Nancy Buchanan papers, 1882-2017, undated, bulk 1970-2008

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Summary

Creators:
Buchanan, Nancy, 1946-, Agalidi, Sanda, Cypis, Dorit, 1951-, Hafif, Marcia, 1929-2018, Hare, Sharon, 1950-, Hunter, Terryl, Lester, Janice, Peterfreund, Stuart (Stuart Samuel) (1945-06-30-2017-07-19), Rachel, Vaughan, Simpson, Sylvia Salazar, and Smith, Barbara Turner, 1931-
Abstract:
The Nancy Buchanan papers document the Los Angeles-based artist's career from the 1970s to the 2010s. Research and production files for her projects, including her major performances and video works, reflect Buchanan's exploration of politics, commerce, environmentalism, and feminism, and highlight her use of art as a tool for raising awareness of social issues. Audiovisual and digital components are present for many of Buchanan's performance pieces, as are photographs of her artworks, exhibitions, and performances. The collection also includes assorted personal and professional correspondence, printed ephemera, teaching files from Buchanan's tenure at the California Institute of the Arts, personal and family materials, papers related to her curatorial projects and collaborations, and artworks and artists' books created or collected by Buchanan.
Extent:
72.3 Linear Feet (127 boxes, 3 flatfile folders. Computer media: 9.84 GB [489 files])
Language:
Collection material is in English , with some Romanian, Slovenian, Croatian, Korean, Kurdish, Arabic, and Spanish.
Preferred citation:

Nancy Buchanan papers, 1882-2017, undated, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2017.M.37.

http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2017m37

Background

Scope and content:

The Nancy Buchanan papers document the Los Angeles-based artist's career from the 1970s to the 2010s, with research and production files for her projects, including her major performances and video works, that reflect Buchanan's exploration of politics, commerce, environmentalism, and feminism, and highlight her use of art as a tool for raising awareness of social issues. The project files constitute the bulk of the collection, and audiovisual and digital components are present for many of Buchanan's performance pieces, as are photographs of her artworks, exhibitions, and performances.

The papers also include professional and personal files, with notes and lectures that reflect Buchanan's scholarly approach to her art practice; teaching files from Buchanan's tenure at various schools, including the California Institute of the Arts; papers related to her many curatorial projects and collaborations; and printed ephemera for numerous art exhibitions and programs, primarily throughout Southern California, from the latter half of the twentieth century. Also present are small artworks by Buchanan and other artists, many of which were given to Buchanan directly as gifts from the artists; and personal and professional correspondence that demonstrate her close connections and friendships with other artists such as Barbara T. Smith, Stuart Peterfreund, and Robert Walker.

Biographical / historical:

Nancy Buchanan is a Los Angeles-based artist known for her performance, conceptual, and video art that focus on themes of power and personal place. She played an integral role in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s and continues to have an active studio practice, with work that centers on political and social issues, shifts between personal experience and global politics, and which often incorporates a feminist approach or capitalist critique.

Born Nancy Page Ridenour in Boston, Massachusetts in 1946, Buchanan grew up primarily in Southern California, and attended Laguna Beach High School, where she earned an art scholarship that supported her freshman year studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). During her first semester at UCLA, Buchanan married, became pregnant, and experienced the unexpected death of her mother, Gretchen Kraemer Ridenour. These events led Buchanan to return to Laguna Beach, where she briefly enrolled in the Laguna Beach School of Art before transferring to the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 1965, where Buchanan also found obstacles. Frustrated by the art faculty there, whom she felt were sexist towards female students, Buchanan briefly joined the English department but soon resumed her studies in the art department. Fortunately, Buchanan found her art professors Robert Irwin and Larry Bell to be encouraging of all of their students, and ultimately earned a BA in 1969 and an MFA in 1971 as a member of UCI's first MFA graduating class.

Alongside artists Barbara T. Smith, Eleanor Antin, and Pauline Oliveros, Buchanan was also an early participant in performances and workshops at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, and she taught her first class through the Woman's Building extension program. Shortly after the Woman's Building opening in 1974, Smith was invited by Woman's Building cofounder, Judy Chicago, to join the Grandview Galleries that were forming there, and Smith in turn extended the invitation to Buchanan. Some of Buchanan's Woman's Building performances include Pie Piece, Underground, and an early collaboration with Smith, Please Sing Along, which opened with nude men dancing to music and ended with a wrestling match between the two artists, in a reversal of the traditional gender roles that attribute strength and aggression to men while portraying women as passive and decorative.

Throughout her career, Buchanan has been involved in many artist collectives and collaborations. She was one of twelve founding members of F Space, a cooperative gallery in Santa Ana, alongside fellow UCI art students Barbara T. Smith and Chris Burden. The gallery on UCI's campus was considered by the art students to be too conservative, and F Space was formed to support UCI art students in an off-campus setting that would allow for more exploratory works, including performances such as Chris Burden's Shoot (1971), and Buchanan's first public performances At Home and Hair Transplant, both featuring Buchanan and fellow UCI art student, Robert Walker, in the nude.

