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Michelle Elligott, Michelle Harvey. Modern Artifacts. Edited by Tod Lippy. Contributions from Mary Ellen Carroll, Rhea Karam, Mary Lum, Clifford Owens, Michael Rakowitz, and Paul Ramirez Jonas. Brooklyn, NY: Esopus Books, 2020. Softcover, 354p. $60.00. (ISBN: 9780989911771). Reviewed by Diane Dias De Fazio.

Picture it: New York City, 2006. A financial crisis is lurking, personal blogging is flourishing, and the Big Apple is still awash in print media, from big publishing houses to smaller journals; iPhones don't exist; Twitter is in its infancy; and library-and-archives social media is a glimmer in a library student’s eye. Tod Lippy, the brains behind Esopus,^[1] a three-year-old arts and culture magazine, reaches out to the Chief of Library and Museum Archives at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Milan Hughston, with a request. The pitch: Esopus wants to feature MoMA’s archival bits of wonder in each of its issues, to demonstrate the vast “hidden collections”—a realm, at the time, largely out of public view. The resulting collaboration would become “Modern Artifacts,” an eighteen-part series^[2] showcasing MoMA’s archival holdings,[3] titled with a gentle pun that nearly belies the repository’s significance and ongoing collecting. Published in 2020, the book of the same name provides all eighteen vignettes, in order, interwoven with work by contemporary artists, created in response to materials in the Archives. Iconoclastic in its editorial approach and entertaining in content, Modern Artifacts is a visually stunning exemplar of what a special collections publication can be.

 Modern Artifacts is a feast for armchair archivists and museum nerds, and Chapter 1 starts with a bang. What is the item every Modern art student has learned about and might want to see from MoMA’s Archives? —Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s map/flowchart/diagram of art history, of course, with arrows connecting art movements to each other and to the future. In Modern Artifacts, it is presented as the recognizable red-and-black graphic cover of the exhibition catalogue for Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), but also in preliminary sketches, and as a full-size foldout facsimile. Even as a reproduction, the effect is breathtaking, particularly when one considers that this may be the closest a reader ever gets to holding the landmark diagram in their own hands. The book’s eighteen chapters follow the “Modern Artifacts” series’ chronology, and thumbnail-size Esopus covers appear on each chapter’s first page, little reminders that the content originally debuted elsewhere. The choice to include artist projects in the book provides the reader with something unique in the greater galaxy of archival collections publications: here is demonstrable evidence that archives inspire new creation, not just nostalgia.

Several chapters are especially interesting, including Three (“Tentative and Confidential”), on “Exhibition ‘X’,” a planned, but unexecuted, exhibition to counter fascism; Ten (“Rent to Own”), on the museum’s art rental program, which was exactly what it sounds like, but with Matisse; and Eleven (“Creating Spaces”), a summary of the landmark 1969–1970 exhibition, with recognition that it marked a twofold turning point for MoMA: the first time the museum teamed with artists to realize their ideas, and also the first time it partnered with corporations. Chapter Fifteen (“The Healing Arts,” from Esopus’ medicine-themed issue) covers “art therapy” courses held at the museum for World War II veterans. Chapter Seventeen (“Modern Renaissance”), recounts Italian Masters, a traveling exhibition of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Raphael, and Michelangelo, et al., mounted during Mussolini’s rise. Modern Artifacts concludes as the series did, with “The Young Turks,” an introduction to the museum’s “Junior Council,” who one might blame for the commodification of MoMA’s holdings—complete with a copy of their first commissioned holiday greeting card, Robert Indiana’s Love, from 1965.

In the course of Esopus's run, individual issues featured artist’s “projects,” from Tina Barney, Jenny Holzer, Anish Kapoor, Kerry James Marshall, Juri Morioka, Dulce Pinzón, Edward Ruscha, and Mickalene Thomas, among many others. To readers of Modern Artifacts without this context, the artists’ pieces interrupt the flow of the Archives segments. The projects would land better in a separate book, given more space to explain themselves. The best are Rhea Karam’s “In. Visible: Gestures of Transience,” which provides a disposable street art  paste-up; Mary Lum’s “The Liberation of Words” on refugees; and Clifford Owens’s “The Visitor,” complete with a copy of the two-part questionnaire for MoMA leadership, distributed by the organization Students and Artists United for a Martin Luther King, Jr. Wing for Black and Puerto Rican Art at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of New York in 1969, and originally “co-signed by”^[4] Black artists Tom Lloyd and Faith Ringgold.

Other chapters in Modern Artifacts fall flat because, in 2022, they seem outdated, with settler-colonialist and/or classist principles that uphold white supremacy. One example, presented without context, is “My Dear Miss Miller”, the tale of (white, female) curator Dorothy Miller who fostered the career of (white, male) abstract painter James Lee Byars (1932–1997). Why Byars, and not Black painter and sculptor Faith Ringgold (b. 1930)? They were nearly the same age, active at the same time, and lived and worked in the same city. But while Ringgold worked, made art, and mothered two children in 1958, Byars had his New York debut—at MoMA, thanks to Miller. In 2022, Byars remains represented at MoMA by twenty artworks—just three fewer than Ringgold, who is still actively creating at ninety-two years old. Chapter Five (“Early Registration”) reproduces MoMA’s guest book, but signatures—almost exclusively of wealthy white visitors—may simply be uninteresting to readers who don’t see themselves. Chapter Twelve (“From Body to Object”) features (white, male) performance artist Scott Burton; and Chapter Thirteen (“Seitz Specific”) details one (white) man’s efforts to move Monet paintings, but overlooks the museum’s 1958 fire, where a worker died and two large canvases from the Water Lilies series were destroyed.

