Join artists Carmen Lizardo and Ginger Sedlarova, and Stewart-Swift Research Center Archivist Eva Garcelon-Hart, and Taylor Rossini, formerly Sheldon Collections Associate, for a conversation about absence in the archive and the role artists can play in making archives more representative of the whole community. The panel will also include Jillian Hartke, archivist at the Albuquerque Museum's Photography Archive in New Mexico who will speak about that Museum's approach to absence, acquisition, representation. This program is supported by Walter Cerf Community Fund and Stewart-Swift Research Center donors.
No archive or collection is perfect and not all people of a community are well-represented in an archive. How do we make sense of these absences and how can we make archives more representative of the whole community? On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stewart-Swift Research Center, the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History invited an international network of collage artists to engage with historic material in the archive and to create a folio of collage prints that reflect on the idea of community in a 21st century world. A number of artists focused on what communities are absent in the archive. By projecting and photographing images of women of African American descent onto the physical storage room of the archive, Carmen Lizardo's collage draws our attention to the absence of Black people in the collection. Seeing "minimal Jewish material in the archive," Ginger Sedlarova hopes to draw attention to what material is there to "inspire the Jewish residents of Middlebury to donate archival materials." Using tools of projection, subtraction, and speculation, contemporary artists can fill gaps in the material of local history keepers in a way that invites underrepresented community members to engage and, possibly, contribute to the archive.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Eva Garcelon-Hart has overseen the Sheldon Museum’s Stewart-Swift Research Center archival collections since 2011 where she has particular interest in bringing the Center’s overlooked stories and visual collections to public attention. While there Eva curated several exhibits including: “Charity & Sylvia: A Weybridge Couple,” “Conjuring the Dead: Spirit Art in the Age of Radical Reform,” and “Elephant in the Archives: Silences, Erasure & Relevance.” During 2021/22 she and her colleagues organized a popular virtual talk series, the “Elephant in the Room: Exploring the Future of Museums.” Eva earned her MA in History of Art and MLIS from the University of California at Berkeley.
Carmen Lizardo's process begins by creating temporary collages--projecting or copying the original pictures and "floating" them on different fabric, wallpaper patterns, water, sand, or paint. She then photographs the temporary collages, printing them on transparent paper. The printed photograph is further transformed by using paint, gold leaf, and iridescent pigments on the backside of the print. These works become one-of-a-kind physical records of their previous ephemeral existence. She holds a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Digital Art from Pratt Institute. Originally from the Dominican Republic, Lizardo served fifteen years as a tenured faculty for SUNY New Paltz’s Fine and Performing Arts program and now is solely dedicated to her studio practice. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York. See Lizardo’s webiste here.
Ginger Sedlarova an emerging collage artist living and working in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Sometimes her work is a short story, sometimes it’s a novel. But it’s always surreal, full of observations about the absurdity of daily life or conversations with the cities she’s lived in, visited and loved. Her practice grew from her love of making digital photo collages in a former career as a graphic artist on newspapers in Canada and magazines in Central Europe--only now she does this by hand, without an editor looking over her shoulder while she works. See Ginger’s website here.
Jillian Hartke is the digital archivist at the Albuquerque Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She studied History at the University of Missouri and completed a Master’s of Library Science at the University of Missouri. She has worked as a librarian in academic, public, and non-profit institutions for over a decade, and has managed the Photo Archives of the Albuquerque Museum since 2018. She is an advocate for access to information and public transparency of collections held in libraries, archives, and museums. She believes in communicating the strengths and weaknesses of a collection to help build stronger community participation in the collecting process and more enthusiastic support for preserving collections for future generations.
Taylor Rossini is a Middlebury College graduate currently in the Winterthur graduate program, University of Delaware. Until June 2022, Taylor worked as Collections Associate and Grant Writer. at the Sheldon Museum.