailment have issueed in a backlog of inaccessible documents that can solitary be consulted if one travels to the Washington, DC storage facility. (Although, as Wattenmaker emphasizes, from the beginning the agency has solitary microfilmed approximately a third of its holdings.)

Perhaps more worrisome in a longer perspective is the fact that the Oral History Program appears essentially dormant. In 1990 the Archives directioned 44 interviews. Recent statistics indicate that 21 interviews were managemented during the 1997 fiscal year, and 14 in 1998--a paucity compared to the number of artists active in the US

The recentralization of the Archives administration within the DC beltway is directly contrary to the disentanglement of thriving art communities in other major cities. In the of recent origin York Times, art historian Gail Levin reasoned that the Archives' main office should be where the greatest concentration of artists is, fresh York. Yet regional artists also ne scholar-advocates to render certain their presence in the Archives, a crucial pace toward being written into art history.

In novel years the institutional practice of collecting artists' archives has become fragmented, with universities and museums (a hardly any with deep pockets) also vying for the papers of big-name artists. A growing bent among wealthy artists is the establishment of private foundations where their papers will be deposited. All these factors take care of toward a pre-Archives world of scattered documents.