The Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) is an art archive and library challenging established concepts of art, nonprofits, and historical institutions. It is located within the Asian Center shopping plaza in Chinatown.

LACA’s collections focus on “materials with special emphasis on underexposed artistic modes of expression such as studio and performance ephemera, artists’ writings, audio-visual recordings, digital media files and institutional collections of artist-run spaces” [lacarchive.com]. Artists who contribute materials become active contributors to their own collection’s descriptive narratives and metadata. Collections represent a wide array of projects, including non-operating art institutions such as the Main Museum as well as labor organizations such as the MOCA Union. It also hosts contemporary art exhibitions and will soon include a dedicated location downstairs from LACA for conducting oral history projects.

Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. (Image courtesy of LACA.)

Acid Free spoke with LACA’s founder and Executive Director, Hailey Loman, about a unique collection currently in the process of acquisition that poses layered and interlocking questions that reflect LACA’s mission of interrogating who decides what is art and what gets to be archived.  

The collection will encompass the records of Common Field, a nonprofit organizing body representing a nationwide network of independent arts organizations. Yearly convenings of its members involved advocacy work, forums, performances, resource sharing, and social gatherings. Common Field also provided funding opportunities and other support to its members. In 2021, in response to official complaints filed by employees, Common Field began an internal audit process of its structural and financial framework, which ultimately led to the organization’s decision to “sunset,” ceasing active operations by the end of 2022. 

Joining our conversation with Hailey is Shevaun Wright, an artist and lawyer whose artistic and intellectual work is often concerned with social and legal contracts as well as institutional critique. Shevaun will be working with LACA on the Archive Collection Agreement for the Common Field collection.

Materials in the Common Field Archive. (Image courtesty of LACA.)

How do LACA’s archives show the multiple perspectives of this complicated collection? 

HAILEY LOMAN: The Common Field archive arriving at LACA will be nestled alongside other collections of now non-operating art organizations. One example is the Main Museum archive, which was a non-collecting, nonprofit contemporary museum that opened in downtown Los Angeles in 2016. It was founded by Tom Gilmore, a local commercial and residential property developer who is also a board member at ArtCenter College of Design, the Natural History Museum, and Sci-Arc, to name a few. There was a massive disconnect from its inception between the founder, people working in the museum, and the museum’s stated mission. For example, the museum's public mission was to serve its downtown residents and local artists, but internally, the museum staff were asked to refrain from making political statements of any kind with regards to voting against neighborhood councils that oppose Gilmore’s development interests. A collection like this will be sitting next to the Common Field archive, which will be sitting next to materials from other various art spaces that, for one reason or another, don’t exist anymore. These collections help contextualize the art field today. They reveal how public art organizations often generate private economic gains and curatorial maneuvers for a select few through their philanthropic relationships. All these collections demonstrate to us how the institution’s internal agenda can harm the public purpose of art nonprofits.

How did LACA come to acquire the Common Field Collection? 

HL: The current Common Field team reached out to us. Cat Yang, a former employee, put LACA in touch with Sheetal Prajapati, the Executive Director, as well as staff members Chris Tyler and Mars Avila. A point of inquiry for me is how philanthropy impacts all of us in the arts, and I know this is true for Shevaun’s practice as well. There’s something poignant about the fact that there’s this organization that is sunsetting, and their records are coming to an organization that is itself existing precariously. Clearly, the way the art nonprofit system is set up is not working for any of us. 

Something that attracts LACA to the collection then is a critical interrogation of nonprofits. Do you think that is also part of Common Field’s desire in making their archive accessible through LACA? Or do you think they see their making it accessible as part of a reparative function after harm that was done?

HL: I would say the latter. I think it’s the current team’s interest in repair work. They used the term “radical transparency” when they first visited LACA and discussed the prospects of their archive coming here. I think they want to do right by what the organization should have been, or promised to be in its mission. In many organizations I come across, their public-facing mission is vastly different from their board's mission. I’ve heard it while recording oral histories with museum curators, nonprofit directors, and museum staff trying to unionize. The front-facing and public programming agenda is totally different from the mission of donors—that is the disconnect. And then we wonder why these organizations don’t make sense to us. It’s because they wrote a mission statement that has nothing to do with how things are going to be run, or they have two missions operating at the same time. Shevaun did an amazing project that referenced this disconnect. She also sued Eli Broad in the process. 

SHEVAUN WRIGHT: Yeah, I tried to.

HL: That was about his relationship to the Hammer Museum and UCLA rather than the Broad Museum, but again the mission statement was vastly different… 

SW: He attempted to embezzle money from the Hammer Museum and donate it under his name to our art school [UCLA], and then our art school was named after him. I looked into the process of naming and what kind of requirements and standards need to be met for that. That spun off into looking at the idea of the donor memorial and the motivations for philanthropy. I started looking at the taxation forms for the Broad Foundation. The Broad claims that its expensive restaurant is part of the nonprofit organization and thus has a charitable purpose of opening it up to the wider community and making it accessible.

