CAA2026

Excavating Race in the Archive

Abstract

This panel brings together archivists and artists in conversation to consider the operations of the archives and their utility in scholarly and creative practices. Indisputably, archives are raced, i.e., constructed to advance the ideologies of racialized difference, particularity, or exceptionalism–variably marshalled to assert power or resist it. We consider both state institutions—from the Library of Congress to the Bibliothèque Nationale—and corrective collecting projects organized by those whose histories were not privileged in grand narratives. How do the institutional collections present their authority as centers of knowledge that hold incalculable cultural value? Archivists who care for and preserve vital documents and materials–letters, photographs, ephemera–that inform written histories of artistic movements and artists’ lives will discuss redress of racist legacies. Artists will speak to their critical interventions that challenge dominant, discriminatory ways of seeing, classifying, and organizing data and things. The panelists’ presentations–considered together–offer a view of the archive as a repository of accumulated power, albeit one that leaks. That is, archives invariably tell on themselves, collecting as they do the evidence of great achievement in ways that illuminate the fragility of subjectivity and anxiety about impermanence.

Panelists

The historical construction of race in the 19th and early 20th centuries, along with post-structuralist, queer, and decolonial approaches to photography continue to inform my practice as an artist, educator and scholar. My research and work on the history of lynching Latinos in California has been widely cited. In this talk, I will discuss my ongoing Profiled series, which has led me to research and photograph plaster casts and sculptural depictions of the human form in over 40 museum and private collections. Most recently, this archival work has also resulted in a 25 ft. mobile on facial recognition technologies that is part of an exhibition at the Wende Museum in Culver City (Oct. – ’25 – Oct. ’26) and was part of the Getty’s PST Art and Science initiative.

This talk will focus on the archive as an essential part of my practice as I navigate the legacies of modernism, engage with decolonial and anti-colonial strategies, and embraces speculative imaginaries, from Muñoz’s “brown commons” to ideas around the queer imaginary, essential tools for critical engagement and self-care in the face of those who seek to restrict our freedom.

I will also share images from an exhibition on vernacular photography entitled, Queerish, that I curated in 2024 and rarely seen items from a survey exhibition of my work, curated by Dr. Amelia G. Jones, that will still be on view at the USC Fisher Museum (08/’25 -03/‘26) during the conference period.

  • Erica Ciallela, “Intended Silence? Understanding the Multiple Meanings of Silence in Black Women’s Archives”

What would your archive say about you? Do you get to decide? For Black women, archival legacy is often left to a footnote. They are buried by the history of enslavement or are forced to live within the shadow of the men in their lives. Finding Black women’s voices calls for a non-traditional approach to archival research. Silences are often imposed by power structures seeking to limit the voices of marginalized individuals. But sometimes those silences are intentional.

In some cases, the forgotten pieces were a means of survival. As archivists continue to uncover Black and Brown voices, they must leave room for the parts of the narrative that were meant to be hidden. In my work studying the archival gaps in the papers of Belle da Costa Greene and the women of the Canterbury Female Seminary, we can begin to see how some archival silences speak louder than what is written. For these women, as well as many others, race defined their life experiences. How we interpret their archives gives new perspectives on how women fought back against societal definitions and chose for themselves how they wanted to be remembered.

This presentation will provide an overview of ‘The Warp / The Weft / The Wake’ by Holly Graham – a new commissioned costume artwork and exhibition currently on year-long display at Manchester Art Gallery; and the outcome of a 15-month residency responding to the gallery’s textile and costume collections.

The commission forms part of ‘20/20’, a project initiated by UAL’s Decolonising Art Institute, aiming to invite decolonial critical discourse in institutionarl collections and to diversify artist representation within them.

The work draws on cultural theorist Christina Sharpe’s framing of ‘the wake’ as aftermath, to consider legacies of expansionism, colonialism and exploitative labour inherent to the material history of cotton. The artwork references a speech delivered by African-American abolitionist Sarah Parker-Remond in one of the building’s gallery spaces in 1859. In a manifestation of Sharpe’s “wake”, Parker-Remond’s assertion that “not one cent of the money ever reached the hands of the labourers” reverberates into the present – what does reparative justice looks like within cultural heritage institutions?

With this in mind, the work channels strategies of institutional critique; speaking back to histories of site with reference to The Athenaeum as speakers’ hall, The Royal Manchester Institution funded by city merchants and industrialists, and Platt Hall built by a textile merchant. Research involved study of un-accessioned pattern books on the peripheries of the gallery’s collection, cross-departmental conversations with curators, dialogue with local people through craft and oral history workshops, and collaboration with early-career researchers through Manchester initiative Global Threads (UCL, Science & Industry Museum).

  • Michelle Al-Ferzly, “Considering the Beinecke Library”

Yale University’s Beinecke Library holds over six thousand items related to the Middle East and North Africa, ranging from individual leaves and manuscripts to large archival collections. Often, these substantial holdings designate Yale as one of the largest repositories of ‘Islamic’ material in North America, if not the continent. Beyond geographic origin, which is not always available for many of these materials, the designation of ‘Islamic’ stems from the language used: most often Arabic, Persian, or Turkish.

This presentation will consider the practice of using nomenclature such as ‘Islamic’ as an overarching category for these materials, and its ramifications for understandings of racial and ethnic identities represented in these archives. It will show how using language as the determining factor for the ‘Islamic’ categorization sometimes obfuscates cultural representation and discussions of racial belonging and the challenges it poses for discoverability by an audience that extends beyond the library’s scholarly users.

Lastly, it will examine opportunities for reparative description that takes these concerns into account, and explore opportunities to highlight racial considerations and positionality not just through highlighting the identities of the author, collector, or dealer, but also by further contextualizing provenance information, historic collecting practices, and using language throughout archival description that are more recognizable to the communities represented.