Manifestations Which Compress as Coal into Diamonds:
On Barbara Rosenthal’s Archives
Words by Patricia Reguyal
In 2021, Queens College of the City University of New York acquired the archival collection of Barbara Rosenthal, an artist in her early seventies living in the Westbeth Artists Housing in downtown New York.
With an MFA from Queens College and a career as a teacher and a working artist from 1970 until the present; artworks encompassing and traversing photography, video, performance, text, collage, and digital media; and pieces in the permanent collections of the MOMA and the Whitney and the Tate Gallery, Rosenthal has been referred to as an “old master of new media.” It’s an enormous collection, comprising journals, books and book drafts, love letters, sketch books, calendars, drawings and prints, and a wardrobe and doll collection. Revelatory of the creative process, the collection holds enormous value for current and future generations of artists and researchers.
The artist’s wardrobe collection. Photo permission from eMediaLoft.org.
As an archives assistant at the Queens College Special Collections and Archives, I was tasked with assisting Rosenthal with preparing her collection for transfer to Queens College. Twice a week for three weeks in July 2021, I made the trip from Queens to Rosenthal’s apartment in Manhattan. My primary project was making digital scans of Rosenthal’s journals which she would not part with until she had their digital surrogates. Most of these journals were already scanned in previous years, by a variety of art students and interns, but many remained unscanned. There are, after all, 87 volumes of these journals, dating from 1960, when the artist was 11 years old, with the most recent being the previous year, 2020. (The artist was in the midst of her 2021 journal at the time I was there.)
The journals were kept in a large silver trunk against one wall of the main space of her apartment, a space that was a gallery, a studio, an office, and a living space. The space also functioned as an archive, with drawers and boxes filled with processed and arranged materials, meticulous recordings of art projects and exhibits and family events, with a printed-out finding aid that included descriptions and photographs. I would walk through her front door, pass a tiny kitchen to the left, then a bathroom, wall shelvings of books, and a warren of improvised tables and desks and drawers and boxes. There was an aquarium with a live turtle and a large plastic lobster, framed artworks on the walls, and two large windows overlooking the Hudson River and Hoboken, New Jersey, the whole space aerated by gusty winds from the river, bracing and beneficial in the age of Covid.
Silver trunk of journals and a journal entry. Photo permission from eMediaLoft.org.
How do artists create? Where do life and art (and, for this particular artist, archiving) begin and end and intersect? One of the thick inserts in one of the numerous journals I digitized that summer was several pages of the artist’s hourly, sometimes minute-by-minute, accounting of activities, from food preparation to washing dishes to reading to children--I felt a kind of awe but also some vertigo at the multiple details that one day of one person’s one life can consist of. In one binder she opened randomly, plastic cases held scraps of colored string, bits of paper, some glitter, and she mentioned that they were fragments left behind from artworks created long ago. One morning she came out with an excited happy smile, modeling a piece of cloth draped around her neck. Explaining that it’s a scarf (or a shrug!), part of her new textile-based project, she had cut it out of her partner’s discarded pair of shorts.
Photographs in the bathroom. Photo permission from eMediaLoft.org.
Rosenthal defines archives as “the manifestations, in physical and media form, of the moment-to-moment reality of what an artist/writer/composer/creator encounters, which compress as coal and then to the diamonds of actual real art.” She records, documents, scavenges, collects, creates. She archives. She is an artist but she is also an archivist, and she is also a person living her life. She lives her life in New York City and rescues chairs, tables, neon signages from the streets and uses them as furniture, as elements of her art, as objects that can lead to rumination or creation. (Or not.) She excavates the minutiae of her life, records them through words or photographs or sketches, and uses them for her art. (Or not.) She has all these journals; she has digital scans of every page and every insert of her journals. And yet, in a paradoxical and completely understandable turn, she entitles her most recent book, a novel she has obsessively drafted and redrafted and revised, Wish for Amnesia.
How do we process and arrange and describe a collection that manages to show all of this--the multiplicities, the paradoxes, the constant churn of living and recording and archiving, of creation and documentation? It will be an intense multi-faceted effort for sure. Students, teachers, artists, and researchers will work on and use this collection in a variety of ways. In summer 2022, an advanced archival practicum was offered through the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, providing students with a hands-on opportunity to work with Rosenthal’s collection.
Annie Tummino, the departmental head, says that Rosenthal’s collection reveals how art is created. I would like to add that Rosenthal’s collection shows how sometimes--a few times in our lives as archivists if we’re lucky--the archives itself becomes art.
Patricia Reguyal was an archives assistant at the Special Collections and Archives at Queens College CUNY when she worked on Barbara Rosenthal’s collection. She is currently working in paper conservation at Frick Madison and the NYC Department of Records.
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