While going from the stage to the archive may sound like an unusual career change, for Kathy Carbone, a third-year doctoral student in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies, it has proven to be a smoothly executed transition. Carbone, who has spent 25 years as a modern dance performer and choreographer, also works as the performing arts librarian and institute archivist at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and is a member of the Herb Alpert School of Music faculty there.
Currently, Carbone is conducting research on points of intersection between artists, archivists, and archives, which earned her 3 place recognition at the annual Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI) this past summer for her poster presentation titled, “Artists in the Archive: Literary and Artistic Interventions.”
“I’m interested in artists’ experience in the archives, how they conceptualize, respond to, and use the archive as well as archivists’ experiences of working with artists in the archive” she says. She is presently engaged in a study of two artists in residence at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center (PARC) in Portland, Oregon, who are creating artworks out of government records. The artists, Kaia Sand and Garrick Imatani, are working with PARC’s collection of police surveillance files to create poetry objects, spoken word performances, sculptures, books, and broadsides that highlight and annotate some of what is missing in the institutional record as well as investigating what is there.
“My research investigates what artists do with archival materials and how they transform or change archival records into works of art,” says Carbone, who is preparing to teach a class on archives and artists at CalArts next year. “I’m very interested in the circulation of archival records as works of art: how archival records/works of art move through time and space, and in doing so, what kinds of associations, resonances, or relationships occur between records, art works, individuals, communities and/or the archive.”
Photo by Scott Groller