The Lunder Institute for American Art Bay Area Think Tank 2026: Artist Legacies and Archives
What a week! I participated in the Lunder Institute Bay Area Think Tank – an initiative that brings together artists, scholars, museum professionals, and culture bearers across disciplines and communities to engage in dialogue around Artists’ Legacies and Archive focusing on female artists and their archives, specifically Hung Liu and her cohort of Bay Area artists, to explore best practices for preserving their career-spanning bodies of work and broadening the art historical canon. Brought together by the brilliant Erica Wall we gathered at the Hung Liu studio, BAMFA, Bancroft Library UC Berkeley, Oakland Museum of California, de Young Museum and Stanford Cantor Arts Center. The conversations were recorded and will be part of the Lunder Institute’s Audio Archive, which will be hosted via JSTOR within the Colby College Library for educational purposes. It’s made me think much more deeply about archives, what we preserve, protect and learn from and how there is such an effort to erase histories. So great to be with Mildred Howard and hear her talk about her retrospective exhibition at OMCA and Amalia Mesa-Bains whose archives we visited at The Cantor Arts Center and so much more…here are a few pictures!
