The Smithsonian’s archives of american art

Lisa TurveyWith upward of 2,500 interviews, the Archives of American Art’s Oral History Program, at the Smithsonian Institution, is the world’s largest collection of interviews about American visual art. Could you give us a brief history?

Ben GillespieThe Oral History Program began in 1958, alongside the founding of the Archives. It started with the desire to collect stories from artists who had participated in the Armory Show of 1913, namely Louis Bouché and Abraham Walkowitz. That led to the Archives’ first big oral history project, of nearly 400 interviews: to collect interviews with artists and administrators who had participated in the New Deal art programs.

At the time, oral history itself was a nascent discipline in the United States. Many anthropology departments and universities, especially Columbia, were interested in collecting firsthand witness accounts and testimonies as primary sources. The Archives of American Art helped to shape the form for the visual arts. Oral histories became a way to document history that couldn’t be captured by other modes of historical research, such as paper records and correspondence.

LTWhat is the funding structure of the program?

Jennifer SnyderThe Works Progress Administration interviews were generously funded by the Ford Foundation. Sometimes we approach a funder and sometimes a funder approaches us. The majority of our interviews are privately funded through cultural foundations, or what we call “trust funds” at the Smithsonian. We do relatively little interviewing with federal funds.

BGIt depends on the project. We might have a foundation come to us and say it would like oral histories with a specific subset of artists, or sometimes our advisory team notices a gap in our records and then we approach a funder to help remedy that gap. Oral histories are massive undertakings. Getting people to give you their whole life story is a huge undertaking in and of itself, and on our side, we’re archiving that record in perpetuity.

JSAn oral history isn’t free. There’s a cost for transcription, for the editor, for preservation, for staff. We can expect the process from start to finish to take at least eighteen months.

LTYou interview not only artists but collectors, dealers, administrators, and educators. Could you say more about how you select subjects, who are called narrators?

BGWe’re often looking for narrators who speak to an era, an artistic movement, or a geographic area. One significant recent project was the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America, which contains over 200 interviews with an unbelievable assortment of artists working in craft. And our project in coordination with the Keith Haring Foundation, Visual Arts and the aids Epidemic, gave voice to people who experienced the aids epidemic firsthand and saw how it affected the art world. Focused projects enable us to think through pivotal moments in the history of art and these human moments alongside it, but we also have the flexibility to go after life stories that don’t necessarily fit within a larger project.

LTUsually you approach narrators, not the other way around?

BGWe invite people 99-plus percent of the time, but we do have people reach out and say “It’s time for my oral history.” And they might already have been on our priority list. Usually, if you think you’re suitable for an oral history, you’re probably on the priority list.

LTYour focus is generally mid- and late-career artists?

JSUsually late career. But that hasn’t always been the case throughout the history of the program; we do have a good number of midcareer interviews with artists, including Emma Amos, Ed Ruscha, and Wendy Red Star. When we approach a narrator and ask if they would like to be part of the program, we make it clear that this is an oral history. It’s not an interview for a magazine or a journalistic interview; it’s for the Smithsonian, and we want to talk to you about your whole life.

LTFrom birth to present—background, family, education, influences, methods, practice, work?

JSYes. That communication about what the interview is is essential, and a huge part of the ethics of oral history. And then we choose an interviewer collaboratively.

LTHow do you pair narrators and interviewers?

BGWe have a pool of interviewers we work with frequently and they’re usually oral historians. We also work with a lot of subject-matter experts—art historians and curators. The relationship with the interviewer is key—narrators have to feel comfortable, and the interviewer may have to help push them when their memory is failing or if they have trepidation about diving into details.

LTBen, you’ve described the difference between oral histories and other types of interview formats as one of both degree and kind. What makes oral histories unique primary sources? What gaps can they fill?

BGOur oral histories are different in scope. We give narrators the space and the freedom to articulate their experience as they experienced it to the best of their ability. We’re taking them away from a targeted interview that accompanies a show or small body of work.

In the critical sphere, there’s been so much backlash against biographically inflected readings. Biography is seen as muddying the power of the object itself, the work of art. Not to say that biographical reading is all that we should do, but oral histories give us so much insight into the people who made the works. We’re breaking away from the standard artistic-genius model into something that’s much more real and grounded, to see who made the work. Oral histories give us a way to humanize art.

LTIt’s an opportunity for narrators to tell their side of the story. Can an oral history be a tool to shape or influence one’s legacy? Do narrators see this as a chance to speak on behalf of their work and about how they might want it to be interpreted or historicized?

