Nationally recognized educator, administrator, funder, and curator Linda Earle was the Center’s 2021 Visiting Scholar. In this role, she organized a series of conversations with Center constituents, staff, and thinking partners to consider how Black archives can serve as a framework for a multivalent exploration of Black cultural production. 

Earle is currently a professor of practice in fine arts management and the associate graduate director for the arts management MA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Throughout her career, she has been an advocate for inclusion, freedom of expression, and development of new platforms for cultural practice, participation, and discourse.  

Explore her work with the Center below.

Linda Earle in Conversation

Earle is currently a professor of practice in fine arts management and the associate graduate director for the arts management MA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Throughout her career, she has been an advocate for inclusion, freedom of expression, and development of new platforms for cultural practice, participation, and discourse.  

In the following interview, Earle shares her perspective on the value and potential of archives in the arts and her ambitions for her term as Visiting Scholar. 

What inspired your thinking around and interest in Black archives as the focal point of this residency?

I was asked to think about issues around Black cultural productivity with the Center, and I wanted to find a way into the subject that would facilitate a sort of rhizomatic exploration across the expanse and diversity of that landscape. Looking at what is recognized, documented, preserved and “metabolized” by institutions provides an opportunity to discuss fundamental elements like the formation of cultural narratives, individual and collective legacies, and the dynamics of racism and resistance.  

Though the archive is not my area of practice, it brings together many subjects of my research, advocacy work, and professional interests. I encourage my students to look at institutional histories and how their origins are manifested in organizational structures, assumptions, and practices in order to think about how new models of thought and practices that center equity can be created, as previously suppressed or undervalued bodies of knowledge and histories emerge.  
 
In the last couple of years, racial reckoning, decolonization, the public battles around even the idea of truth, and the intellectual movement to understand Black power in cultural terms have combined to generate a new energy around archival engagement. During this period, I was also thinking about the passing of so many Black culture-bearers, among them were Camille Billops and James Hatch. Throughout their 50-year union, they collected and cared for letters, objects, media, books, and ephemera representing the scope of Black cultural production. Camille was a sculptor and filmmaker, James a professor specializing in Black theater history and a playwright. They were marvelously generous artists. Their loft in SoHo was a repository and a salon where they interviewed, transcribed, and published in their journal, Artist and Influence, conversations with people working in every aspect of the cultural ecosystem: artists, curators, writers, designers, stage managers, producers, philanthropists, collectors, and even people like me.  

Camille always advised the artists and cultural workers she encountered—no matter their age, celebrity, or visibility—to “take care of your stuff.” They collected voraciously and with a consciousness that this was more than a personal project. They knew it would have resonances they wouldn’t live to see—ideas, books, art. They made arrangements for the collection to be placed with Emory University, where it now resides. They’ve influenced my thinking that this kind of work represents not only a legacy of care but also of imagination. 

How do you see your time as Visiting Scholar at the Center unfolding?

So far, this has been a wonderfully perambulatory learning experience. If my expertise were historiography, I’d have started this time by proposing to pursue a thesis—a specific issue or problem within the subject to research and address. Instead, I’ve had the luxury of exploring with a “north star” but no fixed map. So, I started out following my curiosity—and knowing just enough to know what I didn’t know. The space to read and to interact with folks outside of my usual professional constellation on this basis is proving to be tremendously informative. I’m having a wonderful time asking elementary questions, guilt-free. Each research conversation I’ve had has given me a more nuanced idea of the ethics, mechanics, and potential of the archive as a resource.  

For example, I originally envisioned a single public conversation about “archival infrastructure.” Because of what I’ve learned since then, I’m planning separate talks about archival practices and methods and another about how technology has impacted those practices and methods and created new areas of public-facing potential. The public conversations for the Center community this spring are organized around three broad sub-themes: archives as a generative source for new creative work and critique; as an emergent force in expanding and complicating traditional “canonical” framing of artistic production in academia and institutions; and as I mentioned, the infrastructural aspect, for lack of a better term at the moment. The encounters will include people who are rethinking practices and creating new repositories, archivists who are surfacing materials in established collections and databases for the first time, and artists, curators, and presenters.  

Do you have any specific goals for this engagement? What do you hope are some outcomes of this time with the Center?

I think that many people who participate in the arts in various capacities outside of academia know how important archives and records are but have a very general idea of how they work and what the scope of their potential may be. I hope one of the primary outcomes is to make that more legible and provoke thinking about public impact. There are many different levels of engagement with the subject and different levels of conversation to be had. They can’t, of course, all be contained during my time at the Center. During the summer I’m planning to work on some culminative projects. I’m not sure what that will look like yet—a distillation of the conversations, a compilation of resources perhaps. Actually, I expect to wind up with something fairly open-ended that makes connections and sets a stage for ongoing conversations and mutual education and capacity-building that will be beneficial to the Center’s intellectual community and thought partners.  

What particular opportunities do archives present to Black contemporary artists working today? Can you offer an example or two of specific artists and/or projects using archives in an innovative or particularly compelling way? 

There are so many avenues of possibility. A sense of futurity, which is the space in which artists create, is impossible without a sense of the past. So, archives have much to offer as visual and textual resources, research opportunities in subject, materials, and conditions. I’m interested in this interplay of the past and the future. The 2015 exhibition We Wanted A Revolution drew on archival materials from Black feminist collectives and individuals between 1965 and 1985. Artists from that era included in the show and fellow travelers like me got to look at that work with a dimension of perspective and an awareness that you simply can’t have when you’re engaged in battle. I think that younger generation of artists has gathered courage, references, and knowledge from that same material that I see playing out in some of their work.  

Another powerful example is Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus. It is an exquisite product of engagement with archives and essential reading. In a prologue, she describes the work as “a poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries or exhibition descriptions of Western Art objects in which a Black female figure is present dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.” Coste uses the structural and linguistic devices of poetry to compose these elements into a piece that is at once great art, institutional critique, and reflection on histories of conquest, imperialism, and slave trade. Her mastery and the power of her art to trouble the waters of museum archive practice is devasting and inspiring.  

During a recent Mellon Foundation webinar on libraries and archives, a panelist described archives as the material path by which we make our way through history. How do you see the relationship between archives and history?    

I don’t know that I can put it more eloquently and succinctly than that. Archives are the material substance of history. Clearly, historical narratives are controlled by power and the need for those in power to support that condition. The persistent and systemic armature of anti-Black racism marginalizes or discredits information that challenges it. So, furnishing that path through history requires a kind of ethically restorative work. As we sat among those endless shelves in her loft long ago, Camille Billops stretched out her arms and said, “See this? No one can say ever we didn’t exist, that all of this never happened.”