Lost in the Vertical Files

Lost in the Vertical Files

My name’s Dawson, and over the summer I worked as an intern at the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library
in DC. I’m currently an Art History and Visual Culture student at Bard College. I applied to the internship last spring with only a little archival experience under my belt, and no idea of how I would live in DC if I even got the position. It was a total leap of faith, and I’m still a little surprised I landed on two feet. In the cover letter, I expressed my belief that “[w]orking with the library’s art and artist files is an opportunity for me to engage directly with the histories of modern American art, and the role of the nation’s emblematic contemporary museum in showing and shaping said histories.” At the time, I had no idea if that would really hold weight or not, but it ended up being more true than I could have expected.
Here was what the job was like, day-to-day, in short. The Hirshhorn has, since its inception, collected various ephemera connected to artists whose work the Hirshhorn was interested in obtaining or ultimately did obtain in its collection. Some of the ephemera even dates to before the museum, when Joseph Hirshhorn had the collection and not yet the institution to hold it. All this ephemera is now stored in the library’s vertical files, one file for each artist. Ephemera is media that is not intended to be preserved long-term – in our collection there are postcards from various artists’ exhibitions, newspaper clippings of reviews, interviews, and obituaries, artists’ resumes and bibliographies, press releases, and lots and lots of advertisements for exhibitions. I would date all of these pieces of ephemera, stamp them with a small “HMSG” insignia, and then sort them chronologically. A lot of these glossy advertisements and obscure clippings aren’t really the kind of media that most libraries preserve, yet they do reflect important auxiliary and parallel histories to more straightforward sources– offering a history of art advertisement, histories of galleries and institutions, and how artists and their art are depicted and remembered on the most immediate levels.
Intern Dawson Escott in the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library.
This was my job description on paper, but because of some experience at school working with metadata I took the opportunity to spend a lot of time updating the online entries in the Smithsonian’s
Art and Artist’s Files
database and on Wikidata (if you’re curious, you can find me on there with the username PalmyranRealness) to better digitally represent the Artist Files’ contents and publicize the material available at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library for researchers. I feel strongly that most research in the present day is done online and in order for physical archives to remain used and helpful, there’s a definite need for them to have a digital presence. I updated birth and death dates, created files, clarified exactly which…