This post was written by our 2024 Library and Archives Intern, Miranda Hynes. Miranda joins us from UT Austin where she is studying Art History and Museum Studies, and will be on the team through August. Stay tuned for more guest posts from her this summer!
As the Library and Archives Intern at The O’Keeffe, I’m currently working on processing the Jan Garden Castro Collection, which includes writing a finding aid for the museum’s archival finding aid database. Jan Garden Castro is the author of The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, a well-known book about O’Keeffe published in 1985, and the content of the Garden Castro Collection in our archive relates mainly to the research and production of that book.
The Art & Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, Jan Garden Castro, Crown Publishers, 1995
The Jan Garden Castro Collection holds a number of interesting documents, including correspondence with O’Keeffe herself and cassette tape interviews conducted by Castro, including Ansel Adams and other important figures who knew O’Keeffe personally. More broadly, a look through the Garden Castro collection depicts what it was like to write a book about O’Keeffe when she was still alive, from research and interviews to the ever-demanding publishing process. While working to process this collection, I stumbled across several interesting letters, but the most unexpected example is from Margaret Atwood, world-famous author of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Research on and Correspondence with Individuals, bulk: 1973-1993, Jan Garden Castro Relating to The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe. MS-69. Gift of Jan Garden Castro. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
In this letter Atwood notes that she attached bound page proofs of The Handmaid’s Tale, which was published that very year in 1985. When Castro received this letter and the manuscript accompanying it, she would have had no idea that she was reading what would soon become one of the world’s contemporary classics. Working in archives, unexpected finds like this are always so exciting. Stay tuned for another post about the completed processing and finding aid for this collection!
This post was written by our 2024 Library and Archives Intern, Miranda Hynes. Miranda joins us from UT Austin where she is studying Art History and Museum Studies, and will be here through mid-August.
As the Library and Archives Intern at the O’Keeffe Museum this summer, I’ve been working on processing, rehousing, and creating a finding aid for the Jan Garden Castro Collection Relating to The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. After about a month of work, the process is finally complete! The Jan Garden Castro Collection comprises materials relating to the creation of Garden Castro’s book, The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, which was published in 1985. The finding aid has now been published and can be viewed here: Jan Garden Castro Collection Relating to the Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe Finding Aid
This collection holds all of the research for Garden Castro’s book. Items of interest in the collection include audio cassette tapes of interviews with Ansel Adams, conducted by Garden Castro. There are also multiple exchanges of correspondence between O’Keeffe (and her staff) and Garden Castro. Finally, there are many other pieces of correspondence between Garden Castro and friends or colleagues in O’Keeffe’s life, such as fellow artist Rebecca Strand.
Archives like the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's provide invaluable resources to the public, to academics and researchers, and to curators– the Jan Garden Castro Collection is an example of a collection which could be greatly beneficial to researchers. It’s a deeply gratifying job, but I’ve found that very few people outside of the archival field know what exactly we do every day, and much of archiving was still unknown to me before I started this internship. Thus, when I say that I completed the processing, rehousing, and finding aid for the Jan Garden Castro Collection, you might be asking: what do those words mean?
Archival processing is what archivists do when we’re incorporating a collection into the archive. This consists mainly of taking inventory of all the files and documents, identifying and naming them, and organizing them in a way that makes sense. For example, in the Garden Castro Collection, all of the audio cassettes are grouped together in one section, whereas correspondence is in a different section.
Rehousing is where we take the old folders and boxes that house documents and replace them with archival-grade folders and boxes, which don’t deteriorate as quickly. In this case, the Garden Castro collection had a lot of folders that dated back to the 70’s and 80’s, many of which showed signs of deterioration. Sometimes, this also means that we have an opportunity to physically group documents in a way that makes more logical sense than how we originally received them.
Creating a finding aid is the part of the process that you can all see on our archive’s website. Under the Garden Castro Collection entry, if you’re searching specifically for correspondence with individuals from the 70’s to 80’s, those documents are clearly labeled. This is all in an effort to make documents more easily findable by subject, material type, or time period– depending on how the collection is organized. If you’re interested in better understanding how finding aids work, I’d highly recommend looking around the Archives website, which has all of our finding aids.
I hope that I’ve helped de-mystify some aspects of archival work for you all.
The Art & Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, Jan Garden Castro, Crown Publishers, 1995
Correspondence between Georgia O’Keeffe and Jan Garden Castro, bulk: 1980 – 1983, Jan Garden Castro Relating to The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe. MS-69. Gift of Jan Garden Castro. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
Research on Institutions, Permission Forms, bulk: 1973-1987, Jan Garden Castro Relating to The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe. MS-69. Gift of Jan Garden Castro. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.