Wealth of Information
The Heard Museum’s Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives holds records for nearly 26,000 Native artists.
Within the Heard Museum, set apart from the exhibition halls, lies a hidden gem. The world’s largest collection of Native cookbooks, 1,300 sound recordings, 300,000 photographs, nearly 26,000 biographical files on artists and much more make up the Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives. The research facility is one of the most comprehensive of its kind, and though the Heard Museum’s exhibitions are subject to an admission fee, the library and archive is free to the public.
“We’re very proud of that,” says Mario Nick Klimiades, director of the library and archives. “The library has always been free to anyone who wants to use it. There are no barriers.”
The library and archives have been a part of the museum since its beginning in 1929, and the collection of Maie Bartlett Heard provides its foundation.
Today, Klimiades and librarian Betty Murphy serve as jacks-of-all-trades, managing interns and volunteers, writing grants, taking image requests, assisting the curatorial team with exhibitions, and, of course, cataloguing new materials, which include the vast, ever-expanding assemblage of files in their Native American Artists Resource Collection.
These files are a cornerstone of the library, and beyond just the Heard, the information within them serves a key role in building a cohesive narrative of Native American art history. The endeavor began nearly 40 years ago, when then-librarian Mary Graham and Carol Ruppé, a volunteer, received a grant to begin collecting biographical information.
“They went out and visited artists in their homes and studios, having them fill out questionnaires,” explains Murphy. “That was the beginning of it.”
Including both historic and contemporary artists, at its most basic, a file includes an artist’s name, their tribal affiliation and the medium in which they work. Business cards, photographs, résumés, exhibition catalogs, correspondences and interviews make appearances within the files—anything that accounts for an artist’s achievements. The documentation can become so robust that a mere file folder cannot contain it. Murphy says, “Someone who has had a long, documented career can have five or six cases of information, exhibits they’ve been in, awards they’ve won, fairs they’ve been in.”
Every single artist that has participated in the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market has a file to their name, along with every artist with work in the museum’s vast permanent collection. In the 1980s and ’90s, the Heard’s curatorial department maintained their own files, and the decision was made to merge them, a process that is still ongoing.
But the artist files aren’t just limited to people who have an association with the museum. Jeanne Snodrass King, former director of the Philbrook Museum and registrar of the Gilcrease Museum,
wrote some of the first documentation on the careers of Native painters, and when she became aware of the Heard library’s biographical efforts in the 1990s, made the decision to donate her personal paper and libraries. After her death in 2002, the material was disbursed throughout individual artist files. “We’re talking photos and correspondences, handwritten notes and clippings,” Klimiades says. “When researchers are going through the files, they are just delighted to see those sorts of legacy materials.”
One of the most important sources for the files are the artists themselves, or, when the artist is no longer living, descendants who are able to provide otherwise unknowable insights. “Family members will come in and look at their relative’s files, which can be very emotional, and it tends to be a big point of pride,” Klimiades says. “They are the best bridge for us, in terms of the collection.”
The information is vetted as carefully as possible. Accolades are not taken from an artist’s self-made résumé, for that type of material lacks specificity. The awards, shows and publications all need to be corroborated by firsthand sources. Sometimes, with deceased artists, vital statistics like birthdates can be difficult to pin down. In those cases, information from family members is taken in good faith.
Murphy and Klimiades take their role as stewards of this information seriously and do their best to foster an atmosphere of trust and cooperation with the artists represented. They have a booth at the museum’s Indian Fair & Market every year, where they make a case for the value of their work, as some can be skeptical.
“They might not know what it is,” Murphy says, “or they might think we’re keeping a CIA file on them. That’s not it!”
In fact, when looking at their files, Klimiades says,
“artists are often surprised with regards to what we’ve captured. Often, there will be items from very early in their career, before they were well known.”
Sometimes, input from artists changes how information is reflected in the archives. Weaver Melissa Cody recently visited to look at her own file. Murphy says that they had her tribal affiliation as Diné, “But she said she wanted to be listed as Navajo. We want to respect artists’ heritage, and identify them the way they’d prefer to be portrayed.”
For those who would like to access the wealth of knowledge within the archives, walking into the Phoenix-based institution is not the only way. The library also maintains a comprehensive online database. It has grown from an object management system put in place nearly 30 years ago—initially a simple, internal tool documenting the items within the museum collection—but it wasn’t until three years ago that the expansive artist files became available on the internet.
With 40 years of records, the online database presents a behemoth challenge. “We could hire 10 people full-time to work for 10 years, and we’d maybe get all the materials entered,” Klimiades says. “We just keep picking away at it, and it’s amazing how much we’ve been able to do.”
For hot topics, they make a special effort to ensure materials are readily available online. “A Sonwai jewelry exhibition recently went up at the museum, and before it started we made sure that everything in the folder was up on the database,” Murphy says.
Even though every piece of newsprint that may be filed away in the library hasn’t yet been photocopied and posted to the online archive, each internetbased file acts as a kind of index to the physical version. Someone browsing the internet archive for information on a specific artist can see that an artist statement or article is contained within the
Heard’s archives and call up Klimiades or Murphy to get more information.
The digital version has also allowed for an expansion that would have been hard to conceive of with a solely tangible catalog. It now contains links, to Youtube interviews, blogs and sound files. “Sometimes, things can go dead—websites aren’t always maintained— but we make sure to carefully date when the URL was retrieved and encourage people to go to the Wayback Machine to see the original site,” Klimiades says.
Though still in its early stages, the online archives have opened up a wider world of accessibility for users. Instead of sifting through thousands of physical documents, a researcher can search by medium—say, “encaustic”—and right at their fingertips, every single artist in the archives who has worked in encaustic is listed.
Both the online files and the physical library and archives exist, fundamentally, to further the Heard Museum’s mission of “Advancing American Indian Art,” and to paint a more comprehensive picture of Native art history. “We couldn’t exist without the cooperation of Indigenous people,” Klimiades says. “That’s why we call it the Native American Artist Resource Collection. It’s a collaboration with the community.”