BGAbsolutely, but it really varies from narrator to narrator. Some narrators might talk about their practice more generally, their influences, what brought them to art, even significant shows, but they don’t want to get into the significance of individual works. At times you’ll even find narrators and interviewers who disagree productively over definitions and labels, like in Jennifer Bartlett’s 1987 oral history with Avis Berman.

Other narrators love to speak about individual works and tell the story behind them. In Kay WalkingStick’s oral history of 2011, she talks about Messages to Papa, a transformative work in her practice in the 1970s. In her oral history you hear about the significance of the death of her father, about her coming to terms with her Native heritage, trying to make it as an artist, figuring out what she’s doing with painting. The installation is a site of mourning as well as a site to heal and look forward. And that was completely absent in the critical apparatus, but it’s right there in the oral history. There are so many examples like that where you really gain insight into what was the impetus for a work, how it was shown, how it was received—gems like that. You stumble upon these profound moments.

JSWe are all in charge of our own story, and that comes into play a lot. What’s interesting is when you have people from the same circle and same time tell the same story, or tell the story of an event and it’s different. My experience is different from your experience and we might have been at the same place at the same time. Events and time and place talk to each other.

LTIn terms of the process, does the interviewer provide a list of questions to the narrator in advance? Is anything fair game?

BGIt should be more like a map, with possible questions or topics of interest that the interviewer then integrates into the conversation.

JSOur interviews take place over multiple sessions on different days. And that gives everyone a chance to review the last session and map where they want to go in the next session. During the interview we encourage people to take breaks and to speak candidly with each other about what they do or don’t want on the record.

LTWhat makes for an engaging narrator?

BGThere are many gregarious narrators, and they make the interviewer’s job easy, like when I had the pleasure of interviewing Walton Ford over the summer of 2022. But you can also have narrators who are more circumspect, who take time with phrases and offer a little less but are open to questions and take them as they are and as they form, which can also be fantastic. The main thing is being open to the experience and being open to talking about your life in its completeness.

JSI think what makes a good interview overall is when you can tell that it’s a collaborative process between the interviewer and the narrator. They may not know each other very well, but people who are comfortable with that collaborative process during the interview, with keeping that communication open, make for the best interviews.

BGThere are amazing moments where you can see people working out ideas, or interviewers engaging with what the narrator said and coming back to it and giving them the chance to look at things through a different perspective. You can see the movement of thought in a way that you’re not going to catch in, say, a monologue or a targeted interview. I especially enjoy the moments of self-reflexivity in Sarah Charlesworth’s oral history.

JSYou get these moments where narrators say things like “Oh, I’ve never said that out loud before,” or “I’ve never thought about it,” or “I’ve never put it together in that way before, but as I’m saying it, this is what’s happening.” Leo Castelli offers a few epiphanic moments in his 1969 interview with Barbara Rose.

LTHow do interviewers navigate what might be conflicting imperatives: to get a full account of a life and a practice, which will be a future resource, without guiding the conversation or asking leading or prying questions? How do good interviewers do that well?

BGBeing a good listener is step number one. We always tell interviewers to not break the silence. This is oral history 101, because as people are ruminating, that’s when the next memory will come, so you want their mind to make the connection. That will make for a natural flow. We work with interviewers to reflect on how the oral history serves the narrator. The interviewer is a conduit, there to provide a little traction and help make sure you’re creating a resource that is useful for scholars, curators, and others in the future. The interviewer has the knowledge to give that critical traction but is also someone who’s there to say, if you’re talking about things that are uncomfortable, This is a safe and open space for us to address those issues to better understand your life and career.

LTI know that access to oral histories can be restricted to a certain point. Is there also an opportunity for a narrator to edit or retract?

JSAbsolutely. Part of the ethical practice of oral history is allowing for a review period to take place and allowing your narrator to be able to shape their story and make factual corrections. But other times, people will want to revise something they said, and we take that into account. We have many layers of review that happen here before the interview even goes back to the narrator. After it’s conducted, it goes to our transcriber, and then we have another layer of review called the audit edit. The audit editor listens to the interview and makes sure that what is on the recording is in the transcript, doing this unseen work to clarify the sentences and paragraphs.

BGThen we go back to the narrator and interviewer for review and approval. We may have additional questions for clarification, and they also have a chance to go through to make sure that they’ve represented themselves the way they want to.

JSWe encourage narrators to correct things like names, but we also encourage keeping our verbatim transcript. That is crucial for accessibility, so that what appears on the page is the same as what someone is hearing, and everyone has the same experience of that interview. Part of the understanding is that the interview will be available and accessible, which is fundamental to our mission.

