The Same Dead Thing Alive: Contemporary Archives in L.A. and Beyond

Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida, A House Containing (installation views) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and Wolfpack HQ. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Over the past few years, conversations with artists around my engagement with the estates of Luchita Hurtado and Lee Mullican began opening new perspectives on two practices I thought I knew well. My work with Hurtado began through independent interviews, which later informed the biographical timeline I prepared for her retrospective at the Serpentine (2019) and LACMA (2020). In the years that followed I continued researching and writing on the work of Lee Mullican, Hurtado’s late husband, and aided in processing the estate’s archive after Hurtado’s passing in 2020. Along the way, dialogue with artists repeatedly expanded the universes of these distinct practices into the present moment in ways that neither the archive nor existing scholarship accounted for. In response, I initiated Wolfpack HQ, an exhibition series within the estate archive itself, borrowing the name that Hurtado gave to her studio entity. Working with artists in this context has become a way of continuing the legacies of two figures who lived steeped in their art and artist communities, inviting contemporary artists to learn from and respond to their archive in the present.

This project brought to my attention other organizations, artists, and estates across California, as part of a wider turn, that are similarly approaching archives as sites of production, prioritizing proximity and use over restriction and codified procedure. Diverging from traditional curatorial conventions, they exceed preservation and engage what’s still contested or withheld, as archives function at their fullest when put to work. In the following examples, way- finding is foundational, displacing bureaucratic containment with political readiness and collective learning. Within such work, retention, organization, and access are continually negotiated, as the present repositions the past with each archival act, rearticulating history anew.

In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, “the same dead thing alive” describes a law that only becomes real in execution. The phrase also names a mode of archival practice where past work returns to generate new forms, while questions of stewardship, access, and sustainability remain in play. Art history persists, but its modes of engagement are changing. Rather than aiming for closure, such models enlist artists as collaborators to activate and interpret materials in relation to the present. In doing so, they create conditions for inquiry and new production, keeping histories active, nuanced, and in dialogue with present political realities.

Twelve years ago, the shelves of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), a nonprofit archive and library built through collective participation and community authorship, were empty by design in acknowledgment of the organization’s roots in institutional critique. Materials accrued gradually, selected by artists and organizers for their capacity to respond to the present moment and inspire new projects. As acquisition proceeded through open submission and discussion -based review, LACA has assessed materials for their ability to generate new insight. With this evolving framework, LACA’s collections bring artist-run spaces, studio documents, performance ephemera, union organizing, sex work, child care, death care, and immigration documentation into relation, while steering committees from members of these communities author collection descriptions to produce a composite of L.A.’s underrepresented cultural labor that risks falling outside the scope of major institutions.

In defining an archive as a collection of material set in relation, information emerges through ongoing interpretation. For example, in 2015, LACA commissioned Scott Benzel to create Sonatine Bureaucratique, an essay borrowing its title from Erik Satie’s 1917 composition of the same name. Satie’s piece, itself a humorous appropriation of a classical piano sonatina by Muzio Clementi, narrates a bureaucrat’s uneventful day at the office through marginal notes inserted into the score: He arrives, dreams of promotion, listens to a nearby piano, and leaves, having accomplished nothing. Developed through research using materials held at LACA, in his essay Benzel references catalogs and artist books by Douglas Huebler, Charles Gaines, Guy de Cointet, and Seth Siegelaub, foregrounding procedures of enumeration, coding, and dematerialized circulation. With Satie’s satirical score as guide, the project considers how conceptual art’s refusal to work has mutated into fully realized systems of surveillance, simulation, and data extraction. Benzel’s project thus pivots from Satie’s gently satirical portrait of bureaucratic boredom to a contemporary condition in which the history of conceptual propositions have been absorbed into networked governance, their once impossible gestures now internalized, what once stalled meaning now accelerating control for profit. By drawing together dispersed archival materials into a single, operative frame, the project re-engages the archive as a site where legibility is actively rewritten, coming to resemble the social field that produced it by recalibrating its stakes as cultural and political contexts shift.

