Archiving in the Clouds:
Processing the Lenore Tawney Papers

Words by Lauren McDaniel

After earning my MLIS in 2005, with only temporary jobs seemingly available to me, I thought the problem was me and that I needed to do more graduate school to stand out as a subject specialist. I was wrong, of course: there were few permanent archivist jobs out there even then. But I do not regret spending three years in New York City at Bard Graduate Center pursuing my interest in visual and material culture history (even if it did increase my student debt). Among the many life-changing aspects of my privileged time in that richly interdisciplinary program was a paid summer internship that turned into two wonderful years of one of the most affecting archives experiences I have had.

I was one of three lucky students who got the rare opportunity to process and catalog an artist’s archive in situ. Fiber artist Lenore Tawney had passed away in 2007 at the age of 100, and her estate executors had left Lenore’s Chelsea studio loft and its contents in place until their proper disposition to various cultural organizations could be determined. They, along with their fellow board members of the Tawney Foundation, had decided to hire graduate interns to organize Lenore’s archives prior to going to a repository. Not many artists’ archives (even most white artists’) have the privilege of getting so much care and attention in advance, and when they are, archivists are not usually involved in the process. 

Archivists also too seldom get the chance to work with materials in their “original order,” despite the concept’s primacy in archival theory. What is more, essential contextual information about how a collection was stored and used often gets lost in transit (so to speak) by the time it is accessioned into an archive, if it was ever documented at all. But despite these challenges (maybe because of them), even in handling the materials out of context, archivists can still be strongly affected by the power and presence of the creators and subjects. With radical empathy towards them, we feel a responsibility to reconstruct as much context as we can with our archival arrangement and description, but it is always a bittersweet, incomplete process. The best that archivists can hope to describe is a collection’s existing or received order, and do so as explicitly and transparently as possible. 

While I worked on Lenore’s papers–her personal and professional correspondence; press and publicity material; and journals, notes, and other personal items–another student organized her photographic material, and another cataloged her artwork. We each had our own zones in the expansive, almost floating loft. Lenore’s papers were scattered throughout the loft (for example, just when I thought I found all of her correspondence, we would uncover another cache in some other drawer), but after gathering batches of material, I would sort them on small antique tables and chairs in the center of the space, while our intern supervisor, Kathleen Nugent Mangan (estate executor and independent curator, now Executive Director of the Tawney Foundation) did administrative work at a table in the kitchen area. As we worked, she would tell us invaluable stories about Lenore, whom she came to know and work for in the late 1980s. Almost any name that I came across in Lenore’s papers, Kathleen could identify and often had a story to share about them and Lenore. 

Lenore Tawney in her studio at 115 Spring Street, New York, 1966. Photo: Clayton J. Price.

In addition to our living Lenore database, Kathleen, always at hand, we also had weekly meetings with Lenore’s other estate executor, Paul J. Smith (Director Emeritus of the American Craft Museum–now the Museum of Arts and Design, who recently passed away at age 88). At every meeting, Paul–who was an American craft legend in his own right–would tell his own stories about Lenore and her milieu. He also never came empty-handed, excited to share stories about the latest New York arts-related events or places to which he had gone and photographs he had taken. His bottomless enthusiasm for the city and its creativity was infectious. Kathleen and Paul were incredible ‘primary resources’ for our collection research and I made sure to keep my ears and eyes wide open at all times, weaving an ever-growing web of connections in my mind. 

Over time, working in Lenore’s loft, barefoot at those tiny tables, reading her miniscule, flawless handwriting or carefully rehousing her elaborately-collaged mail art, while also hearing Kathleen talk about her, I could sense her there with us. I could almost see her five-foot figure sitting in her worn leather armchair in the far corner of the loft, almost certainly reading (according to Kathleen) a dense text on religion or philosophy. Classical WQXR was often on the radio as we worked, the music soaring through the loft’s high ceilings, and once when a particularly dramatic piece came on, Kathleen told us that Lenore would complain of it being too ‘bombastic’ and they would change the station. Thereafter, whenever a similar piece came on, Kathleen or I would quote Lenore and change the station. This became one of many seemingly insignificant inside jokes/tributes we all came to share about Lenore, which (maybe more than anything else) helped me to understand the person whose papers I was processing. I believe it also, in a way, helped Kathleen through her process of grieving for Lenore.

Archivists often develop a deep connection to record creators or subjects, despite rarely getting to meet them. I certainly did with Lenore and her work, and it is still there over ten years later. But archivists, especially in large institutions, do not usually get a chance to develop relationships with those closest to the creators or subjects. Not only did working with Kathleen greatly add value to the quality of my processing Lenore’s papers, but to my life as well. We became lifelong friends in the process and are still in touch. I reached out to let her know I was writing this piece–she generously provided the images from the Foundation reproduced here and updated me on how much Lenore’s archives continue to be used in research, exhibitions, and other work of the Foundation. They will eventually go to the Archives of American Art, but she still relies on them regularly. 

I will never forget that special experience when it felt like I was archiving in the clouds.

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