Art Spaces Archives Project
Announces a Panel Discussion
“Buried Treasure: Art Spaces Archives Project”
to be held at the
College Art Association’s 93rd Annual Convention
In Atlanta, on February 17, 2005

The Art Spaces Archives Project [AS-AP] is pleased to announce a panel 
discussion entitled “Buried Treasure: Art Spaces Archives Project,” to 
be held at the College Art Association’s 93rd Annual Convention on 
February 17, 2005, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM at the Atlanta Marriott 
Marquis, 265 Peachtree Center Avenue, Atlanta, Georgia.

The panel will feature Julie Ault, Marella Consolini, Yasmin Ramirez, 
Irving Sandler, and Marvin Taylor and will address the topic of 
archiving and recognizing the alternative, or avant-garde, movement in 
America from the 1950s to the present from the viewpoint of creators, 
presenters, historians, and archives of the vital histories of emerging 
Contemporary Art in all of its manifestations. Moderating the panel 
will be David Platzker, the Project Director of AS-AP, an emerging 
non-profit initiative founded in 2003 to assess and survey the state of 
the archives of art spaces throughout the United States.

Irving Sandler will speak on artist venues, beginning in the 1950s with 
the Arts Club, which was founded in 1949 by the pioneering Abstract 
Expressionists and whose panels he arranged from 1956 to 1962 at the 
infamous Cedar Street Tavern, and the artists cooperatives on Tenth 
Street, including Tanager Gallery, which Sandler managed from 1956 to 
1959 along with the influential magazine “It Is.” Additionally, 
Sandler’s presentation will provide a history of the alternative spaces 
founded in New York City in the 1970s—such as Artists Space, which he 
co-founded in 1972 and on whose board he still serves. His primary 
focus will be on the historic and contemporary importance of these 
spaces in the careers of artists and the evolution of recent American 
art.

Marella Consolini of The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture 
will discuss the practical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding a 
seven-year initiative to digitize and transcribe Skowhegan’s archive of 
over 400 lectures given by its faculty from 1952 to the present. This 
process, included evaluating the material and its condition; 
determining the best method of preservation for the six hundred 
original reel-to-reel tapes; researching what form the transfer of the 
tapes would take; fundraising for the project; contacting the artists 
or their estates for permission to make these lectures available for 
public access; working with lawyers on the documents going to the 
artists as well as to the institutions housing the archive; and 
maintaining the on-going development of the archive and its 
preservation.

Julie Ault will outline the conditions, growth, and decline of the 
alternative arts network of the 1970s and 1980s in New York City, which 
is the subject matter of the book she edited, “Alternative Art New York 
1965–1985” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and The Drawing 
Center, 2002). Ault will also discuss some of the problems she 
encountered while researching the field of alternative spaces and group 
structures, which raise issues in and around the politics of archiving 
and historicizing.

Yasmin Ramirez will present “Mi Casa Es Tu Casa: Identifying the Spaces 
and Places of Latino Art Archives,” which will give an overview of 
recent initiatives to catalog and archive Latino art spaces and artists 
in New York and California. She will discuss strategies that the Center 
for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, The Smithsonian, The Museum 
of Modern Art in New York, and the Center for Chicano Studies at the 
University of California at Los Angeles are implementing to archive 
Latino alternative spaces, resources, and materials for the study of 
artists and artist spaces that are currently available.

Based on ten years experience documenting the Downtown New York Arts 
scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Marvin J. Taylor will give an overview of 
the issues alternative spaces and academic institutions need to 
consider when discussing the acquisition of archives. Among the topics 
he will discuss, are intellectual property rights, copyrights, 
retention policies, issues of access, exhibition loans, and other legal 
and financial matters.

About AS-AP
Art Spaces Archives Project [AS-AP] is a non-profit initiative founded 
by a consortium of alternative art organizations, including Bomb 
Magazine, College Art Association, Franklin Furnace Archive, New York 
State Council on the Arts [NYSCA], New York State Artist Workspace 
Consortium, and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, with a 
mandate to help preserve, present, and protect the archival heritage of 
living and defunct for- and not-for-profit spaces of the “alternative” 
or “avant-garde” movement of the 1950s to the present throughout the 
United States.

With funding provided by NYSCA, The National Endowment for the Arts, 
and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, AS-AP has a mandate 
to begin the documenting process by rooting out both a national index 
of the avant-garde—assessing the needs for archiving and 
preservation—and helping to establish universal standards for archiving 
the avant-garde.

AS-AP’s belief is beyond simply identifying the whereabouts of centers 
of activity. There is an underlying need to assess, catalogue, and 
preserve important formative materials for study by historians with a 
critical distance from the creation of the material itself.