LIVING PROOF / LIVING ARCHIVES (installation view) (2026). Image courtesy of the artists, Cirrus Gallery, and Cirrus Print Editions. Photo: Robert Demangus.

If LACA draws the social field into the archive, 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica works from the inside outward, reanimating its own discursive history as a means for performance to engage community. At 18th Street the archive is currently activated through High Performance: A 2-Year Conference (2025–2027).¹ In partnership with the burgeoning artist-founded Performance Art Museum, the complete 72-issue run of High Performance is being digitized and made publicly accessible. Founded in 1978 by Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland and published through 1997, the quarterly was produced by the nonprofit Astro Artz from 1983 to 1995, an organization that would later become 18th Street Arts Center. Across its run, High Performance documented performance as social intervention, urban maintenance, and collective address well before such modes were formalized as social practice and relational aesthetics. As part of 18th Street’s initiative, a reading group revisits Burnham and Durland’s book The Citizen Artist, which distilled the magazine’s ethos into a theory of artists as civic actors shaping public life. The archive, in turn, becomes a foundation for future practices, a reminder that performance has always operated with its finger on the pulse of embodied civic life, social relations, and labor.

With a similar impulse for immediacy, the active and agile Society of Art and Living Archives (SALA) focuses on California’s cultural history through public programs including exhibitions, workshops, and walking tours. The nomadic project, which recently expanded its Los Angeles roots to the Bay Area, operates as a salon-like, peer-driven alternative to more formal institutional models. Functioning as a roaming archive and social site, SALA moves at a faster pace, connecting historical material with contemporary artist networks. This approach was evident in LIVING PROOF / LIVING ARCHIVES: Action Artefact, a recent exhibition at Cirrus Gallery where artists engaged prints and ephemera from the gallery’s archive through new production, including a ring-suspended printed silk scarf Spotted Lantern Moth (2026) by Frances Stark, made in response to Chris Burden’s If you fly, if you drive (1973). While engaging specifically with Cirrus’s archive here, the exhibition exemplified SALA’s commitment to keeping California’s archival material in circulation as a site of ongoing interpretation.

While organizations such as LACA, 18th Street, and SALA approach the archive as a collective resource for research, discussion, and new artistic production, artist estates, inseparable from specific artists’ legacies, are increasingly activating their archives through exhibitions that place historic artists in dialogue with contemporary practices to think alongside, extend, or reconsider the artists’ concerns.

At Blunk Space in Point Reyes, the exhibition arm of sculptor JB Blunk’s estate, the 2023 exhibition JSP JBB paired artist James Sterling Pitt and JB Blunk in a cross-generational conversation. New ceramic works by Pitt were put in proxy with Blunk’s ceramic trays from the 1970s and ’80s. While Blunk’s shifting relationship between positive and negative space negotiates use, Pitt’s clay sculptures draw from an object journal developed in response to traumatic brain injury, where drawing served as calendar and prosthetic memory. Their scaled-down architectural forms relate inner and outer worlds, extending Blunk’s investment in the relation between interior and exterior space and reconsidering Blunk’s work alongside a contemporary counterpart.

While Blunk Space operates from a site separate from where the artist once lived and worked, projects such as 500 Capp Street and TOM House stage exhibitions within their artists’ homes and studios. Once home to David Ireland in San Francisco’s Mission District, the nonprofit 500 Capp Street brings Ireland’s home and archive into contemporary discourse, inviting risk, experimentation, and new production. Since late 2024, the program has shifted to a collective leadership model, replacing a single director with shared oversight, embedding decolonization research, social practice, and land use into its curatorial methods and institutional structure. Programming now emphasizes Bay Area and California-based artists, treating locality as a working condition through artist-driven and process-oriented exhibitions. Recent residencies, including yétúndé olagbaju’s 2023–2024 term, inspired this approach after the artist redistributed their funds to collaborators, foregrounding collective labor and social infrastructure.

