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Jackman Scholars-in-Residence ~ The Art and Science of Museum Objects and Seeing Potential: Asking/Investigating/Exhibiting the Malcove Collection

This guide is intended for those enrolled in the 2019 iteration of the Jackman Institute for Humanities Scholars in Residence Program working with Dr. Alen Hadzovic and Dr. Erin Webster.

Finding Archival Sources (Primary Sources)

Archival sources are materials created by a person, family, or organization in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of their enduring value. The archival collections of artists, galleries, or arts organizations can tell us a lot about how the art world operates, at many different levels. Archival sources might reveal the motivations and inspirations that inspired the artist to create the work; it might reveal tensions over how the work was to be displayed; it might include unpublished criticism of the work from the artist's contemporaries and correspondents. 

Archival sources for an art criticism/history paper on a specific artwork may include:

  • A diary written by the artist while making the work
  • Draft sketches of the work
  • Technique tests and preliminary attempts not intended for exhibition
  • Correspondence written between the artist and the gallery where the work was first shown

Most large galleries, such as the AGO and the NGC, collect archival material much in the same way that they collect artwork. They preserve these collections to be used by art researchers - including students in art criticism and history programs. However, in order to use archival collections for your research, you need to understand how they are organized. The links on the left should help you understand archival collections a bit better.

Archival collections are accessed through databases, just like books in the library. Some institutions have internal databases that show just their collections. For example, the MoMA Archives provides researchers with a list of all of the collections that they have:

MoMA List of Archival Collections

Other archives, such as the AGO, contribute descriptions of their archival collections to databases that search across the collections of many institutions. One example is Archeion, the provincial repository for Ontario. For example, if you search for information about Arthur Lismer in Archeion, you will find that the both the AGO and Victoria University at UofT hold collections related to Lismer:

Lismer in Archeion

Note that artists can decide to donate their archives wherever they want, including universities, national or provincial archives, or galleries, among others. And information about an artist may appear in other collections, as we can see in the Arthur Lismer example above. On the left are links to four large gallery archives that should be helpful starting points for finding primary resources.