AS-AP’s website—www.as-ap.org—is a virtual resource and finding aid for 
locating the places and spaces of alternative and avant-garde activity. 
A central location for information pertaining to reservoirs of 
archives, tools to assist in archiving, and other aids for scholars 
interested in the alternative or avant-garde movement in the United 
States as well as for the locations of activity themselves.

About the Panelists
Julie Ault is an artist who independently and collaboratively organizes 
exhibitions and multiform projects. In 1979, Ault co-founded Group 
Material, the New York City-based collaborative which until 1996 
produced installations and public projects exploring the 
interrelationships between politics and aesthetics. She is also the 
editor of “Alternative Art New York 1965–1985” (Minneapolis: University 
of Minnesota Press and The Drawing Center, 2002).

Marella Consolini is the Executive Director of Development & 
Administration of The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Prior 
to Skowhegan she was the Director and Vice President of Knoedler 
Gallery in New York City, the Senior Vice President of eArtGroup.com, 
the Associate Director at Laura Carpenter Fine Art in Santa Fe, New 
Mexico, and the Administrator for Petersburg Press, a publisher of 
Contemporary Master Graphics in London and New York. Ms. Consolini has 
a B.A. from Bard College and completed additional course work at the 
Rhode Island School of Design.

Yasmin Ramirez is a PhD graduate of the City University of New York and 
the recipient of the 2002 SSRC Dissertation Research Fellowship on the 
Arts and Sciences and the 2003-2004 Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. Ms. 
Ramirez was a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio from 1999-2001 
and the curator of Taller Boricua from 1996-1998. She has written for 
publications such as “Art in America” and “Art Nexus.” Her exhibition 
catalog essays include: “Parallel Lives, Striking Differences: Notes on 
Chicano and Puerto Rican Graphic Arts of the 1970s,” “Timeline of El 
Museo del Barrio,” and “La Vida: The life and writings of Miguel Piñero 
in the art of Martin Wong.” Her dissertation was on “Nuyorican 
Vanguards: Political Actions / Poetic Visions, A History of Puerto 
Rican artists in New York, 1964-1984.”

Irving Sandler received a B.A. from Temple University, a M.A. from 
University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD from New York University. In 
1956, Sandler became the director of the Tanager Gallery, Program 
Chairman for the Artists' Club, and a reviewer for “Art News” and “Art 
International” magazines and from 1960 to 1965 at the “New York Post.” 
He is the author of books that synthesized his collection of interviews 
and reviews into broad surveys of contemporary art, including “The 
Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism” 
(1970), “The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the 
Fifties” (1978), “American Art of the 1960s” (1988), “Art of the 
Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s” (1996), and “A 
Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memory” (2003). In addition, he has written 
monographs on individual artists such as Alex Katz and Mark Di Suvero. 
Sandler was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 1965, and a National 
Endowment of Arts Fellow in 1977. He is also Professor Emeritus of Art 
History at the State University of New York at Purchase, where he has 
taught since 1972.

Marvin J. Taylor is the Director of the Fales Library and Special 
Collections at New York University. In 1994 Taylor founded the Downtown 
Collection at the Fales Library. The Downtown Collection, which 
contains over 12,000 printed books and 7,500 linear feet of manuscripts 
and archives, documents the post-1975 outsider art scene that developed 
in New York City’s SoHo and the Lower East Side neighborhoods. It is 
the only collection of its kind in a major research university and 
contains works by such artists and writers as Kathy Acker, Lynne 
Tillman, David Wojnarowicz, Dennis Cooper, Keith Haring, and many 
others. Taylor holds a BA with honors in Comparative Literature from 
Indiana University, where he also received a MLS. He also
holds an AA Masters in English from New York University. He is 
currently editing a book titled “The Downtown Book: The New York Scene 
1974-1984,” which will be published by Princeton University Press later 
this year.

David Platzker is the Project Director of Art Spaces Archives Project. 
 From 1998 through 2004 he was the Executive Director of the non-profit 
institution Printed Matter, Inc. He is also the co-author, and 
co-curator—with Elizabeth Wyckoff—of “Hard Pressed: 600 Years of Prints 
and Process” (New York: International Print Center New York & Hudson 
Hills Press, 2000); and—with Richard H. Axsom—the book and exhibition 
entitled “Printed Stuff: Prints, Posters, and Ephemera by Claes 
Oldenburg: A Catalogue Raisonné 1958-1996” (Madison, Wisconsin: Madison 
Art Center & New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1997), which was awarded the 
George Wittenborn Award for Best Art Publication of 1997 by the Art 
Libraries Society of North America. Platzker is also the president 
specificobject.com, an on-line arts bookstore.

For additional information regarding the panel or AS-AP please contact 
David Platzker at [log in to unmask] or at (212) 226-9076.

For additional information regarding the College Art Association’s 2005 
Annual Conference please visit CAA’s website: 
www.collegeart.org/conference/2005

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