Collage featuring: Swallow the Fish, Gabrielle Civil, 2017; Lauren Halsey, published by the Hammer Museum, 2020; No New Theories, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, 2019; Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music by Robert Farris Thompson; Mingus Ah Um album cover designed by S. Neil Fujita, 1959; Simone Fujita holding Voguing and the Ballroom Scene of New York 1989-92, Photographs by Chantal Regnault, 2011

A Conversation with

*~*SIMONE FUJITA*~* 

Bibliographer, Getty Research Institute

Interviewed by Jennie Freeburg 

Simone Fujita is Bibliographer, African American Art at the Getty Research Institute. Her work is part of the Getty's African American Art History Initiative.

I first had the pleasure of getting to know Simone while at the Art Librarian Society of North America (ARLIS) conference in Salt Lake City, where she presented on a zine she put together with other members of the ARLIS Diversity Forum, and later we spent a snowy evening at a disco DJ night (even though the disco DJ turned out to be the following evening). I have since come to know Simone as a generous and insightful colleague in art + LIS, an amazing mac & cheese chef, forwarder of hilarious instagram content, and my #1 choice of karaoke duet partner on "Drunk in Love." 

AF: So what does it mean to be Bibliographer, African American Art at the Getty Research Institute?

SF: As the bibliographer, I am expanding the library’s collections around African American Art in order to support advanced research on Black artists in the US and eventually in the diaspora as well. That includes things like books, zines, periodicals and other types of unusual print or ephemeral publications. It also includes electronic resources, which we’ve gotten several more in the year I’ve been there. We have at least five online resources that support research on African American-specific topics. And there’s this other dimension of content that I thought was important, which is capturing more recent press about Black artists, since the last few years have been an explosion of coverage and interest in Black artists. It’s just such a notable rise in exhibitions in both emerging and more established artists really getting their due that it feels like an important time to capture current articles. So I’m developing a digital bibliography to capture all the more recent content that wouldn’t be in databases. 

AF: How did you get this gig? What were your interests and background in art and in libraries that led up to it? 

SF: I’m coming at this work from the perspective of art history being one of many parts of history in which stories of POC are really underrepresented, and these stories have been buried. When I was in college, I was interested in learning about all the art history that I wasn’t learning--because I studied art history, but I was over learning about the history of Western art from an old European lens. I ended up taking more ethnic studies classes to balance out what I wasn’t getting in art history. I found it exciting to learn about other modern and contemporary artists of color and get to do some oral histories with Asian American artists who were working in New York in the 70s. Their stories were so completely erased from the curriculum we were learning in school--except for in the Asian Pacific American Studies Department. That ignited a fire to increase awareness of these buried histories even when I was in college, so I was just trying to figure out how to do that. 

It took me a long time to figure it out. I didn’t even know that librarianship or archives were careers you could go into and I didn’t know anyone who was a librarian or an archivist. I knew historians who did work related to archives, but nobody had introduced me to the profession until I was working at the Japanese American National Museum. I worked there in a bunch of different capacities, and I really loved working there because it was not a white lens, it was not a white gaze, it was definitely by and for Asian Americans, Japanese Americans. That was really refreshing to have the experience of working outside of a PWI [predominantly white institution] and see what that’s like. When I was there, the Head of Collections, who is an archivist, was kind of like, “I think you wanna join our department. We’re the fun department.” And I told her I was really curious about her department! So I asked what I had to do to work in there, and when she said “oh, you have to get your master’s in library science,” I was like, what? What is this world, I never even heard of that! That’s what got me on the path of unlocking the career that I didn’t know existed. 

Screenshot from the music video "APESHIT" by The Carters, 2018

AF: What are some of the institutional directives for your role? What is the Getty asking you to do, and are there additional implicit directives either from supervisors or other colleagues? How do you interpret, augment, potentially subvert or even resist some of these? Basically, how do you feel about what you’re supposed to do and what do you do with it?

SF: In this job more than probably any other job I’ve had, I’ve had the most amount of control, thanks to having a really supportive supervisor--the Chief Librarian of the GRI, Kathleen Salomon, who trusts me and gives me room and autonomy to direct my own work in a lot of ways. She’s open to my feedback and my own ideas about how the job should be, because it’s a new role. My basic directive is that as an art history research facility, we want to provide the best resources to advance new scholarship on African American Art History, and in order to do that we are acquiring additional library materials and additional special collections materials to support that goal. We have a curator who’s doing the archives acquisitions and then I’m doing the library acquisitions. It’s building a foundation to make sure that all the materials coming in through Special Collections will be supported through a well rounded variety of research materials to support an expansive view of Black Art History in the US.

AF: I was just revisiting the Iris blog entry on you from last year. The titles you highlight for it strikes me, as you say, that they encompass an expansive view of art history. In reading about some of your selections it seems that of course part of the issue is what are we even calling "art" and the effect that has on who gets to be called an artist. How much of that is anything you have to fight for; is it understood to be your role? 