LTSpeaking of access, does your audience mostly use the transcripts online? What about in-person visits to the Archives?

JSWe have 1,700 transcripts available online. Some transcripts aren’t online because they’re restricted or because they only exist on paper. We have people use our transcripts in our reading room or from the comfort of their own home: researchers are able to contact our reference team for access to transcripts and recordings that aren’t available directly on our website. They use the recordings for many different reasons. Sometimes we have family members say, “I’ve never heard my great-grandfather’s voice.” But then we have people who say, “I’m a curator, I’m doing an exhibition and putting together the audio tour, and what can we use?” When SFMOMA had their big reopening a number of years ago, they used a lot of our interviews for their audio tours.

LTWhat other uses are made of oral histories?

BGAs primary sources, they’re used in thousands of books, dissertations, theses, articles, and exhibitions every year. They are also fodder for many novels and history books, because these first-person accounts really flesh out the experience of a period. These uses and adaptations speak to their legacy-shaping power: they’re so accessible. If somebody’s coming into the Archives of American Art twenty, thirty, fifty years after your death, your oral history becomes a viable resource for reclamation and recuperation. And our collecting process is so broad. We’re not just going after blue-chip artists who have massive retrospectives; we’re looking for significant figures who help us to tell the bigger story of the visual arts in the United States, like Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, Katherine “Lehua” Domingo, and Frederick Weston.

JSIt’s not just scholars and curators using oral histories. We see a lot of undergraduates, graduate students, History Day students. Another big use of our transcripts is for writing obituaries. Artforum, Artnews, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times—their reporters are mining these transcripts.

LTIn the case of obituaries, the oral history is literally used for the last word, to fact check and confirm information. You mentioned Columbia earlier, which has an MA program in the discipline, and there’s also the Oral History Association [OHA]. Many museums, universities, and other institutions have oral history initiatives. Is there a set of best practices in the field?

JSThere are absolutely best practices in the field, through the OHA. We also have our own best practices in the Archives. It’s a doubleheader of best practices.

BGPart of keeping up with best practices, both with the OHA and internally, is maintaining a style guide for oral histories. Ours is consulted widely and it’s about to emerge anew with important additions, including best practices with captions.

LTBeing interviewed for an oral history is a significant time commitment—less so than writing an autobiography or making a body of new work, but an undertaking of at least several hours. Do you ever have narrators on your priority list who are initially hesitant but then decide that doing an oral history is worth their time?

BGWe work to accommodate schedules as best we can, but sometimes that can be an issue. Our timescales are quite long at the Archives: we might have approached someone in the early 2000s for an oral history and the timing didn’t work out, but they’re still alive, we can do an oral history with them now. We don’t think year to year.

JSThe narrators in the Visual Arts and the aids Epidemic project knew each other, so they would talk to one another about their interview experiences through back channels. It was helpful because people knew what to expect, and it put them at ease talking about potentially traumatic and emotional times and events.

In terms of time commitment, it’s not just the interview, it’s also the review process. We give the narrator a timeframe for review, and we are clear: you do not have to review your transcript. If you’ve done a six-hour interview, that’s a couple of hundred pages, and you get that by FedEx and you’re like, Oh my god, now I have to relive my story again [laughs].

LTYour Pandemic Oral History Project, interviewing artists, educators, and curators about their experiences during the summer of 2020, was on a more condensed timeline.

JSThe pandemic threw everything off. We really ramped up with that special project: we did eighty-five interviews in a row, which was bananas—in a good way.

LTOn video? Remote?

JSYes, almost all on video. It really got us into doing video interviews for the first time.

BGThe remote interviews have been a real opening for us to think about what you can capture with video, and they help alleviate scheduling problems while protecting immunocompromised and older narrators.

JSFor years, we’d only do video oral history with a film crew and a three-day shoot. And then the pandemic hit and we were seeing people at home in their living room with their earbuds on and whatever technology they had available. And we thought, Oh, we can do this too.

BGThere was fear too about remote interviews and the intimacy and rapport that the interviewer and narrator could have, but we’ve been able to mitigate those concerns. Although we are continuing with the in-person interviews that we’ve always done, this is another tool to capture more interviews.

LTIn addition to the Pandemic Oral History Project, the Between Artists: In Conversation with History series is another recent initiative.

BGThat series is on our podcast, articulated, which makes the collections available in new ways. Six emerging artists had the opportunity to dive into our oral histories and curate their own episode based on their research. It speaks to the relevance of the Archives and the ongoing influence of oral histories—how they capture an artist’s voice and influence—and it has been rewarding to connect with different generations of artists.