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Buchanan (Nancy) papers
2017.M.37
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Contributing Institution: Special Collections
Title: Nancy Buchanan papers
Creator: Buchanan, Nancy, 1946-
Creator: Agalidi, Sanda
Creator: Cypis, Dorit, 1951-
Creator: Hafif, Marcia, 1929-2018
Creator: Hare, Sharon, 1950-
Creator: Hunter, Terryl
Creator: Lester, Janice
Creator: Peterfreund, Stuart (Stuart Samuel) (1945-06-30-2017-07-19)
Creator: Rachel, Vaughan
Creator: Rosler, Martha (1943-07-29)
Creator: Simpson, Sylvia Salazar
Creator: Smith, Barbara Turner, 1931-
Identifier/Call Number: 2017.M.37
Physical Description: 72.3 Linear Feet(127 boxes, 3 flatfile folders. Computer media: 9.84 GB [489 files])
Date (inclusive): 1882-2017, undated
Date (bulk): 1970-2008
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.
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.
Language of Material: Collection material is in English, with some Romanian, Slovenian, Croatian, Korean, Kurdish, Arabic, and Spanish.
Open for use by qualified researchers. Born digital content and audiovisual materials are unavailable until reformatted. Contact
reference for reformatting.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Gift of Nancy Buchanan. Acquired in 2017.
Selected audio and video recordings have been digitized: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/2017m37. Access is available only to
on-site readers and Getty staff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nancy Buchanan papers, 1882-2017, undated, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2017.M.37.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2017m37
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.
Nancy Buchanan, Fallout From the Nuclear Family, 1980, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2011.M.14.
Allan Kaprow papers, 1940-1997, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 980063.
Barbara T. Smith papers, 1927-2012, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2014.M.14.
Doin' It in Public : Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building (1973-1991): oral history interviews, 2008-2011, Getty Research
Institute, Accession no. IA40011.
Faith Wilding papers, approximately 1960s-2015, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2017.M.8.
Getty Research Institute California Video exhibition project files and oral history recordings, 2006-2008, Getty Research
Institute, Accession no. IA60004.
Getty Research Institute public event records and recordings, 1998-2020, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. IA40002.
High Performance magazine records, 1953-2005, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2006.M.8.
The Kitchen videos and records, 1967-2011, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2014.M.6.
Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive, circa 1970-2000, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2006.M.7.
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions records, 1978-2018, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2018.M.2.
Michael H. Smith papers, approximately 1971-2012, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2022.M.36.
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. recordings, 2008-2012, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. IA40011.
The Waitresses records, 1971-2015, undated, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2017.M.45.
Woman's Building records, 1960-2016, undated, Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2017.M.43.
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.
Buchanan, Nancy.
Nancy Buchanan Resume. Nancybuchanan.net. September 12, 2022. https://nancybuchanan.net/resume_web.pdf.
Chan, Audrey.
Nancy Buchanan: Ethical Provocations (photo essay). Afterall.org. January 12, 2012. https://www.afterall.org/article/nancy-buchanan.
Doin' It in Public : Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building (1973-1991): Oral History Interviews, 2008-2011, Getty Research
Institute, Accession no. IA40011.
Jones, Amelia.
Amelia Jones in Dialogue with Nancy Buchanan,'Truly for Real.' AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions. October 22, 2021. https://awarewomenartists.com/en/magazine/reellement-pour-de-vrai-nancy-buchanan-en-conversation-avec-amelia-jones/.
Kook-Anderson, Grace.
Best Kept Secret: UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 1964-1971. Laguna, CA: Laguna Art Museum, 2012.
Loeffler, Carl E. and Darlene Tong, eds.
Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art. San Francisco: Last Gasp Press and Contemporary Arts Press, 1989.
Phillips, Glenn,
Acquisition Approval Form for 'Nancy Buchanan Archive,' c. 1960s-2017, accession no. 2017.M.37, April 30, 2017.
Roth, Moira, ed.
The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980. Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Art and nuclear warfare
Art and social action -- United States -- 20th century
Art and technology
Art, American -- California -- 20th century
Feminism in art -- United States -- 20th century
Hair in art
Installations (Art)
Performance art -- California -- Los Angeles
Political art
Video art -- California -- Los Angeles
Women artists -- Archives
Women artists -- California -- Los Angeles
Women artists -- United States -- 20th century
Artists' books
Audiocassettes
Audiotapes
Black-and-white photographs -- 20th century
Born digital
Cabinet photographs
CD-Rs
Chromogenic color prints -- 20th century
Color photographs -- 20th century
Color slides
Contact sheets -- 20th century
Correspondence
DVDs
Film reels
Gelatin silver prints -- 20th century
Photographs, Original.
Printed ephemera
Salted paper prints
Sketchbooks
Tintypes (photographs)
Videocassettes
Buchanan, Nancy, 1946-
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Gallery)
Ridenour, Louis N. (Louis Nicot), 1911-1959
Rideout, Ransom
Walker, Robert, 1942-
Woman's Building (Los Angeles, Calif.)