Trina Michelle Robinson’s recent 2026 exhibition Open Your Eyes to Water, co-presented between 500 Capp Street and the arts organization Root Division, sets Ireland’s archive in conversation with the legacy of conceptual art and institutional critique. Drawing on records and matter gathered over two decades before she was a practicing artist, Robinson works with ledgers, wills, tax records, soil, water, and sound gathered from sites of the transatlantic slave trade. In the mixed-media work Liberation Through Redaction (2022–2026), Robinson partially obscures documents that listed enslaved people as property, stitching over the text with red thread while leaving names visible. Field recordings gathered in Ohio and California play throughout the house, linking the domestic scale of 500 Capp Street to Robinson’s wider diasporic landscape. Drawing on a practice that is both archival and embodied, the artist considers the body as a “memory index,” situating ancestral traces and imagined heirlooms between what was recorded and what remains unacknowledged. Rather than illustrating a direct relationship to Ireland’s archive, the exhibition stages a dialogue between practices, using the archive as a site where conceptual art’s strategies of redaction, repetition, and indexicality are engaged critically in Robinson’s process-based material practice.

Trina Michelle Robinson, Open Your Eyes to Water (installation view) (2026). Image courtesy of the artist and 500 Capp Street. Photo: Lark Chang-Yeh.

The Tom of Finland archive offers another example of how archival structures can be organized collectively from within a site where the artist lived and worked. When the nonprofit was established in 1984, its founders recognized that the archive would need to take an open, collective form rather than one that’s closed and singular. Erotic art, photographs, zines, correspondence, and ephemera around Tom’s work entered the collection through acts of trust by the members of the queer community who submitted them, rather than institutional mandate. Today, the Tom of Finland Foundation holds an extensive collection, preserving access for future generations to encounter queer histories in their original material form. Maintained by a librarian alongside volunteers, the library continues to be a labor of love, offered equally to artists-in-residence, researchers, and visitors.

This logic continues in the Foundation’s artist in residency program through which new work is made, lovers meet, and boundaries are tested and reimagined. As m black, an artist-in- residence, observed, the Foundation functions as a place where “people find each other.” In this sense, pleasure becomes a methodology of attention, consent, and community. Recent artist-in-residence Yinon Avior Philivsohn’s exhibition Torn Suspense worked with what the artist calls “the underworld of the archive,” images and materials marked for loss, twice over. Drawing from photographs in the Tom of Finland collection of artists who died of AIDS alongside scraps from a BDSM magazine collection deemed too materially worn for official preservation, Avior Philivsohn committed to what he describes as “the discarded of the discarded.” Scanned, enlarged, and reprinted fragments are quilted into gridded surfaces where stitches mark labor integral to the new image. Protective coatings preserve even as perforations penetrate, suspending the work between risk, trust, and aftercare.

Taken together, these practices show how historical materials can circulate to respond to evolving social, political, and artistic contexts. They complicate and multiply standardized art histories, favoring intimacy, immediacy, and primary stewardship over comprehensive coverage or authoritative resolution, emphasizing the ethics of archival practices rather than straightforward administrative procedure. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, “effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constituting, and its interpretation.”² What emerges is not simply retrieval, but a belated clarity where the past becomes legible, its meaning cohering only in retrospect.

Across these practices, historical material is afforded the capacity to generate new contexts. Museums enter at later stages as sites of preservation and historical contextualization, yet the vitality of larger institutions depends on earlier forms of care that accept uncertainty as necessary and reimagine archives as living infrastructures sustained by ongoing interpretation. Here, the archive is a site of pressure, where what cannot be fully known continues to exert meaning by keeping its tensions alive. Rather than resolving into stable narratives, these practices stay with the present, understanding history without endpoint. Operating outside codified conventions, such projects demonstrate how archives remain productive when responsiveness and relation take precedence over closure, extending the past into the present while holding open futures still under negotiation.

Shelves inside LACA’s Reading Room. Image courtesy of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA). Photo: Max Cleary.

 

 

Marie Heilich is a writer and curator in Los Angeles. Her writing appears in BOMB, Texte zur Kunst, IMPULSE, The Whitney Review of New Writing, Artforum, artist monographs, and exhibition catalogues.

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