Scope and Content of Collection
The Eleanor Antin papers document the artist's professional career, beginning with audio
cassettes of her performances as an actress in the 1950s. Series I includes professional
correspondence with art critics, curators, and artist-colleagues, such as Lucy Lippard or
Brian O'Doherty. The notebooks in Series II span three decades and include notes, drafts,
and sketches of all of Antin's works, offering insight into her composition process and her
source material. Series III contains these same materials in a more developed or finished
state, including completed screenplays, shooting scripts, and exhibition installation plans.
It also includes a number of unpublished works, including early poetry and experimental text
works from the 1960s, and unpublished plays and performance plans from the 1970s and 80s.
These projects are also documented by a very complete set of announcements in Series VI, and
reviews and press releases in Series VII. Several thousand photographs In Series VIII
(approximately 1100 prints, 1000 slides, and several thousand negatives) document most of
Antin's artistic output, including many destroyed and lost works from the 1950s and 1960s,
rejected works from the 100 Boots series, and works that Antin pulled from
circulation in the 1970s. Audiovisual materials in Series IX bring these materials more
vividly to life and includes the master copies of Antin's video, film, and audio works, many
of which are not available elsewhere. Series V contains work by others, including poetry,
artist books, and many manuscripts of essays about Antin. Series IV contains personal and
other miscellaneous items.
Arrangement
The papers are arranged in nine series:
Series I. Correspondence, 1965-2009, undated;
Series
II. Notebooks, 1970-2001, undated;
Series
III. Projects, circa 1965-2009;
Series
IV. Personal/Miscellaneous, 1973-2008, undated;
Series V. Work by others,
1962-2010, undated;
Series
VI. Ephemera, 1960-2010, undated;
Series VII. Reviews and Press
Releases, 1965-2009;
Series
VIII. Photographs, 1965-2007, undated;
Series
IX. Audiovisual and digital materials, 1953-2010.
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