Even when building the museum, he got a huge tax rebate from that land acquisition. Looking at the varying motivations and agendas of people who get involved in the arts is a lens for seeing how art basically launders reputations as well as money. And collective boards can put their own private collections on display, which then raises the value and cements them as canon. So it’s interesting when someone makes a donation like what they’re doing with Common Field, an organization that kind of “failed,” because in a way we have a look at behind the curtain.

HL: Right. Common Field was a special initiative of the Andy Warhol Foundation. The previous Executive Director of Common Field was also on the board of the Warhol Foundation. And then Warhol board members ran organizations that were in the Common Field network. Past board members of Common Field also ran organizations funded by the Warhol Foundation. We don't have the archives of those network organizations or the Warhol Foundation’s archives. The curtain is only partially exposed. 

Shevaun Wright, Class Action, 2019, installation view. (Image courtesy of the artist and LACA).

Is that something you have to be considering in determining what you can make accessible, how Common Field relates to the Andy Warhol Foundation?  

HL: Yeah, we need to see if there are NDAs written and signed by anyone. 

SW: It is a real consideration in a general sense if you have an active foundation and active members involved with reputations that are at stake, because the archive is facilitating access to these documents that are potentially sensitive. It raises questions about consent. Because normally what you find when you go into institutions—you sign an NDA and the question is more that you’re not supposed to speak about the institution, but when the institution decides to release everything, that's a whole different ball game. Have you consented for them to waive that? 

HL: That contractual agreement is one thing that is not as murky, but consent in the archive is something that we can’t have a singular rule on. We’ve had situations where people will say, “Actually, I want this back”. And if it’s a group photo where that person is among others, then they’re going against the consent of the rest of the group. 

What are your anticipated uses of the Common Field collection? 

HL: Our communities first and foremost consist of artists. Artists come here to work and learn about their field, and the harm that’s happening in their field, as well as to gain a better understanding about how philanthropy impacts their lives and the arts. These kinds of conversations around art philanthropy, we feel, are not happening in art schools or elsewhere. 

We hope that the Common Field collection further demystifies the opaqueness of art philanthropy, at least within the nonprofit sector of it. So that’s very much who we center. We’re thrilled for researchers and scholars and academics to come, beyond artists, but informing one another is why we started LACA.

The Common Field archive will contain meeting minutes, board materials, press, merch, everything from W-9s of employees and other documentation to correspondence between network members. They made their audit available to read. Also drafts of press releases they have written, which is fascinating to see what was crossed out. That’s another thing we need to address with Shevaun—if someone writes something, crosses it out, writes something else, can we show the cross-out? Or is that actually another form of consent that someone has chosen to cross something out, and they don’t want you to see it? We might think, “Oh, it’s marginalia, it’s amazing,” but someone decided they didn’t want this to be public, so now should it be?

SW: Again, it’s so unusual, because normally it’s in reverse. You sign an NDA, and if you disclose something against the institution, you get in trouble—they have a right to sue you. But then if the institution is the one that owns the work because you’re under an employment contract with them and they decide to release this, do you have any rights as an employee that it’s reflected back on you? 

You’ve mentioned not wanting to do any further harm, and you’ve spoken about how thorny the topic of consent is. It sounds like there are some really specific cases here where there were individuals who had complaints about particular behavior, so I imagine you’re also balancing those individual needs and protections against your goals in preserving and making this archive accessible. 

HL: Balancing the individual's needs versus the entirety of a collection is challenging. In this archive we are prioritizing how it demonstrates larger structural issues around art philanthropy. Our focus is on broader harmful impacts on our art community rather than individual “wrongdoings.” Our goal is to make this legible. The concentration of wealth and agency is at the root of disparity and disenfranchisement among people living today. 

SW: Yes, and I think it’s an interesting reflection on the law as well, because you can have these donor memorials where, for example, Eli Broad donates all of his personal writings to UCLA to then financially take care of and steward, and this is propaganda. We don’t talk about that as a harm, but then when an independent archive that’s looking into institutional critique takes on a donation from a very rare set of circumstances that allows us to see behind the scenes, that’s when the law jumps on us and becomes very sticky.

Hailey Loman is a multi-disciplinary artist working in installation and performance. She is the Co-Founder and Director of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), an artist-run archive and artist book library in which contemporary creative processes are recorded and preserved. She founded The Oral History Center, a cooperative that examines the ethics that operate in leadership roles. Interviews, recordings, transcriptions, and ephemera are collected during the process, assembled and made accessible as an oral history collection.

Shevaun Wright is a lawyer and artist engaged in the growing field of legal aesthetics. Her practice is interdisciplinary and research based, utilizing the contractual medium and the notion of the ‘social contract,’ as well as re-contextualized dialogues as a tool for engaging in institutional legal and artistic critique. Informed by her Aboriginal heritage, she aims to extrapolate feminist and post-colonial critiques of the law and art as a means to access and reveal similarities in their discursive practices. She practiced as a commercial lawyer in Australia for six and a half years and just passed the California bar. She has undertaken numerous residencies, including the Whitney Independent Study Program (Studio) and most recently was an artist fellow of the Banff International Curatorial Institute. She has master's degrees in art and law, including a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA’s Interdisciplinary Studio program.