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Access and Management
Access
Management
LACA's artist book library contains more than 15,000 small edition artist books by Los Angeles based artists. Rather than archivists and art historians alone determining the narratives around these items, contributing artists generate descriptions and indexed in first person or narrative form.
LACA also has two ongoing archival collections:
MOCA Union Archive: The MOCA Union archive is a collection of ephemera from the unionizing efforts of MOCA’s gallery attendants, exhibition installers, audio-visual technicians, retail, and education staff. These staff members came together in 2019 to collectively improve their working conditions. MOCA voluntarily recognized them as a union until March 2020, when MOCA laid off all 97 of the museum’s part-time employees. And the other staff were furloughed soon after that. To put this into context, Los Angeles does not have an art museum with a union.
Private Practices: LACA co-created the collection "Private Practices" which is an AAPI Sex Worker and Performance Art Collection. In LACA’s shared neighborhood of Chinatown, we have seen firsthand a notable expansion of police presence since the 2021 Atlanta Shooting Spree. We are mindful that the securitization of our neighborhoods is not the answer to the entrenched systemic misogyny and racism that pervades our country. With this in mind we gathered together materials from LACA’s community (In this case: Coco Ono, Mariko Passion, Wang Newton, Emily Valez Nelms, Kim Ye, Riv, and Mutant Salon). This is an ongoing collection with materials that came in included screenshots, paystubs, apparel, set pieces, police reports, text and ephemera pertinent to sexual labor—which is still being added to on an ongoing basis.
Live/Work: Artist Studio and Housing Collection: this is an ongoing collection at LACA containing ephemera directly related to artist studio and housing issues. Our aim is to contextualize art-making within this typically overlooked site of production.
reCourse work: is a collection of materials related to the process of creating course work, lessons and syllabi. These include prompts, notes, sources, paystubs, outline drafts, or correspondences that shaped an art course. This collection's aim is to demystify how artist’s build pedagogical tools. The intention is to facilitate multiple entry points into knowledge building by artists for artists, and for people interested in the arts. Materials are primarily from art schools such as California Institute of the Arts: CalArts, Pasadena ArtCenter College of Design, Otis, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Irvines Art Department, and from Occidental College's Art & Art History Program.