The San Francisco Art Institute opened its doors to the public in 1871 with a tenure that spans over two centuries. The work of any kind of long-term preservation is never promised, and record-keeping often involves a range of choreographies between volunteers, grant writing, stewards, and collection migrations. When the age-old establishment faced abrupt foreclosure in 2022, like many cultural institutions, the preservation of its archival collections were not guaranteed. My internship with the SFAI Legacy Foundation provided invaluable training in how to best serve an ad hoc community-driven organization and its archivists in transition. It has been incredibly inspiring to witness and train under Becky Alexander and Jeff Gunderson as stewards of an archive that they infrastructurally (re)built themselves without the knowledge or confidence of what would come next.
In the spirit of Becky and Jeff’s curiosity and diligence, this internship tasked me with exploring do it yourself (DIY) workflows that prioritized questions of access––how can this material live out in the world, and what kinds of infrastructure, support, relationship building and equipment does this archive need to help spread awareness of what was here and what work needs to be done to preserve its collections?
With a renowned Film and Video department peopled by filmmakers such as George Kuchar, Kathy Acker, Mark Boswell, Angela Davis, Ernie Gehr, and Sharon Grace (among many others), the audiovisual collections of student works and faculty lectures is pretty incredible. A large part of my internship entailed collection (re) assessment of what was salvaged from the California Art Institute’s Library and its VHS collection, with many films living in a kind of format and provenance no-man's-land. It was incredibly rewarding to research this experimental film and video collection and to reflect on the sheer volume of independent works whose records of production and distribution are largely lost to time or have traveled new paths of many new acquisitions and management. I look forward to observing how the evolution of an onsite ¾” U-Matic digitization lab will serve this collection, what their potential collaborative future with BAVC Media will look like, and I am proud to have helped assemble this station/networks to built upon the work of previous volunteers who cared about preserving the history of a crazy art school’s inner world.
leah worked in the archive at SFAI
