BOOKSHELVES Program | “Accessioning Access”

The panel discussion “Accessioning Access: Social Reflexivity within Archival Practice,” explored relationships between authority, organization, and user-ship within emerging archival practices. As the way information is organized informs how it is comprehended, what are the responsibilities of archivists and other history-makers in writing socially reflexive public narratives? How does organization determine user-ship, and how can archival systems be open to culturally-informed lexical shifts in their vocabularies? Who are we archiving for?

This conversation, moderated by BOOKSHELVES resident Ann Harezlak, brought together the varying perspectives of Jessica Gambling, Museum Archivist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Karly Wildenhaus, arts researcher and library worker, and Amanda Martin Katz, director of 3307 W Washington Blvd. Together they explored processes of systemic organization to reveal how hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion function. In our current cultural climate, it is necessary that we understand these processes in order to invent intersectional schemas that write truly reflective social histories.

PANELISTS

Jessica Gambling has been the Museum Archivist at LACMA since the position was established in 2010. She is responsible for all description, access, reference, and outreach activities for the institutional archives as well as records management at the museum. Previously, she worked as an archivist at the Huntington Library and the Los Angeles Public Library after earning her MLIS from UCLA in 2007.

Karly Wildenhaus is a Los Angeles–based arts researcher and recent graduate of the library and information studies program at UCLA. She arrives to librarianship by way of curating and art publishing, and she likes to think about what constitutes artistic knowledge and research, the relationship of place and visual culture, ways of working, social dimensions of technology, and the intersections between feminism and labor.

Amanda Martin Katz is an artist, writer, and facilitator whose practice explores relating through textual engagement. Recent works have been published and performed in Foundations Magazine, the journal 7×7 (in collaboration with Renée Petropoulos), the Torrance Art Museum, and the Institute of Jamais Vu (London). She engages collaborative inquiry and embodied research methodologies in long-term projects such as the salon and exhibition platform, Katz’s Deli (since 2012) and the “thought-residency” program, BOOKSHELVES (since 2016). Both of these programs operate out of her experimental space-cum-project, 3307 W Washington Blvd, located in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. 3307 is a socially engaged project that builds community through the valuing of literacy, hosting literary events, performances, and meals. She received a BA from Colgate University and a MFA from Otis College of Art and Design.