Imagine a well-known artist decades ago — Diego Rivera, say, or Jackson Pollock — runs out of paint. He goes out and buys more paint, maybe a couple of brushes, and tosses the receipt into a drawer when he gets home.
From one perspective, that piece of paper is trash. But to a researcher today looking for more information about that artist, suddenly that piece of paper is a treasure, with information about the kind of paint the artist used, what shades, what types of brushes. Now there’s a deeper understanding of what’s behind the brushstrokes of the artist’s canvases.
And it’s at the Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution research center, that such treasures are kept — treasures that now include the papers of three more San Antonio artists: photographer Kathy Vargas, internationally known sculptor and installation artist Jesse Amado and painter and former proprietor of Gallista Gallery, a nationally recognized Latino art hub, Joe Lopez.
For artists, being collected is an honor — an affirmation of the value of the legacy they leave behind. But for researchers and the public, the archive adds a human element to the greats.
“The way to think about it is: There’s this distance that people often feel between themselves and art in a museum, and everything that we collect fills that distance — makes the artist much more human to people, which makes them much more approachable,” said Josh Franco, Latino collection specialist at the archives, who asked these artists to donate to the archive.
Founded in 1954, the archive collects and preserves the papers of significant artists, dealers, collectors and other members of the art world along with the records of museums, galleries, schools and associations. Items in the archives include correspondence, photographs, sketchbooks, diaries, receipts for purchases of materials and “a lot of unclassifiable ephemera that we end up collecting as well,” Franco said.
Some of the gems include Jackson Pollock’s passport, which lists under distinguishing features, “right index finger partly missing”; Picasso’s handwritten list of artist picks for the landmark Armory Show in 1913; letters from Frida Kahlo to her friend Emma Lou Packard and husband Diego Rivera sealed with lipstick kisses; and a letter from Marcel Duchamp to his sister Suzanne Duchamp which contains the first documented use of the term “readymade.”
With grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Archives of American Art has been able to digitize many of its most important and frequently used collections. The public can access for free more than 125 fully digitized collections, oral history interview transcripts and selected digital images online at aaa.si.edu.
San Antonio is a focal point of an ongoing national effort by the archives to boost its holdings of materials related to the work of Latino and Latin American artists. The initiative was created in the wake of “Willful Neglect,” a 1994 report by a 15-member task force appointed by the Smithsonian, that revealed the institution, which comprises 19 museums, nine research centers and a zoo, largely had ignored Latinos in its collections and exhibitions.
San Antonio long has been regarded as a mecca for Latino arts. And yet, of the 27 individuals from San Antonio represented in the archives before the recent acquisitions, the vast majority are non-Latino.
Scholar Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, a San Antonio native who spent much of his career in New York but returned to live here full time about seven years ago, remains an active contributor. And the papers of the late San Antonio artists Mel Casas and Porfirio Salinas also are included. Others — including Jesse Treviño, Rolando Briseño and Angel Rodriguez-Díaz — are represented in the archives’ collection of oral history interviews.
“I think if you look at the number of artists (in San Antonio) that produce at a high level and have been doing this for a long time — the quality of the work — it’s extraordinary,” said Eduardo Diaz, director of the Smithsonian Latino Center.
Among the major cities with large Latino populations, New York currently has the most individuals with papers in the archives’ Latino and Latin American collection with 31, followed by Miami with 15 and Los Angeles and San Francisco with six each.
“Certainly, Texas is hugely important as far as Latino art in America goes,” said Kate Haw, director of the archives. “We had done a better job of keeping up on the coasts — in New York and California. We had done a less good job of keeping up in the middle of the country.”
Franco, a West Texas native who lived here from 2006 to 2008 when he worked as a service-learning coordinator at Our Lady of the Lake University, was hired last year as Latino collection specialist, a new position. Franco’s time here helped inform which artists he approached first.
One of his priorities was connecting with Ybarra-Frausto. The scholar of Latin American and U.S. Latino arts and culture and former associate director of creativity and culture at the Rockefeller Foundation previously had donated research materials on Chicano art that date from 1965 to 2004.
“I call his collection an anchor collection for Latino arts here at the archives,” Franco said. “It’s around 40 linear feet, which is really huge.”
