Redescribing African American Collections at the Archives of American Art

Words by Rayna Andrews

My archival practice is founded on providing access to collections. As the archivist for the Henry Luce Foundation African American Collecting Initiative, thinking about how researchers find and interact with AAA’s archival resources online is an ongoing and evolving process central to my work. My goal is to make these collections approachable and navigable—for both seasoned researchers and those new to archival research.

I arrived at AAA in October 2017 and received a list of collections that were in the African American guide. The Archives uses the term “guides” as internal subject categories which collectors designate in our Collections Information System upon accessioning a collection. This guide contains collection information from a robust list of artists, art historians, and galleries run by people of the African diaspora. However, collections with material related to African American art and artists are also included. This might include a collection of a white art historian who studied Black artists, galleries that showed Black artists, and collections of interviews with Black artists, even when conducted by white interviewers. Oral history interviews and loan collections of Black artists that exist in our collections as microfilm are also included. 

I created a spreadsheet to track these different types of collections, and to help determine processing priorities, beginning with backlog collections. While exploring other Archives resources, I identified additional collections related to African American artists that were not included on the guide list. Doing this preliminary work alerted me to some of the “quirks” of AAA’s past descriptive practices -- the Archives favored a “colorblind” approach that did not explicitly state a creator’s racial or ethnic heritage. Depending on the level of description and what other subject headings were applied at the time of cataloging, this resulted in partial-to-complete erasure of creators’ racial identity and heritage. This harms the creators in the erasure of their identities as well as hindering potential researchers looking for material specifically related to African American artists. With this information now in place I could formulate a plan to move forward.

Inspired by a session at SAA’s 2018 annual meeting, "Toward Culturally Competent Archival (Re)Description of Marginalized Histories,"(1) I developed a plan for a description audit of our collections related to artists from the African diaspora. For the first phase of this project I created a pared-down version of my original spreadsheet for an intern to use to capture processing status, overview description level(2), if oral histories had transcriptions, and subject terms applied. This first phase was completed over the summer, but I did not have adequate time to delve into the data and fully develop an operational phase until March 2020.

The current work-from-home landscape necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed me to dedicate significantly more time to this project and move into the second phase quickly. Building on my intern’s previous work, I compiled lists of subject terms commonly applied to our collections and researched description practices at peer institutions, as well as redescription recommendations(3). From here I was able to make decisions about which subject terms should be replaced and which should be retained. 

Local practice at the Archives requires each collection record to have at least one occupation term. The current cataloging standard requires archivists to apply a baseline occupation with a geographic subdivision, ideally down to the city (i.e. Painters -- Illinois -- Chicago). In the past, terms such as “African American painters” or “African American artists” were applied as occupation terms. These terms were not applied consistently and were not linked to one another. For instance, a search on the term “African American artists” would not have brought up collections where only the “African American painters” term was used. In order to end the siloing of African American collections away from others, all collections are now cataloged with general occupation terms.  Collections related to African American art and artists  have “African American artists” added as an additional topical term(4). At this time we are not using more specific topical terms such as “African American painters,” but adding these specific faceted terms is a possible future goal.

When I began the final stages of this project during our transition to work from home, AAA was in the process of migrating all of our collection records to ArchivesSpace. As part of the pre-migration work I updated subject terms for collections with finding aids in ArchivesSpace, noting and then completing post-migration changes. There are also a number of loan collections for which the Archives holds only microfilm of the materials; in many cases these collections have minimal descriptive and biographical information. I updated subject terms for these collections, and revised or wrote descriptions with clarifying statements about their microfilm-only status, entering these updates once the migration was complete. 

This project is a test case for how we might systematically approach redescription of collections, as we have a responsibility to both the creators of the collections and researchers who use them to describe these materials well. One way we are committing to this ongoing work is through a newly-formed subject terms working group to address controlled vocabularies used at the Archives. A colleague on this working group is already building off this work to perform a similar audit and redescription project with our Latinx collections. We hope to complete similar redescription on our Asian American and LGBTQ collections as well.

While some aspects of redescription have been more straightforward to address (e.g. standardization of local practices), one aspect of culturally conscious description that continues to be a challenge is balancing a creator’s self-identification with standardized language and the needs of researchers.