Buchanan was also a founding member of Double X (sometimes written as "XX,") a democratic collective that emerged in 1975 out of the Woman's Building with members from the Grand View 1 and Grand View 2 gallery spaces (sometimes written as Grandview) that sought to bring women's culture into various communities and to challenge the bias and sexism practiced toward women artists. The collective's first project was Faith Wilding's, By Our Own Hands (1977), which documented the women's art movement in Southern California.

Navigating both the global and the personal, Buchanan often incorporates or centers familial narratives into her works. Buchanan's father, Dr. Louis N. Ridenour, Jr., was a nuclear physicist who served as the first chief scientist in the United States Air Force, from 1950 to 1951. Ridenour was invited to work on the development of the atomic bomb, but declined, publicly arguing that there was no defense against nuclear weapons. With works like Fallout from the Nuclear Family, Buchanan explores the papers of her father, who passed away during her childhood, to highlight the growth of the military-industrial complex and its impact on the individual. Similarly, with works like Mother (1975) and The Marketing of Motherhood (1979 and 1981), Buchanan examines the role of motherhood through the lens of her own role as a mother; the relationship she had with her own mother, Gretchen Kraemer Ridenour; and how our culture represents motherhood in advertising and business.

Over the course of her career, Buchanan has been a stalwart figure in the Southern California artistic community. She has served in leadership roles for numerous Los Angeles organizations, including as a board member and committee chair for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE, 1980 to 1982), a member of the performance and exhibition committees for the Woman's Building (1984 to 1985 and 1989 to 1990), a video committee member for the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (1987), and a board member for the Arroyo Arts Collective (1998 to 2001). Through her art and her work as an organizer, community activist, and curator, Buchanan also demonstrates commitment to making alternative voices heard. She was an organizing committee member for Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America (1984); an administrator for a 1979 Double X film series featuring works by women of color; an associate producer from 1988 to 1998 for Message to the Grassroots, a Community Access cable television program by activist Michael Zinzun; and has taught numerous community workshops on performance and video art.

For several decades (1988 to 2012), Buchanan was an influential faculty member in the Program in Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). From 1980 to 1983, Buchanan lectured part-time at several Southern California universities, including UCLA; University of California San Diego (UCSD); California State University, Long Beach (CSULB); California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH); and the Otis Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design). She also served as a faculty member with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Art from 1981 to 1983, and as an adjunct faculty member with the Vermont College of the Arts and with the Otis Art Institute's Social Practice Program from 2014 to 2018.

Acquisition information:
Gift of Nancy Buchanan. Acquired in 2017.
Appraisal information:

Two optical discs were not retained with the collection: one damaged, unreadable optical disc and one blank disc.

Duplicate printed ephemera and newspapers were also not retained.

Custodial history:

Materials were created by Buchanan and remained in her possession from their creation until their transfer to the Getty Library in 2017. The small artworks by other artists were either purchased by Buchanan, or, more commonly, were given to her directly as gifts from the artists.

Processing information:

In 2019, Jasmine Larkin processed the bulk of the project files and Alison Ransom processed a portion of the personal correspondence. Sarah Mackenzie Wade processed the audiovisual materials, a portion of the project files, and the photographic materials and calendars during intermittent onsite access throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, and completed processing and wrote the finding aid for the collection in 2022.

Digital materials were processed by Laura Schroffel in 2017 and 2019. Files require further processing before access copies can be made available.

Component titles for materials in Series I. Project files and Series II. Professional files replicate the original folder labels; all other component titles were devised by the archivist.

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, ST-03-17-0007-17.

Arrangement:

The archive is arranged in five series: Series I. Project files, 1970-2017, undated; Series II. Professional files, 1922-2016, undated; Series III. Personal papers, 1898-2014, undated; Series IV. Artwork and artists' books, 1968-2015, undated; and Series V. Audiovisual and digital materials, 1979-circa 2003, undated.

Born digital materials are integrated into a corresponding series based on content, wherever possible. Born digital materials without a clear correlation to particular projects can be found in Series V.C. DVDs, circa 2003, undated. The original order of the born digital files is retained.

Physical location:
Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the catalog record for this collection. Click here for the access policy.
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Access and use

Restrictions:

Open for use by qualified researchers. Born digital content and audiovisual materials are unavailable until reformatted. Contact reference for reformatting.

Terms of access:

Contact Library Reproductions and Permissions.

Preferred citation:

Nancy Buchanan papers, 1882-2017, undated, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2017.M.37.

http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2017m37

Location of this collection:
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, CA 90049-1688, US
Contact:
(310) 440-7390
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