San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
McNay, Carver asking for stories, items about pandemic, center’s history
things as they’re happening, and for me personally, I’m a little biased, but I love art and the arts, and I just feel like we have people that are incredibly, incredibly important.”
So far, she has gotten a lot of documentary photographs, including images of first responders and volunteers, as well as written accounts of personal experiences. She is not limiting the archive to artists.
“It’s for anybody who works in the art industry, whether they are people who work in an art museum, whether they are sponsors or donors for a gallery; it could be students, professionals, anybody who is part of the community in some way,” she said.
Straus said she would consider artwork specifically related to the pandemic, but she wanted to make clear that submissions will not become part of the McNay’s art collection.
Among the contributors to the archive is Lyle Williams, curator of collections at the McNay. He has written up a few experiences, including detailing the virtual cocktail hours he now holds every Friday night with some longtime donors.
“We take care of a little bit of business at the beginning, and then we talk about how everyone is coping,” Williams said. “It’s just interesting how we sort of adapt to not only take care of ourselves but to nurture these relationships that are personal and professional.”
As he sees it, such stories need to be preserved.
“I think it’s really important that we document how we are all dealing with things right now, not only in terms of how it’s effecting us professionally, but as a record of how are surviving or in some cases, thriving despite the shutdown,” he said. “I feel that there are probably a lot of stories that will be lost just because people aren’t taking the time — they’re so busy living their quarantine life that they’re not reflecting on what’s going to be important in the future.
“That’s the takeaway — what are you going to learn from all of this?’
Straus said she eventually would like to create an online exhibit sharing items in the archive. She might be able to have something up next month, she added.
“People can peruse it, and maybe get to learn a little bit more about other people’s experiences,” she said. “I think it’s good to see where different people are coming from, but in addition to that, what I would like to do is, in the same way that we look back at the 1918 influenza pandemic, and we have all this information on what was happening back then and we can see how arts and culture was influenced at the time, I think that we need to make sure we’re focusing on things right now, and how people look back at this period of time.
“I’m hoping this can be something that, in a small way, contributes to that.”
The pandemic archive is a little further along than the Carver’s project, which is a bit of a salvage operation. When Cassandra Parker-Nowicki stepped into the executive director role last summer, one of her goals was to create a formal archive documenting the Carver’s history.
The center — known now for both its community programs and for performances by local, national and international touring artists — dates back to 1905, when it opened as the Colored Community House.
“We really recognize the fact that, being an institution of color, there wasn’t a lot of emphasis, in the earliest days and certainly during segregation, on archiving, not just here internally but in the larger context,” Parker-Nowicki said.
The project is trickier than it might otherwise have been because a lot of material has been lost. The historic venue closed in 2000 for a renovation that was slated to take a year but ended up taking four — largely because of funding issues. A lot of items were removed from the building and placed in what was intended to be temporary storage.
“The long and short of it is that a lot of that, almost of all of it, was destroyed. So, again, not thinking it was going to be long-term, it wasn’t stored anywhere that was climatized properly,” Parker-Nowicki said. “We went to retrieve some of the stuff. It was unsalvageable. We don’t even know what was lost. We don’t know if there were photos or documents.”
So even though some materials in boxes are stashed here and there on the Carver campus, the archive is starting almost from scratch.
David Lonergan, who is a few weeks into a summer internship at the Carver, is getting the project rolling. Among other things, he plans to interview patrons and other folks about their experiences at the Carver. And he’s also hoping to track down programs, ticket stubs and other ephemera.
“What I’d like to do is rebuild the archive through the voices of our patrons,” said Lonergan, a senior at Trinity University majoring in Spanish with minors in history and economics. “I think especially now, when the majority of the elderly community is kind of, for lack of a better word, cooped up inside, this would be a great opportunity for them to interact with someone safely outside of their house and relive some memories of the Carver.”
The project likely will take a long time. ParkerNowicki thinks working on it might be a regular part of future interns’ responsibilities. The ultimate goal is that it will be housed at a university or some other institution where it can be maintained.
“The hope is that, at the end, we’re able to have this really robust archive of our history, she said. “Of course, we’ll retain some things here locally, but we want to make sure that generations down the line can access it.”
One of the chief values of community archives is that they tell stories that might otherwise be lost, said Gohlke, the UTSA archivist.
“Community archives, when they’re able, can provide access to local histories that are probably not going to be found anywhere else,” she said.
Gohlke has firsthand experience with that. She interned at the Happy Foundation Archives, which artist and activist Gene Elder maintained at the Bonham Exchange nightclub to preserve the stories of the city’s LGBTQ community.
Elder died last spring, and Gohlke is part of a committee that is developing a plan to make sure the archive continues.
She is keeping tabs on the McNay and Carver projects, and is looking forward to checking them out when they’re complete.
“These things are really important and essential to preserving history,” she said.
Information on contributing to the COVID-19 archive at the McNay Art Museum can be obtained by emailing Leslie Straus at leslie.straus@mcnay art.org. To arrange an interview about the Carver Community Cultural Center, email David Lonergan at david.lonergan@thecarver.org.