Archives of American Art Blog

“Yes, they represent something that is me.”: Rupert Garcia on Dr. King and M. Duchamp

William Christopher meeting Martin Luther King Jr., 1964 Sept. 14 / Mary Herrick, photographer. William Christopher papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Marcel Duchamp playing chess in his studio, 1952 / Kay Bell Reynal, photographer.[Photographs of artists taken by Kay Bell Reynal], Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

I don’t often link Martin Luther King, Jr. and Marcel Duchamp. Yet, in September 1995, Chicano artist Rupert Garcia did just this when he sat for an interview with Paul J. Karlstrom. Garcia highlighted the similarities between these iconoclasts, both of whom died in 1968.

Karlstrom began the interview,

Karlstrom: I wanted to just point to one thing in this chronology to get us started. It jumped out to me in my reading. And that was, under the little paragraph “1966 to ‘69,” towards the end of that entry it says “assassination the same year”—and that’s ‘68—“of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the death of Marcel Duchamp strike a deep chord with the artist.” And for some reason I find this promising, shall we say, in terms of your interview, and could you expand on that a little?

Rupert Garcia: Yes. You know, I have always—not always—for many, many years I’ve been very interested in Dada and Surrealism and for sure in Marcel Duchamp and the ways in which he upset the perceived notions of what art is supposed to be, what it’s supposed to look like, and the procedure of making something called art. I found that very, very fascinating, very intriguing, and intellectually stimulating because of the challenge it proposed—to me specifically. And then the death of Martin Luther King, his assassination in the same year in which Duchamp died, resonated for me in terms of the challenges that King represented—the social–economic–racial dimension of protest, which, of course, Duchamp was also protesting—more of a cultural protest having with it moments of political ideology. So the event of these two men dying in the same year, for me, rang, as the chronology says, it resonates deeply for me because it kind of combines an aspect of who I think I am—the aesthetic, cultural, artistic dimension with the twist of having a critical bent built into it, not taking things for granted in terms of art and culture, represented by Duchamp, and then Martin Luther King representing that part of me who has always been conscious of the dimensions of racism and class in our society. Even as a kid in high school I knew about that. And even as a kid growing up, the dimensions of being an artist and then being socially conscious were always there. And so when these two men died they kind of represented to me this moment of, yes, this is really . . . these two men represent something that is a part of me, that I can actually point to these two folks and say, “Yes, they represent something that is me.” And the ramifications, of course, is in terms of my work, in terms of my thoughts about my work, is, I think, more complex, but they did, nevertheless, symbolize something very great.

To me, it was so interesting when I found out that they both died in ‘68. I mean, I couldn’t believe that they both died in ‘68. Let alone died, but that they both died, and I saw these two symbols that I embrace. On the one hand, this is so sad, but just so wonderful.

 On April 4^th, the 45^th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the centennial of the 1913 Armory Show, I am grateful to Rupert Garcia for pointing out and pairing these perhaps unlikely men, two symbols that I too embrace.

Kelly Quinn is the Terra Foundation Project Manager for Online Scholarly and Educational Initiatives at the Archives of American Art.

Arman + Yves Klein = BFF

Oral history reel box identifying the 22 April 1968 interview with Arman.

For the last year, I have been volunteering for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.  Since my mother tongue is French, I was entrusted to transcribe and translate interviews conducted with French artists in New York in the 1960s.  

My first task was to identify who the interviewed artists were in order to correct an old labeling error.  This lead me to do a great deal of research into the people, the places and the vocabulary of the period.  In the course of this research I deciphered which recordings belongs to the artists Bernar Venet or to Arman, and enjoyed learning about their art and their times through their own words.  The interview with Arman, in particular, lead me on an hour-long journey through wartime and post-WWII southern France, and through the defining artistic movements of the second half of the 50s and 60s.  

Fast forward to just last week, when I visited the Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers exhibit at the Hirshhorn.  I knew from listening to Arman that Yves Klein was his childhood friend, his travel buddy and his judo partner.  As I walked through the Yves Klein exhibit, I was delighted to see in pictures the faces of the people Arman had talked about.  I saw pieces of art, and read texts that referred to experience he had described in his interview.  And at the very end of the exhibit stood the sculpture of a man, tinted in Klein's characteristic deep blue—it was Arman, life-size, naked, greeting all the visitors with a knowing grin.  As I looked at his statue, I felt very thankful to him.  It took me a few months to transcribe and translate his interview, but he taught me so much in the process.  I was able to experience the Yves Klein exhibit with a new comprehension of his times and his art.

Read the full oral history interview with Arman conducted 22 April 1968, by Sevim Fesci, and view images of Yves Klein and his work on the Archives of American Art's website.

See Klein's Relief Portrait of Arman (1962) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden through September 12, 2010.

Guest blogger Gaston Lacombe is a Smithsonian Behind-the-Scenes volunteer for the Archives of American Art and a photographer based in Washington, D.C.

