Artpark Archival Collection at the Burchfield Penney Art Center Archives Gift of Earl W
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Artpark Archival Collection At The Burchfield Penney Art Center Archives Gift of Earl W. Brydges Artpark State Park 2013; A2013.017 Title: Artpark Archival Collection Name and Location of Repository: Burchfield Penney Art Center Date: 1970 - 2010 (Inclusive Dates) 1974-2005 (General Bulk Dates) Extent: 118.979 linear feet of textual, photographic and audio-visual materials Name of Creator: Earl W. Brydges Artpark State Park Administrative History: Artpark is currently (as of 2021) a 154-acre State Park along the Niagara River Gorge, located on the American side of the American-Canadian border in Lewiston, NY. It was initially created to develop tourism around local historic attractions and revitalize the area following late 1950s development of the New York State Power Authority power plant in Niagara Falls. Over- developed and costly theater construction under State Senator Earl W. Brydges in this direction of cultural development, said to be modeled after the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, resulted in a consulting emergency between the Natural Heritage Trust, the New York State Office of Parks and Recreation, and national experts and local cultural community leadership. This included the arts administration consulting firm Arts Development Associates (which had helped with the Lincoln Center), and a Steering Committee involving, amongst many, Niagara University Theater director Brother Augustine Towey, C.M., and Haudenosaunee Council on the Arts founder and artist Duffy Wilson. As a result, Artpark (or the Artpark program at the Earl W. Brydges Artpark) emerged from the Niagara Frontier Performing Arts Center, and in 1973 was established as a publicly-funded state park dedicated to all of the arts, with portions of support coming from earned revenue, grants and contributions. Formative Artpark administrative leadership included Dale McConathy (Executive Director 1973-1974), Joanne Allison (Associate Director 1976-1981 and Executive Director 1981-1989), Christopher Keene (Music Director 1974-1989 and President 1985-1989), and David Midland, who replaced McConathy as Acting Executive Director in 1974 (continuing as Executive Director from 1974 to 1981 and again as President and Executive Director in 1989). The seasonal program opened for its first summer on July 25th, 1974, the park site surrounding the cultural and historic heritage sites having served previously as a quarry, garbage and chemical dump, and spoils pile for the Niagara Power Project. Critical and media attention was local, national, and international towards Artpark’s experiment in public art. The Artist-in-Residence or Visual Arts program (1974-1991) was a major part of this park revitalization, dedicated in its first year to the memory of Robert Smithson and requiring artists to practice art in a public laboratory setting. Annual catalogues were produced from 1974-1989, with the first catalogue covering years 1974-1976. The program was administered by David Katzive (1974-1976 and again in 1979 and 1990) Rae Tyson (1974-1978), Joanne Allison (interim, late 70s), Richard Huntington (Visual Arts Director, 1982-1985), and Joan McDonough (under the Park Programs designation of the 80s and 90s). Original artist residencies in the Program in Visual Arts in 1974 included nearly thirty groups or individuals participating in periods from one to ten weeks in various media, including film, video, poetry, music, performance, land art, and sculpture. Important American, Canadian, and international artists were paid a weekly fee and a living stipend, travel and materials allowances. In 1979 The A-I-R or Visual Arts program was formally divided into Project artists or Major Projects works and Artists-in-Residence or crafts works. Project artists consisted of around a dozen individuals or collectives coming for periods of 3-6 weeks while Artists-in-Residence could consist of 40 craft artists. Other programming at Artpark included nature and recreational activities, children’s and all- ages art workshops, crafts demonstrations, cooking workshops, performing-artists-in-the- park (PAPS) and storytellers, outdoor theater (especially the Niagara University affiliated A.R.T., or Artpark Repertory Theater), summer writing and art class daycamps, and special events that ranged from outdoor movies and local community partner festivals to further artist and performance programming. Partners included the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. To host such diverse programming, Artpark used an amphitheater, an ARTEL (an L-shaped, multilevel wooden boardwalk) with multiuse log cabin, “silo” and truck body furniture, and a Town Square with geodesic dome known for “dome workshops”. The Theater, a 2400 seat