SF: I feel like the curator is working within more specific parameters than I am, which makes my role more expansive. There wasn’t a clear idea of what the limits of collection development would be for my role. So these are things that [the Chief Librarian] and I have talked about a lot. I’ll ask her “is this in my purview?” and the attitude is generally “well, I can’t see why it wouldn’t be!” I really want to collect album art, like records. Records by jazz musicians and also that feature art by Black graphic designers. The GRI doesn’t usually collect records though, unless maybe things come in with a collection and they figure it out from there, but it’s not something the library usually goes out and buys. I think sheet music also would be really interesting. Especially much older sheet music, with racialized depictions and stuff like that. 

I think that it’s exciting for me--well, I should explain--I worked for seven years at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, and I did collection development there and I was also the zine librarian, so I really fought to include a lot of things that might not have been captured elsewhere in the collection. I really grew the collection on queer artists, and artists of color, and you know just kind of viewing collection development as a vehicle to get narratives of artists who were not being taught in the classroom into the library so that students could at least do that research and find people and get inspired by artists who look like them and who shared experiences. I mean honestly art students are not even always being taught to paint their own skin tones, they didn’t graduate knowing how to accurately “capture” a diverse world, so there were a lot of gaps. So I tried to fill that through collection development through zines and through exhibition catalogues and other things. I kind of see this as an extension of that. An expansive, intentionally intersectional approach to collection development that thoughtfully includes women artists and feminist art and queer art and artists that might not have exhibition catalogues but who have zines. At the Getty, historically, I think people haven’t focused as much on graphic design, fashion design, or different elements of design work. 

I feel good that I haven’t had anyone say anything like, “that’s not really what we want to cover,” especially in terms of Black art, because everything influences something else. An artist like Betye Saar has a variety of influences that include aspects of African diasporic spiritual practices, and Black women’s history in the US, and the occult, and just all these different influences that if you really want to study her you have to be able to have a base of literature that includes all these different aspects. Everything is so intertwined. Even though we’re not a music institution, it’s important to include books about the history of Black music in the United States because there’s so much cross pollination and influence between music and art. It’s undeniable and it’s definitely linked and important to include.

AF: How closely do you work with cataloguers or archivists who are describing these materials? 

SF: That’s something that will be evolving with time.I feel fortunate to have a good relationship with Sarah Wade, who will be processing the Betye Saar collection, and is a partner in doing antiracist work at the Getty. I feel good about opportunities for collaboration with other LIS colleagues at the Getty as we get more collections and as things start getting more processed. Right now we have so many things waiting. As far as processing library materials that are not traditional, I usually determine whether it’s Special Collections or General Collection. Sometimes it’s really hard! It’s a trickier decision to make than I thought it would be, because of course we want to make sure that things stay in good shape, especially if it’s one of a few or a limited run of something that could be considered and artist book, but at the same time you know that you’re limiting access, and it’s hard to balance that sometimes. I can’t help but think not just of the present use of the material but how it will be used 10, 15, 20+ years on. For example, I think I put No New Theories by Kameelah Janan Rasheed in Special Collections. It’s considered an artist book but it’s not delicate.

AF: In speaking about your work at ArtCenter, users of the material and of the library are forefront in your mind. Obviously, the users at the Getty are very different, and yet because it’s the Getty you’re given a lot more to work with in ways. I’m sure that’s somewhat of a pattern across institutions. What do you do with that? How does that affect what choices you’ve made in your career, in what you’re collecting?

SF: It’s definitely been a weird adjustment to go from a place where I knew so many of the library users, and my collection development was informed by conversations with them. I was even the advisor to different student groups, so I would hear stuff every day from students on a variety of topics--whether it’s recommendations for things I should be watching or what they’re reading and watching, or the types of things that are inspiring them--and those were such generative, fun conversations to have. I’m still trying to gauge what the user will get the most out of whenever I’m doing collection development. I envision when people come in and maybe they’re seeing the reading room on a tour, and they’re going to pull a few things from the Robert Farris Thompson Collection in the future, and maybe it’ll be about mambo and art or something like that, and I want to think what kinds of other visual materials do we want to have to support that, or what artists in those places can we highlight, so it’s a mixture of library materials, special collections, and ephemera. I’m always trying to think of a wide range of materials we can offer on different topics. 

AF: What you keep alluding to also is these permeable categories--what is art, but also what is special collections, what is archival, and what is secondary research.

SF: And the importance of doing instruction from multiple kinds of materials to have a well rounded view of a subject--to bring a topic to life in a really exciting way. That’s also something I developed a passion for when I was at ArtCenter, because I would take students around on tours during library orientation, and I would also do library instruction sessions with specific majors. So I would tailor the instruction sessions to whether it was, say, an entertainment designer who is interested in aliens and Star Wars, so what concept art do we have and what can I pull. I think with time I’ll be able to do more instruction and more outreach [at the Getty].