Hauser & Wirth Institute: Democratizing the Archives

Who should have the power to document, preserve, and present cultural history? Is it experts and institutions, as has long been the case, or is it the artists and communities themselves—the ones who were generating the material in the first place? The question doesn’t come with an easy answer. But the nonprofit Hauser & Wirth Institute exists to provide possible paths forward. The New York-based foundation, which launched in 2018, supports nonprofits and collectives to process and present their archives to the public, so they can tell their own stories.

Operating independently from its primary benefactor, Hauser & Wirth Gallery, the Institute provides funding to organizations to foster creative approaches to making archives more available to the public, and for archival education. The word archives may mean different things to different people, but the Institute’s focus is on “the materials that accrue through artists doing their work,” explained Hauser & Wirth Institute’s executive director Lisa Darms. That is: notebooks, photographs, posters, letters—the granular drip of artifacts amassed through a lifetime of art-making. Within those contours, the Institute has a mission to foster diversity and agency. “Underlying everything we do is increasing access,” Darms said.

She previously spent more than seven years as the senior archivist at New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections, where she specialized in documenting the downtown arts scene from the 1960s to the 1990s. In 2010, she began an initiative to archive materials from the feminist youth movement Riot Grrrl. “At that time, it was unusual for institutions to collect materials like that,” Darms said. “People were motivated to donate to the collection because of the history of feminist erasure—it was a way to make sure that people who had been written out of the canon in the past were actually part of it, by having their archives preserved.”

During her own career, Darms has noticed significant changes in the profession that have put a greater emphasis on self-determination. “The field has really shifted in this direction,” she said, referring to efforts to democratize the archival process and make materials more accessible. “And that’s primarily through supporting communities to archive themselves.” 

Unlike a collecting institution, Hauser & Wirth Institute follows a two-pronged model that it describes as “non-custodial.” It has the resources to catalog and digitize artists’ archives at no cost for an artist, their estate, or arts organizations; it is then able to assist in finding a permanent home for those collections. Perhaps more radically, its grant-making program enables others to take charge of their own archives. “People should have the choice,” over how to preserve their histories, Darms said.

A case in point is the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York, a 2022 grantee. A similar archive would have likely gone to a major collecting institution in the past, Darms said. But the almost 50-year-old workshop decided to keep its documents on site, where artists in residence and other researchers are able to access them. 

Then there is the Chicago Archives + Artists Project, a 2021 grantee, which is an initiative created by the collective Sixty Inches From Center. Dedicated to preserving the culture of the Midwest’s Indigenous, diasporic, queer, and disability communities, the organization “was trying to find other ways of deconstructing the art-historical canon,” Darms said. Since 2017, the Chicago Archives + Artist Project has paired up artists and archivists in year-long residencies. The results have now been published in a book, Chicago Archives + Artists Project: Case Studies in Collaboration, funded in part through the Hauser & Wirth Institute grant.