ARTchivist's Notebook: Keep on caring
“Fear is just the false belief that there’s nothing you can do.”
— Katie Pruitt
This line from the song “Expectations” was a recent, unexpected gift from the Spotify algorithm and has been circling in my head for weeks. It reminds me that no matter how scary the world becomes — and we are at some kind of zenith right now in my lifetime — there is always something we can do.
At the risk of sounding naive, what we can do is care. The reckless dismantling of our government, our freedom of speech, our social support systems is the opposite of that. It is cruelty. When USAID funding abruptly stopped to the camp he manages for refugees from the conflict in Myanmar, Saw Tha Ker said, “Whoever made this decision has no compassion at all.” We may not be able to stop these huge catastrophes, but offering care is a way of fighting back.
I’ve been moved in the past few weeks by all the people who keep reaching out to help those who lost their homes in the LA wildfires; who stand beside me in the streets at protests and rallies, and colleagues who keep doing DEI and reparative work, even when they can’t safely talk about it. As Roxane Gay and Jennifer Finney Boylan pointed out at a recent NYPL event, the election was only won by the slimmest of margins. There are more of us than there are of them. So please don’t give up.
Some offerings on care:
Monuments to Motherhood by Molly Gochman. I loved this podcast much more than I expected to. Gochman, an artist, initially asks what a monument to mothers would look like and ends up taking a fascinating and moving journey through what it means to mother, to care, to nurture, and to honor all of the people — not just the cisgender, white women — who serve as “mothers.”
Valarie Kaur’s TED Talk: 3 lessons of revolutionary love in a time of rage. A friend sent this to me on a day when I really needed it. It’s from 2017 but is perhaps even more resonant now. It also starts with motherhood, which Kaur frames, not just as an act of care, but of bravery. Perhaps we can never vanquish fear, but we can be brave enough to care, even for those who have no compassion, and also for ourselves.
Season 2 of Mo on Netflix. I don’t want to spoil it, but this show proved braver than I expected, addressing the oppression of the Palestinian people head on and with a big heart. Mo’s mother has the best line: “"The world will always try to tear us down. And when they do, we smile. Because we know who we are."
And because this is still a newsletter:
Art Recovery LA has issued a Preservation Needs Survey for those who need help recovering artworks or personal items damaged by the fires.
OCLC’s Works in Progress Webinar: Listening to community-centered archives about sharing collections online. It’s more important than ever to figure out how to support marginalized communities to preserve and share their stories online. Join me and colleagues from UC Irvine’s CCAP TEACH project and the California Digital Library on Tuesday, Feb. 11 as we discuss our research into community-centered archives, their access to forms of online sharing, and the ups and downs of a grant-funded research project.
Come work with me: Part-time, Remote Digital Archivist at Curationist. Join me in creating and refining metadata through a social justice lens for open access cultural heritage works. You can also propose new metadata enrichment projects according to your own interests and experience.
Emerging Music Critics of Color: The 3rd annual Irene Yamamoto Arts Writers Fellowship is now accepting applications for two, unrestricted awards of $5,000 each. If you are a person of color who writes critically about music and has less than 2 years of publication experience, please consider applying. Deadline is March 17.