Digitization Diary: Speaking of American Art

Oral histories are a cornerstone of the the collections at the Archives of American Art. Our Oral History Program, which began in 1958, now includes over 2,000 interviews, 79 of which were conducted last year alone! Late in 2009, the Archives received a Save America’s Treasures matching grant to help us continue the preservation and digitization of our entire oral history collection. We are very excited about this major undertaking, in which over 1,000 interviews will be digitized.

Yellow copies of removal notices stick up out of the folders in the box. This is an alert to staff that the originals are no longer located here.

The oral history collection is at risk from deterioration, damage, and format obsolescence. The media on which most interviews were conducted are reaching the end of their lifespans. We are seeing degradation of the reel-to-reel audio tapes, some of which have vinegar syndrome or mold. Even some of the MiniDiscs we recorded a few years ago are unable to be played.

Digitization is key to preserving sound media, and the Archives has used the recommendations from Sound Directions at the University of Indiana and Harvard University for sound file quality specifications, and the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative for metadata specifications.

The Lawrence Kupferman interview reel is prepared for shipment. The reel and the white copy of the removal notice are placed into an archival folder.

The back of the Kupferman interview reel box. This information will be captured through scanning upon its return to the Archives after digitization.

This is a great jumping off point for me to show the process for how I prepare a typical oral history tape for digitization. We are using an outside vendor, Safe Sound Archive in Philadelphia, PA, for the digitization of our materials.

My first step is to complete a removal notice for the original material. This notice tells someone that the item they are looking for has been removed from the storage box, the reason why, and lets them know where they can now find it. Two copies of the removal notice are made: a yellow copy replaces the interview tape(s) in the storage box; a white copy stays with the original item when it is sent to the vendor, is returned to us, and is sent to offsite storage.

Step two is to place the reel(s) and removal notices into an archival folder for the remainder of its journey. The folder is labeled with the name of the interviewee(s), the date(s) of the interview, and the number of original pieces found in in the folder.

It is fairly common for the reel boxes to have important information written on them, as seen with the Kupferman interview pictured here. When the reel is returned to us, the box will be scanned, preserving this information for whoever may need it.

The third step is to pack the materials carefully in boxes to ship for digitization.

In addition to the tapes, the vendor receives a spreadsheet that lists the interviews included in the shipment, along with lots of metadata (data about data) for the sound engineers. But this process, and more information about the captured metadata and returned sound files, I will have to save for another post!

Jennifer Snyder works with oral history interviews at the Archives American Art. When she is not sending interviews out for digitization, she is writing about extraordinary examples of facial hair for this blog. All photos in this post by Jennifer Snyder, 2010.

Giuseppe Panza di Biumo

I just read Christopher Knight’s 78-page interview with Giuseppe Panza, who died April 24th, and it was well worth the trouble.  Knight, who did the interview for the Archives of American Art in 1985, got the collector to really talk about art and much else beside, though not about shopping or parties or gallery openings.  Most strikingly, Panza talked about why he collected, and he expressed himself with a modest seriousness that set off his ideas well.  These were comprehensive—emotional, aesthetic, philosophical, technical—and leave a strong, and sympathetic, impression of authenticity and ardor.

Knight wrote his own appreciation in the Los Angeles Times blog, and a transcript of the original interview is here: Oral history interview with Giuseppe Panza, 1985 Apr. 2-1985 Apr. 4

Darcy Tell is editor of the Archives of American Art Journal.

A Young Artist's View of Tanforan

Tanforan, circa 1942-1944. Kay Sekimachi Stocksdale, artist. Bob Stocksdale and Kay Sekimachi papers, 1937-2004. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The fiber artist Kay Sekimachi was 16 years old when she painted this watercolor of Tanforan Assembly Center, a horse racetrack at the base of San Bruno Mountain, California, where some 7,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were detained in 1942 and housed in barracks and horse stalls (in one of which the famous racehorse Seabiscuit was once stabled).

Arts and crafts made by Japanese Americans in U.S. internment camps are currently on view in The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942-1946 at the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery.

In a 2001 oral history interview with Kay Sekimachi for the Archives of American art, Sekimachi talks about art instruction at Tanforan.

Jenifer Dismukes is managing editor of the Archives of American Art Journal.

New Old Oral History Interviews

Esther McCoy, ca. 1944. From the Esther McCoy papers, 1896-1989. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Recently I reviewed a list of interview transcripts added to the Archives’ website over the past several months, and was glad to see that we are making progress toward our goal of getting all of our Oral History Program transcripts online.

The mix of interviews includes a cross section of artists, art historians, critics, curators, and administrators going back to 1962, fairly typical of the interviews conducted since the Program began in 1958.

Highlights include a long and detailed 1987 Interview with Esther McCoy.  McCoy is best remembered for her pioneering work as an architectural historian, critic, and proponent of Southern California modern architecture of the early to mid-twentieth century.

To read transcripts of any of the 737 interviews currently online, visit the Oral History Interviews section of our website.