Author: Catherine Spiller
After hearing that I was going to intern at the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh last December, I spent the whole winter break curious as to what the "backstage" of a gallery space might look like. I wanted to know how a gallery space is run and what happens to the shows after they are taken down. Working with my supervisor, AAP Executive Director Madeline Gent, we decided that I would be working closely with the in-house archive and the materials held at the Heinz History Center. I had always been very interested in researching art and artists, so this was right up my alley.
The project began with me surveying what the Detre Library and Archives of the Heinz History Center held in their archives, to establish what was available to the public and what wasn’t. In the Archives I found photos and records about past AAP shows and members, going as far back as 1910. It was fascinating to use these sources to explore these artist’s works and understand their careers.
By working with what Heinz did have, I also learned what it did not have. I went back to the AAP gallery, where their in-house archive resides in many file cabinets and boxes. I sorted through those files, finding old catalogs that the Heinz archive was missing, information from different shows that the organizations had not prioritized recording, and many other acquisitions the gallery had received from artists and did not know what to do with. My supervisor, Madeline Gent, asked me to gather these physical records to take to Heinz and to create a digital collection for their ongoing use. Because AAP is now primarily working with digital formats there aren’t as many paper archives to save. The digital collections I have helped pull together include photos of past shows, artist and juror statements, gallery literature, or advertising media. These “scrapbooks” continue to show AAP’s activities each year.
The term scrapbook is perhaps not the most accurate because scrapbooks are big presentation-style files that list, in chronological order, each of the gallery’s events throughout the year. I have collaged together the pictures from the opening receptions, added news articles about shows, and quotes from certain artists and jurors about the meaning behind a show. The scrapbooks do not focus on the financial work or the planning that is involved in putting on a show; those documents remain held at AAP. Working on these digital scrapbooks has been the most rewarding aspect of my work because it allows me to combine all the research I’ve been doing into one (digital) object and hand it over to the Heinz archivists. And I feel like I got a taste of archival work in seeing how Heinz archivist Carly Lough has tried to help me find certain things in their archives, and in other online or external resources. Archivists help put together larger stories of organizations or time periods using day-to-day documents, photos, and articles, but they also work to make these stories accessible to the public for as long as possible.
And thinking back on when I first walked into AAP, I think I know now what behind-the-scenes at a gallery looks like. It looks like a place cluttered with stacks of papers and boxes, but it holds so much history. And through my work those boxes are a little more organized, and the stories they contain a little more accessible to other researchers like me.