Maren Hassinger papers, 1955-2018. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

I will note that within this project I primarily focused on subject terms and enhancing or creating description for under-described collections. For the most part the Archives has not done the important work of interrogating our application of the label “African American” for collections. Though creators may identify differently, our application of this subject term, and specifically naming a person’s race or heritage in the collection’s description as a standardization of practice allows for increased access and combats erasure at the same time. For example, in cases where the artist/creator has stated how they identify, we have included it in the biographical note and/or collection description, but when this information is unknown, we default to African American. We agreed to take this approach to combat erasure of the creators’ identities, but I recognize that collapsing specific identities under the more general label of “African American” can lead to another kind of erasure. Additionally, though I have used the term “people of the African diaspora” here and recognize how it would be beneficial to introduce it into description, the phrase is not widely used at the Archives at this time. I also acknowledge that highlighting creators’ ethnicities in the context of archival description enforces the white supremacist idea of white as default; however, this highlighting also increases access(5). Without it, we are right back where we started with unfindable collections.

Part of my work, and a goal shared by the working group, is to develop guidelines and documentation that will empower archivists to think critically about description and apply subject terms that will accurately describe collections and the people associated with them without causing harm. This will most likely take the form of a list which will be a combination of authorized and local terms from which archivists can pull relevant terms. The Archives uses LCSH and Getty AAT, but we have created our own terms when necessary. There is a precedent for this within the Smithsonian—the National Museum of the American Indian created their own controlled vocabulary, as authorized terms are problematic and do not meet their needs. Another helpful tool has been the redesign of the Archives’ accession form to include a free-text field in which collectors can add information about how creators identify along race, gender, and artistic identities. This gives creators more agency in how they are ultimately described in collection records.

This project is only the beginning. My colleagues in the working group and I will continue redescription projects within the other guide categories before (hopefully) expanding to a full-scale redescription project. And, of course, redescription is not a one-and-done thing—it is an ongoing process. My hope is that as we continue, we develop better processes for description that affirms creator identities while increasing access and meeting research needs.

Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Footnotes

1. Tang, Annie, Dorothy Berry, Rachel Winston, and Kelly Bolding. “Toward Culturally Competent Archival (Re)Description of Marginalized Histories.” Papers presented at the Society of American Archivists Annual Conference, Washington, DC, August 2018. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=library_presentations

2. The summary on the “collection overview” landing page for each collection was the focus for this description audit. In the case of processed collections with finding aids, the finding aid abstract appears on the collection overview page. For unprocessed and microfilm collections, and for oral histories, this is the only description available. I created a rubric for our intern to assess the collection summaries: 4 = Full description/abstract following guidelines laid out in the Archives processing manual. Finding aid abstracts at the Archives typically begin with a sentence that provides the creator’s occupation, their life dates, the collection dates, and the collection It should then give a brief contents description. A full description will also indicate that the creator or subject is from the African diaspora. 3= Meets the criteria of full description/abstract, but does not identify the creator as African American, OR is missing critical information. 2= Microfilm or unprocessed (no finding aid) collection with basic level of description, may indicate that they are African American. 1 = Microfilm or unprocessed (no finding aid) collection with little-to-no description.

3. The Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia Anti-Racist Description Resources document was a valuable resource both as a document, and for its annotated and extensive bibliographies [Antracoli, Alexis A., Annalise Berdini, Kelly Bolding, Faith Charlton, Amanda Ferrara, Valencia Johnson, and Katy Rawdon. “Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia: Anti-Racist Description Resources.”  October 2020. https://archivesforblacklives.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/ardr_202010.pdf]

4. We devised a similar approach for collections of women artists. Instead of “Women sculptors,” “Women painters,” “African American women artists,” etc. archivists catalog and add general occupation terms to these collections as well as “Women artists” and, if necessary, “African American artists.”

5. In an answer to a question related to this topic after her Conscious Editing: Enhancing Diversity and Discovery webinar for the Sunshine State Digital Network on October 7, 2020, Dorothy Berry noted that labeling white men does not typically help with researcher discovery in the same way that labeling African Americans or other marginalized groups does.