state-of-the-art construction, cost over seven million dollars in the early 70s and hosted the North American premiere of a Philip Glass Opera (Satyagraha), an important Upstate NY performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, regular collaborations with the New York City Opera (Christopher Keene), contemporary dance and choreography (including an Alvin Ailey world premiere), as well as a significant regional Jazz Festival, and traveling ballets, musicals, and Broadway, classical, and pop productions. Such facilities also allowed Artpark to host more informal artist residencies. For example, Lucy Lippard, a writer affiliated with the activist group Art Workers Coalition, came to write about Artpark during the first season. Informal artist residencies in the Theater included Philip Glass and Martha Graham. The renowned regional opera program at Artpark appears to have been lost when Christopher Keene left Artpark in 1989. While some reputationally significant artists did attend the A-I-R program in 1990, the documentation suggests that the documentary budget was cut and an annual catalogue could not be compiled from artists’ documentation. In addition to the loss of opera in 1990, one A-I-R artist collective was also censored and not allowed to participate in the 1990 program, and the acclaimed Jazz Festival was subsequently no longer organized. A small group of artists in 1991 constituted the last A-I-R program. Privatization of Artpark in 1997 under President David Midland (who returned in 1989) allowed certain portions of Artpark’s 200-acres to be leased back from the state by Artpark & Company, an incorporated fundraising wing supplementing Artpark from its very earliest activities. Private donors were sought to continue programming, but most non-concert activities at Artpark were discontinued, while public art structures such as Omega and the ARTEL could not be maintained or were not retained or replaced. The artist residency program was reintroduced in the late 1990s as a small open studio program encouraging local craft artist participation but did not fund professionalized artists or participatory intermedia public land art laboratories as it once had. Artists continued to exhibit works in the gallery or outdoors on site that had been created elsewhere and transported to the Artpark state park grounds. Artpark at this time mainly shifted to a major concert and events venue with singular art projects that reduced the overall volume of activities and theme park nature of this state park dedicated to the arts. It was not until the early aughts that Artpark again began to commission large scale land art and sculptural works from artists, including the 40th anniversary works in 2014, but not to be seen on the scale of the publicly funded artists residency program from 1974-1991. —Jennifer Seaman Cook Custodial History: In 2013, The Earl W. Brydges Artpark State Park (“Artpark”) donated their archival holdings to the Burchfield Penney Art Center. The collection was previously stored by Artpark in two locations: “Site A” was a trailer on the Artpark State Park grounds; “Site B” was off-site storage located on the Fort Niagara campus. Textual materials at Site A exhibited little to no original order. These materials largely consisted of promotional ephemera, administrative documents, and program documentation, but seemed to have been thrown together and moved without intent. A significant exception to this was the image binders at Site A. The image binders totaled approximately 300 binders of slides, negatives, and contact sheets, primarily from 1974-1990. These image binders exhibited nearly perfect original order. Still, due to decades stored in a trailer with no temperature controls, the binders had become sticky with adhesive from taped labels (which dripped down the sides). Nevertheless, these binders contained detailed descriptions of events, artists, and many other activities at Artpark on an item level. For the next 2 months, Archivist Heather Gring focused on conducting the initial inventory of Site A materials. Rehousing the image collection became a top priority for Archives interns, and the image binders were fully rehoused by 2014. Since then, interns have worked on item-level description of the image collection, allowing for individual images of artists to be identified within the approximately 70,000 images. This process is 65% complete as of 2021. In October of 2013, Gring began the assessment of the archival materials stored at Fort Niagara (“Site B”). Site B materials had been stored at a World War I Naval Barracks building on the Fort Niagara campus since roughly the 1990’s. Many state agencies had used this building at Fort Niagara to store documents, but by 2013 only the Artpark collection remained. Site B consisted of approximately 70 boxes of archival documentation and approximately