Chicago Artist Files at Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library + Marc Fischer
Images: (Left) Artist and publisher Marc Fischer leafing through the files in Harold Washington Library’s Chicago Artist Files. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel. (Right) Artist and publisher Marc Fischer scanning files in Harold Washington Library’s Chicago Artist Files. Photo by Ryan Edmund Thiel.
“If more artists could see the impact that a three-inch thick folder has in telling the story of an artist’s work, they’d get it together immediately. This file could be your life.”
ARCHIVE:
Chicago Artist Files at Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library
Beginning in the late 1920s civic leaders from the Municipal Art League of Chicago encouraged Chicago Public Library to promote the work of local artists. The library exhibited local artists in branches throughout the city and in the Main Library, which is now the Chicago Cultural Center, keeping research files on the artists. After the appointment of Matilde Kelly as the head of the Art Department in 1946, the Art Department began to assiduously develop the files, which later became known as the Chicago Artist Files. In 1991, Chicago Public Library moved into the Harold Washington Library Center, and the files have greatly expanded with the resumption of the department’s exhibitions of Chicago artists. The files include information on over 11,200 fine and commercial artists in all visual media, street artists, designers, architects, craftspeople, landscape architects, performance artists, photographers, collectors, curators, critics, gallery directors, galleries, and art organizations, from late 19th through 21st-century Chicago.
ARTIST:
Marc Fischer
Marc Fischer is the administrator of Public Collectors, an initiative he formed in 2007. Public Collectors aims to encourage greater access and scholarship for marginal cultural materials, particularly those that museums ignore. Public Collectors’ work includes the Library Excavations publication series and web project, Quaranzine—which produced 100 single page publications with over 75 collaborators at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Malachi Ritscher—a project about the late Chicago music documentarian and activist, produced for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In addition to Public Collectors, Fischer is also a member of the group Temporary Services (founded in 1998) and a partner in its publishing imprint Half Letter Press (ongoing since 2008). He is based in Chicago. (www.publiccollectors.org)
READ MORE: Library Excavations and the Love of Print with Marc Fischer