Translating archival collections to book form is no small feat, and what Lippy and Michelle Elligott present is extraordinary, but evaluating Modern Artifacts as a scholarly work presents challenges. The book is less a critical audit of a giant institution with nearly a century of history, and more like a greatest hits album: all your favorites are there, along with some good pics of the superstars. That the content was written well before the summer of 2020 also presents problems, and raises questions if Modern Artifacts is a relic of an era preceding the COVID-2019 pandemic. MoMA’s collections and hiring practices have been widely criticized; in Modern Artifacts there is likewise inadequate representation of BIPOC curators, artists, and visitors. MoMA’s controversial real estate decisions are absent, which—for a museum that now occupies almost an entire city block formerly full of residential townhomes—could be interpreted as archives-washing. Modern Artifacts is “good history,” not the self-reflective reckoning for which some readers might advocate. Perhaps this is by design: MoMA has also published a number of inward-looking exhibition catalogues since 2017, including Among Others: Blackness at MoMA (2019).

Lest anyone forget, this is a museum publication and, as such, intended at least in part as a promotional tool for MoMA. Elligott, Chief of Archives, Library, and Research Collections at MoMA since 2017, is the primary credited author, but one cannot equitably judge Modern Artifacts as if it were a solo venture. Michelle Harvey, Archivist of the Museum Archives, wrote Chapter Thirteen and gets “additional text by” credit, and the artists are also credited. Further, Lippy's vision for an advertising-free magazine yielded consistent art direction, and brought together established and emerging creatives. The magazine served as the platform on which the success of “Modern Artifacts” rested, and from which its audience grew. Anonymous Digital Projects Librarians, Imaging department staff, and graphic designers made everything look spectacular. Artists visited the Archives, were guided to particular materials by staff, and then devised and produced arresting responses, specifically for the book. Director Hughston’s network, support, and reputation facilitated the realization of the installments. It boggles the mind to think how much labor—and money—went to produce Modern Artifacts, as well as the Gordian knots that were untangled to address all the rights and permissions necessary to present this as a print publication.

 The book is not largely about the text; it’s about the “artifacts” in the Archives, presented “as they would be found in the Archives reading room”^[5]—in (full-size images of) labeled acid-free folders brimming with things like hand-scrawled notes in bright colored pencil, scrapbook pages with newspaper clippings on the same leaf as event tickets, and sheets of yellowed typed correspondence. The archival holdings are introduced through Elligott’s prose, but presented visually, rather than described in long expository paragraphs or captions. Intended to replicate the Archives research experience, page after page is expended on handwritten letters, sketches, and ephemera—dinner menus, clippings, entire looseleaf notebooks and sketchbooks, and photographs. While Modern Artifacts uses this visual technique to present itself (and the Archives) as accessible repositories full of significant historical eye candy, the book’s use of uncaptioned full-bleed visuals is also an accessibility disaster. Design prerogative aside, can one excuse a nearly 400-page book by an educational institution with no captions or transcriptions, and mostly images? If a second edition is produced, will it correct this?

 Modern Artifacts offers only “photography credits”, which connect readers to the Archives, and formalists may cringe at the lack of footnotes or endnotes. Without a bibliography or notes, this beggars the question, Where to draw the line regarding scholarly output? Is Modern Artifacts a coffee-table book, or a scholarly publication? Must there be endnotes? Should all images have captions? Is bibliography a requirement? Despite lacking most of these “back matter” elements, I argue that their absence does not discredit Modern Artifacts. Rather, by virtue of its primary objective—to bring the widest audience possible to archival collections—following Modern Artifacts’ style, tone, and format should be the standard for academic writing, particularly for publications on library and archives collections.^[6] Such open and clear prose can only raise awareness of special collections and inspire the next generation of scholars, LIS professionals, and curators.

 Modern Artifacts set a high bar that, realistically speaking, may stand unequaled for years to come. A publication of this caliber is nothing short of aspirational for most museums and institutional archives. Would that we all had a phalanx of library boosters to finance such a showcase (not to mention the staff time). Did any of this expand use of MoMA Archives? Of other museums’ archives? These, and other, questions remain. Nevertheless, in terms of archival awareness, the cascading effect of the Esopus series is visible—if only at the micro level—in social media hashtag challenges, library Tumblr, and the waves of I-school graduates with archives and outreach specialization. In 2006, “Modern Artifacts” shone a light on a fascinating and relatively off-limits treasure trove. In 2022, Modern Artifacts represents both a museum archives collection project from the recent past, and the cultural phenomena museum archives became, writ large, over the ensuing sixteen years: who’d have predicted that such an anthology would appear on two “Best-Of” lists the year it was published? The noblest work Modern Artifacts does is that it makes a solid case for better funding for institutional archives and their staff. All university, museum, and corporate archives should acquire this book, and every special collections library should try to propose their own institution-specific version of Modern Artifacts, sooner the better.

—Diane Dias De Fazio, Acquisitions and Collections Development Librarian; Ingalls Library, The Cleveland Museum of Art