Museum Records & Research from Mills Art on Vimeo.
Museum Records & Research is a site of inquiry, providing researchers, artists, and curators access to a history of arts and culture in the Bay Area dating back to 1925.
In the sanctuary of a former museum cloakroom, Museum staff maintains, updates, and digitizes the museum’s archive and collection records, preserving historical data for fresh consideration. MR&R welcomes connections between the historical record and contemporary art practice through class visits, publishing, and interpretive opportunities.
PROJECTS
Glass Cube
An online magazine, Glass Cube features traditional and unconventional takes on our collection and archive including essays, poems, excerpts, stories, and novel approaches to interpretation.
Pitch Guidelines
Millscollegeartmuseum.tumblr.com
Behind-the-scenes student blog highlighting objects in our collection.
PAST PROGRAMS
Nov 7–Dec 4, 2018
TIM KOPRA
An exhibition of photos, notes, and leftover artifacts found deep within MCAM’s archives that would normally be labeled as irrelevant. These seemingly arbitrary relics give us a glimpse into the museum’s history as well as the lives of the people behind the institution itself. Curated by Chloe Champion, Eva Goldstein-Moore, and Carmen Wylie.
Sep 8–Nov 1, 2018
MUSEUM R&R: GRAY PAPER, EVIL FAXES
An exhibition of photos, notes, and leftover artifacts found deep within MCAM’s archives that would normally be labeled as irrelevant. These seemingly arbitrary relics give us a glimpse into the museum’s history as well as the lives of the people behind the institution itself. Curated by Chloe Champion, Eva Goldstein-Moore, and Carmen Wylie.
Jun 6–Jul 22, 2018
THE RIPPED IMAGE
Within MCAM’s collection areas, the locations of three prints dating back to the Renaissance are currently unknown. For The Ripped Image, artist Marshall Elliott projects digital images of these vanished prints, categorized as missing in the Museum’s object files, onto a motorized reflective pennant banner, abstracting the images into traces of light. Acknowledging the images as mnemonic copies of objects that were once available for study in person, the installation makes no effort to depict the original artworks. Instead, Elliott unfaithfully replicates them as source material for a light show that fills Museum Records & Research’s operating space.
Bio: Marshall Elliott received his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute and BA degrees in Film Studies and English Literature at the University of Colorado. He has exhibited at spaces such as the deYoung museum, The Headlands Center for the Arts, City Limits, and the Jules Maeght Gallery, and is an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands. He currently lives in Oakland.
Mar 31–May 27, 2018
CONTACT?
CONTACT? looks at the threshold of the archive. Both the archive in its concept and Mills College Art Museum’s Museum Records + Research become the site of this installation. It is an installation with archival images and conceptual graves (plexi, pink wood). The archive becomes the mediator between time and history, author and influence, as Ellis Martin connects the contemporary queer to Sophie Calle’s The Graves, exhibited at MCAM in 1992, alongside her relationship to artist Hervé Guibert during the same period. Contact prods the relationships implicit in these two artist’s works, asking how close is close enough, asking how to be attentive when looking in.
JAN 17, 2017
A Window Into the Tower
A photographic print and slide projection installation of recent and historic images taken in and around the MCAM tower. Illuminating a hidden facet of the museum architecture, which has been covered over by the expansion of the art department, the tower window.
Slides pulled from the museum archive show the tower, as photographed by Imogen Cunningham in 1925 (shorty after the buildings completion). These are paired with contemporary photographs taken in the tower by Graduate Student Alex Hamilton in 2017.