Ybarra-Frausto,76, has been collecting archival material related to different subjects since his days as a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle. He keeps neatly labeled files in bankers boxes stacked against a wall in the dining room of his apartment on the edge of Tobin Hill. More are stored in gray document cases in his office.
“A lot of Chicano studies centers wanted my archives, but I decided to give it to the archives of American Art because it’s a central repository for art that has to do with the United States,” Ybarra-Frausto said. “I could have separated out and said, ‘All of this California art should go to Stanford in California, and all the New Mexican art should go to the national center for Hispanic arts in Albuquerque,’ but I decided, no. Chicano art is a national art, and the center for that is the Smithsonian.”
The materials Ybarra-Frausto donated most recently include conference papers, published essays, artist files and a letter he wrote to the mayor of El Paso when “Los Lagartos,” a sculpture by artist Luis Jimenez, was going to be removed from its original location.
Amado and Vargas had a presence in the archives in the form of oral history interviews, “so it made sense to approach them for their papers, since their stories were already present here,” Franco said via email. Both artists also have artwork in the Smithsonian collection.
Vargas, an associate professor of art at the University of the Incarnate Word, sent 10 boxes of material to the archives.
“I told (Franco) ‘I have discovered several things about myself doing this,’” she said. “One of the things I discovered is that I’m a total pack rat.”
Vargas had kept correspondence from her friend Lucy Lippard, an internationally known writer and art critic, among her treasured belongings for years and donated it because she believed her letters to Lippard also would be in the archive.
She was right. Franco let her know via email that at the same time he was going through Lippard’s letters to her, a colleague in a different section of the archives was going through her letters to Lippard.
“One of the reasons I wanted my work to go to the Smithsonian is because our letters are continuing to talk to each other,” Vargas said.
When Franco visited Amado at his home, the artist showed him some of the things he had kept to get an idea of what he should donate.
“At one point, I ran across some old love letters and pictures and mementos of a relationship. I said, ‘Well, you don’t want to see those,’” Amado said. “He said, ‘No, no, no. I’m interested in that, too.’”
Among the items he decided to send were several volumes of journals, sketchbooks and press clippings from throughout his career.
“It’s funny — I think about my legacy, and for the longest time I thought I was the only one thinking about (it), but I guess not,” Amado said. “They’re interested, too.”
Lopez, a soft-spoken artist known for his paintings of roosters, thought he was being pranked when he was first contacted by Franco.
“When they sent me the email, I thought, ‘Somebody’s screwing with me,’ said Lopez, 71, who closed Gallista Gallery in June after operating the Southtown space for almost 20 years. “But then I read it over, and it was very professional. I said, ‘Wow! Hopefully it’s true.’ And it is true.”
He and his wife, Frances, spent about three weeks going through his belongings to select items for the archives. “I sent letters, little drawings that I did for larger drawings. I sent a bunch of (tearsheets). I never realized I had come out in the paper that often.”
Lopez also submitted documents pertaining to his five-year legal battle with the E. & J. Gallo Winery. The California-based company sued the artist in 1996 over his use of the word ‘gallo,’ Spanish for rooster. At the time, Lopez had a gallery called Puro Gallo on South Alamo Street. The suit was settled out of court.
The artist, who had a rough start as a “vato loco from El Barrio Escondido” — a homeboy from a small neighborhood near the Alamo Quarry — said he is “proud and humbled” to be part of the archives.
“Joe, aside from his own private practice, put so much time — such a lifetime of work — into Gallista Gallery, which itself was part of the careers of so many artists in San Antonio and the U.S., so that makes his collection especially valuable,” Franco said. “It tells the story not just of his practice but of a whole network of Latino artists, Chicano artists, in Texas.”
Recently, Mary Thomas, a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is working on a dissertation exploring the use of improvisation by Chicano and black artists in South Los Angeles, traveled to D.C. to use the archives.
“Frequently the most interesting details are found in the materials that you think ‘Why would anyone keep that?’” she said. “I found myself enthralled by a binder that was just filled with business cards from businesses in Los Angeles. Just this collection of business cards told a really compelling story about what the economic landscape of South L.A. was like in the late ’70s.”
Franco said he has a long list of San Antonio artists he hopes to collect, and he expects to return to San Antonio in the near future. That should be a signal to artists here to take care when they clean out their closets or tidy up their studios. What looks like trash might actually be reference material.